The Invisible Front: How War Is Burning the Climate - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Armed conflict releases hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, yet militaries operate almost entirely 
outside global climate accounting

Key Points

Global military activity accounts for an estimated 5.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, placing it fourth among the world's largest national emitters. 1 Russia's three-year war in Ukraine has generated roughly 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, more than the combined annual output of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 6 The first 120 days of Israel's campaign in Gaza produced emissions exceeding the annual output of 26 nations, with reconstruction projected to add tens of millions of tonnes more. 9 Military emissions reporting was exempted under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol after US pressure; the 2015 Paris Agreement made reporting voluntary, and most countries still disclose nothing. 12 Post-war reconstruction is one of the largest hidden carbon costs of conflict: rebuilding Syria's damaged housing alone is projected to release around 22 million tonnes of CO₂. 15 Rising defence budgets compete directly with climate finance; global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, while the $100 billion annual climate finance pledge to developing nations remains unmet. 3

The burning began in the dark. 

In February 2022, as Russian armoured columns crossed the Ukrainian border and artillery shells tore open industrial facilities along the Donbas, a different kind of damage was accumulating, invisible but measurable: the carbon footprint of a major land war in the 21st century. 

Within weeks, researchers at a small Dutch-based non-profit, the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, began logging what no international climate body was required to track. 

Within seven months, they had documented at least 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent released into the atmosphere. The equivalent, they noted, of the Netherlands' entire annual output.

That calculation was only the beginning. By the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2025, total war-related emissions had reached 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined yearly output of four Central European nations. ⁶ 

The figure encompasses battlefield fuel use, the burning of forests and agricultural land along the front lines, the destruction of energy infrastructure, and the airspace rerouting that has forced civilian aircraft onto longer, more fuel-intensive paths across a continent. It does not yet include the enormous carbon cost of rebuilding what was destroyed.

Ukraine has become the most closely studied climate casualty of modern warfare. But the dynamics playing out across its scorched plains and shattered cities are not unique. From Gaza to the Sahel, from Myanmar's contested borderlands to the oil fields of Libya, armed conflict is quietly generating greenhouse gas emissions on a scale that existing international frameworks are simply not designed to count. War, it turns out, has a carbon footprint, and it is enormous.

The Scale of the Problem

Researchers at the Conflict and Environment Observatory and Scientists for Global Responsibility published a landmark estimate in 2022: the world's militaries, taken together, account for roughly 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. ¹ 

If armies and defence industries were a single country, they would rank as the world's fourth-largest emitter, behind only China, the United States, and India, but ahead of Russia. That figure, the researchers noted, covers only peacetime operations and the supply chains that sustain them. The additional emissions generated by active conflict were not included.

Quantifying those conflict emissions is far harder than it sounds. Satellite imagery can detect fires; chemical sensors can identify pollutants; proxy indicators, including fuel consumption records, weapons delivery logs, and damage assessments, can fill some gaps. But the data is fragmentary, access to conflict zones is restricted, and the methodologies for estimating wartime emissions are still being developed. A further complication is that destruction of industrial infrastructure often temporarily reduces civilian emissions, making it easy to misread a country at war as cleaner than it was before. ¹⁶ 

The actual picture, once fires, reconstruction, and military fuel use are included, points firmly in the other direction.

Wartime emissions compare unfavourably with sectors the public knows well. The global aviation industry produces approximately 2.5% of annual CO₂ emissions. The entire military sector, at 5.5%, is roughly double that. Cement production, one of industry's most notorious emitters, accounts for around 8%. Shipping contributes about 2.9%. War, in other words, belongs in the same league as heavy industry, yet it appears in almost no national climate account. ²

Not all forms of warfare generate equal emissions. Mechanised land war, with its fuel-hungry tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and artillery supply chains, is among the most carbon-intensive. Aerial bombing campaigns add enormously to that total: a single modern fighter jet burns through tonnes of fuel per sortie, and the industrial production of precision-guided munitions is itself highly energy-intensive. 

Research presented at a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Sciences roundtable explored whether lighter technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks, might reduce a conflict's carbon footprint over time. The tentative conclusion was that, while individual strikes may emit less, the combination of more frequent use and the eventual need to rebuild what such weapons destroy will likely offset any efficiency gains. ¹⁷

Two Conflicts, One Planet

In Ukraine, war has become the largest single source of the country's carbon emissions. A 2025 assessment by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War found that 36% of all war-related greenhouse gases came directly from military activity, including fuel burned by tanks, jets, and supply vehicles, plus the steel, concrete, and explosives used to construct and maintain hundreds of kilometres of frontline fortifications. ⁷ 

Another 27% is attributable to reconstruction activity already underway. The rest is distributed across energy infrastructure destruction, civilian aviation rerouting, and the displacement of refugees across Europe.

The fires are among the most alarming findings. In 2024 alone, roughly 965,000 hectares of Ukrainian land burned, more than twice the total area burnt across the entire European Union that same year. Landscape fires along the front lines accounted for 48.7 million tonnes of CO₂, a 113% increase on the preceding two years. ⁸ 

The fires result from a lethal combination: artillery-sparked blazes during dry summer conditions, climate-driven heat extremes, and the practical impossibility of firefighting in active combat zones. Climate change and the war are amplifying each other.

In Gaza, the carbon arithmetic is compressed into a far smaller geography. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Lancaster University published a study in early 2024 finding that the first 120 days of fighting generated between 420,000 and 652,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent from direct military activity alone, more than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries. ⁹ 

When pre-war construction, such as tunnel infrastructure, and projected post-war reconstruction are factored in, the total rises to more than 61 million tonnes. That number exceeds the combined annual emissions of Sweden and Portugal.

The reconstruction estimate is significant. By January 2024, between 36% and 45% of buildings in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged. Rebuilding 100,000 damaged structures using conventional techniques would generate at least 30 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to New Zealand's annual output. ¹⁰ 

Cement and steel, the fundamental materials of urban reconstruction, are two of the most carbon-intensive industries on earth. Every bombed city carries within it a future emission debt.

Beyond Ukraine and Gaza, emissions from conflicts in Myanmar, the Sahel, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo receive far less scientific attention, not because they are small but because monitoring them is even harder. The DRC, for instance, has lost vast tracts of tropical forest to the pressures of prolonged conflict and displacement, releasing stored carbon on a scale that is only partially captured by satellite systems. 

Researchers who gathered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025 warned explicitly that smaller but persistent conflicts were being systematically overlooked in global emissions accounting. ¹⁷

Black Rain and Poisoned Ground

When a fuel depot is struck by a missile, the immediate result is a fireball visible from kilometres away. The longer-term result is more insidious. Large-scale hydrocarbon fires, and the war in Ukraine has produced hundreds of them, generate enormous plumes of black carbon, a mix of soot and chemical particulates that absorbs solar radiation and accelerates atmospheric warming. 

These plumes can travel thousands of kilometres. Research on the 1991 Gulf War oil fires, which consumed roughly 700 Kuwaiti wells over nine months, found that the resulting soot contributed to the accelerated melting of Tibetan glaciers, thousands of kilometres from Kuwait. ¹⁶ 

The fires contributed more than 2% of global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in that single year.

Urban bombardment creates analogous contamination on a smaller but more geographically concentrated scale. When buildings collapse, they release decades of stored materials: asbestos, heavy metals, PCBs, and fuel residues. In Gaza, a preliminary assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme in June 2024 found that approximately 37 million tonnes of debris had accumulated, contaminating soil and groundwater with toxic substances. ¹¹ 

These contaminants disrupt soil chemistry in ways that reduce long-term land productivity, effectively converting farmland into dead zones for years or decades.

Explosions themselves alter soil structure. The detonation of high explosives compacts soil, fragments its chemistry, and introduces heavy metals, including lead, copper, and zinc from shell casings, into the ground at concentrations that inhibit plant growth and leach into groundwater. 

In Ukraine, ammunition containing heavy metals has contaminated agricultural land across some of the country's most productive farming regions. Ukraine's agriculture sector accounts for around 60% of the country's exports; the long-term damage to that soil represents an economic and ecological loss that extends far beyond the current war. ⁸

Water systems are particularly vulnerable. In Gaza, the destruction of eight wastewater treatment plants, of which six had been damaged or destroyed by May 2024, resulted in an estimated 130,000 cubic metres of raw sewage being discharged daily into the Mediterranean Sea. ¹⁰ 

The groundwater beneath Gaza, already stressed by decades of over-extraction, has been further contaminated by munitions residues and the collapse of sanitation infrastructure. The Mediterranean plume from such discharge carries biological and chemical pollutants into shared regional waters, crossing borders regardless of political agreements.

The Carbon Cost of Destruction

The destruction of cities is a form of carbon release that operates on a vast but largely uncounted scale. Buildings, bridges, pipelines, and power stations represent embodied carbon, the cumulative emissions produced when they were first manufactured and constructed. When they are bombed, that embodied carbon does not disappear; it joins the ongoing atmospheric ledger as debris management and reconstruction demand yet more energy. 

Clearing the rubble from Aleppo and Homs alone, according to estimates by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, would require more than a million truck journeys. ¹⁶ 

Each of those journeys burns diesel. Each load likely contains hazardous materials.

Modern cities, precisely because they concentrate so much energy infrastructure, are acutely vulnerable to this form of cascading damage. The bombing of electricity grids, transformer stations, gas pipelines, and district heating systems does not merely deprive civilians of warmth and light. It forces the substitution of dirtier, less efficient energy sources, including diesel generators, wood burning, and coal-fired backup systems, often for years after the fighting has stopped. 

In eastern Ukraine, chemical factories, oil refineries, and coal processing facilities have been among the most heavily targeted sites. The resulting toxic releases have contaminated the Dnipro river basin and the Black Sea. ²⁰

Damage to dam and water management infrastructure creates the longest-lasting environmental cascades. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine in June 2023 released a torrent of contaminated water across a vast agricultural floodplain, destroyed riparian ecosystems, and deposited an unknown volume of munitions residues and industrial pollutants into the lower Dnipro and the Black Sea. The ecological recovery from an event of that magnitude is measured in decades, not years.

The Long Carbon Tail of Reconstruction

Post-war reconstruction is, in many respects, the most underappreciated chapter of war's climate impact. The Iraq War between 2003 and 2008 was responsible for an estimated 141 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, according to a study by Oil Change International. In that same period, only 21 EU member states individually produced more emissions than the war itself generated. ¹⁸ 

Much of that total came not from the fighting but from the logistics, fuel supply chains, and the early phases of reconstruction.

Syria's civil war, which has left roughly 60% of urban infrastructure damaged or destroyed, carries an estimated reconstruction emission debt of 22 million tonnes of CO₂ for housing alone, not counting roads, power stations, schools, or hospitals. ¹⁵ 

In practice, reconstruction in conflict-affected countries has rarely incorporated climate considerations. Iraq and Syria both relied heavily on oil revenues and conventional construction, locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure for another generation. Gas flaring, in which excess petroleum gas is simply burned off rather than captured, intensified in Libya, Syria, and Yemen during and after their respective conflicts, a trend that has continued long after the fighting receded.

Ukraine presents what may be the most consequential reconstruction opportunity yet seen. President Zelensky has spoken of needing at least $5 billion per month for rebuilding. The international community has been debating whether that rebuilding could be structured around clean energy, energy efficiency, and decentralised renewable systems rather than the gas-dependent grid Ukraine relied on before the war. 

Proponents argue the war presents a rare chance to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure entirely. ⁷ Sceptics note that the immediate pressure to restore heat, light, and industrial capacity tends to overwhelm long-term planning, and that international reconstruction funds have historically moved far more slowly than the carbon-intensive imperative to rebuild fast.

The Reporting Gap

In 1997, as diplomats in Kyoto negotiated what would become the world's first binding climate treaty, the Pentagon lobbied hard for an exemption. Military emissions, US officials argued, could not be disclosed without jeopardising national security, revealing the locations and readiness of forces to potential adversaries. 

The lobbying worked. The Kyoto Protocol excluded international military operations from national emissions totals and allowed countries to group domestic military emissions with civilian categories, obscuring the true military share. ¹²

The 2015 Paris Agreement technically ended the formal exemption. In practice, it replaced mandatory exclusion with voluntary disclosure, which amounts to much the same thing. Under the Paris framework, countries may report their military emissions but are not required to do so. According to the Military Emissions Gap organisation, which tracks reported data submitted to the UNFCCC, only four countries provide detailed disaggregated military fuel data. ¹³ 

A 2025 report by Scientists for Global Responsibility found that almost all official military emissions figures, even for countries with comparatively strong reporting practices, cover less than 10% of their actual military carbon footprint.

The practical result is that a sector producing an estimated 5.5% of global emissions operates in almost complete statistical darkness. Researchers working on the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report have noted that the scenarios used to model future climate trajectories do not include a quantitative assessment of military spending's impact on CO₂ emissions. 

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in a leading environmental journal found that events such as the US-led War on Terror and Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to measurable increases in global CO₂ emission intensity, estimating that military spending growth accounted for 27% of the total change in emission intensity between 1995 and 2023. ⁴ 

That finding has not yet been incorporated into mainstream climate modelling.

Several credible proposals exist to address the gap. The Conflict and Environment Observatory has published a framework for mandatory military emissions reporting. Academics from Oxford, Lancaster, Columbia, and Harvard have co-signed calls for the UNFCCC to require explicit military reporting in national inventories. The European Parliament has called for transparent reporting by member states. ¹⁴ 

None of these proposals has so far produced binding change.

Energy Markets and the War Premium

Russia's invasion of Ukraine reshaped European energy policy faster than any Green New Deal had managed. As Russian gas supplies were severed or sanctioned, European governments scrambled for alternatives, reopening coal plants, racing to build liquefied natural gas import terminals, and accelerating renewable deployments at a pace that would have seemed impossible in 2021. 

The short-term reaction was unambiguously dirty: coal consumption rose sharply in Germany and across Eastern Europe in 2022 and 2023. The medium-term trajectory, however, pointed toward a faster clean energy transition, driven by the hard lesson that energy dependence on an aggressor is a strategic liability.

Whether that acceleration will persist is an open question. Geopolitical instability has a well-documented tendency to push governments toward energy security at the expense of climate commitments. Oil Change International estimated that Russian fossil fuel exports earned approximately €58 billion in just the first two months after the invasion, with the EU accounting for €39 billion of that total. ¹⁹ 

The revenue funded the continuation of the war. European dependence on Russian gas was not merely an environmental failure; it was a strategic one, and the two failures turned out to be inseparable.

Military supply chains are themselves highly carbon-intensive. Producing a modern tank requires enormous quantities of steel. Artillery shells consume both steel and explosives. Explosives production is energy-intensive and relies on chemical processes that generate significant nitrous oxide emissions. 

The US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, and its supply chain emissions, covering the weapons and equipment it procures, roughly double its direct operational footprint. ⁵ 

As NATO members race to rearm, those supply chain emissions are multiplying across the alliance.

The Economic Displacement

Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar not spent on a solar panel. The relationship is not quite that simple, but it is not entirely metaphorical either. Global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024. In the same year, the long-standing pledge by wealthy nations to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries remained unfulfilled, despite having been due since 2020. ³ 

The contrast is stark: the same governments that have consistently failed to meet their climate finance commitments spend 50 times as much on their militaries every year.

Rising defence budgets are not merely displacing climate spending at the national level. They are generating additional emissions through the investments themselves. Research by macroeconomist Balázs Markó at Bocconi University found that for every percentage point increase in military spending, total emissions rise by between 0.9% and 2%. ² 

NATO's 2025 commitment to a target of 5% of GDP for each member nation, if met, would double the alliance's combined military expenditure between 2025 and 2030, generating an estimated additional 840 million tonnes of emissions compared with a scenario where spending remained at 2% of GDP.

Climate change itself is increasingly identified as a driver of future conflict, creating the feedback loop that many researchers now consider the most dangerous long-term dynamic in the field. Water scarcity, crop failure, extreme heat, and displacement are already documented contributors to instability in the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, and across parts of the Middle East. 

If warming continues to generate the conditions that make conflict more likely, and conflict generates the emissions that accelerate warming, the system becomes self-reinforcing in the most dangerous possible way.

Recovery, Accountability, and What Comes Next

How long do ecosystems take to recover from the damage of war? The honest answer is: it depends on the damage, and sometimes the answer is never. Vietnam's forests took decades to partially recover from the aerial spraying of Agent Orange, a herbicide that destroyed an estimated 4.5 million acres of forest and farmland and left soil contamination that persists today. 

Ukraine's nature reserves, more than 12,000 square kilometres of which have become active combat zones, will require at least 15 years to recover from the direct physical damage alone, according to preliminary Ukrainian government estimates. ²⁰ 

The chemical contamination and unexploded ordnance that now covers roughly 30% of the country's territory complicate that timeline substantially.

There are examples where environmental restoration has been incorporated into post-conflict recovery. El Salvador, after its civil war, invested in watershed management and reforestation as part of a broader rural recovery programme. Rwanda made systematic forest restoration central to its post-genocide agricultural strategy. Bosnia invested in mine clearance partly because the contaminated land was economically unusable. These are partial models, not templates. ¹⁶ 

None of them operated at the scale and complexity that Ukraine, Syria, or Gaza now present.

International legal frameworks for environmental accountability in war remain weak. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court recognises widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment as a potential war crime, but prosecutions on those grounds are extremely rare. 

A group of researchers at Goldsmiths and the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network has called for Israel to be investigated under Rome Statute provisions for systematic agricultural destruction in Gaza. Ukrainian officials are building a reparations case against Russia partly on climate damage grounds, estimating total climate liability at more than $42 billion using a social cost of carbon of $185 per tonne. ⁶ 

Both cases face the same obstacle: no binding international mechanism exists to adjudicate climate damages caused by war.

Environmental monitoring during conflict is emerging as a potential new area for cooperation. Satellite systems operated by the European Union, including the Sentinel-5P instrument used to track atmospheric pollutants, have already produced detailed data on air quality changes over Gaza and Ukraine. 

Researchers using those tools have tracked spikes in carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, and methane as infrastructure burns and waste management collapses. The science is ahead of the policy: the data exists, the methodologies are improving, but no international body is yet required to act on what the satellites see.

Conclusion: The Unanswered Question

There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance at work in contemporary climate politics. Governments negotiate emissions cuts, publish net-zero targets, and announce clean energy subsidies while simultaneously increasing military budgets, fighting wars, and exempting their armed forces from the reporting requirements they impose on every other sector. The gap between what is measured and what matters has rarely been wider.

The research being produced now, from the meticulous carbon accounting of Ukraine's war to the satellite studies of Gaza's air quality, represents a genuine scientific advance. For the first time, it is becoming possible to measure, in near real time, what armed conflict costs the atmosphere. That knowledge is valuable. Whether it will translate into accountability, into changed behaviour at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, is a different question entirely.

The atmosphere does not distinguish between a tonne of CO₂ from a coal plant and a tonne from a burning oil depot struck by a cruise missile. Both warm the planet. Both narrow the window for the action the IPCC says is still possible. If the world is serious about climate, it will eventually have to reckon with the emissions it has been most reluctant to count. 

The question is whether that reckoning comes in time to matter, or only after the damage has been done.

References

1. Parkinson, S. & Cottrell, L. (2022). Estimating the Military's Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Scientists for Global Responsibility and Conflict and Environment Observatory.
2. Climate Change Performance Index. (2024). CCPI x Military Emissions Gap: How Military Emissions Impact Global Warming.
3. Transnational Institute. (2025). Climate Collateral. Updated November 2025.
4. PMC/Nature. (2025). Rising military spending jeopardises climate targets. Environmental research journal.
5. Crawford, N. C. (2019). Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Watson Institute, Brown University.
6. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War / Planetary Security Initiative. (2025). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: Three Years.
7. de Klerk, L. et al. (2024). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: 24 February 2022 to 23 February 2024. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War.
8. European Commission Joint Research Centre. (2025). War Worsens Climate and Environmental Challenges in Ukraine.
9. Queen Mary University of London. (2024). New Study Reveals Substantial Carbon Emissions from the Ongoing Israel-Gaza Conflict.
10. Wikipedia / UNEP. (2024). Environmental Impact of the Gaza War. Based on UNEP preliminary assessment, June 2024.
11. Shaheen, A. et al. (2024). The War on the Gaza Strip and Its Consequences on Global Warming. Frontiers in Human Dynamics.
12. National Security Archive. (2022). National Security and Climate Change: Behind the US Pursuit of Military Exemptions to the Kyoto Protocol. George Washington University.
13. Military Emissions Gap. (2025). Problem: The Military Emissions Gap. Conflict and Environment Observatory.
14. Scientists for Global Responsibility. (2025). Most Militaries Report Less Than 10 Percent of Their Carbon Footprint.
15. Conflict and Environment Observatory. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change?
16. CEOBS. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change? Conflict and Environment Observatory.
17. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2025). Carbon Footprint of Military: The Environmental Impacts of Modern Wars. Roundtable Report, July 2025.
18. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer.
19. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer: Russian fossil fuel exports and European dependency.
20. Wikipedia. (2025). Environmental Impact of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

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Fire, Then Flood, Then Fire Again: Australia's Climate Whiplash Is Getting Worse - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

A new report finds record fossil fuel pollution is overpowering natural cooling cycles, plunging communities from one disaster to the next with barely a breath between.

Key Points

Australia's 2025-26 summer delivered record heat, catastrophic fires and severe flooding in rapid succession, a pattern scientists call “climate whiplash.” 1 Fossil fuel pollution is now overriding natural climate drivers like La Niña, pushing Australia's temperature baseline permanently higher. 2 South Australia's Marree recorded a new state high of 49.8°C in January, then received ten times its normal monthly rainfall within a week. 3 Melbourne has logged as many extreme heat days since 2000 as it did in the entire twentieth century. 4 Insurance payouts for extreme weather averaged $4.5 billion a year between 2019 and 2024, more than double the prior 30-year average. 5 Mid Coast Council in NSW has applied for disaster recovery funding 16 times since 2019, illustrating the mounting fiscal strain on local government. 6

In the space of ten days last January, communities along Victoria's Great Ocean Road lived through catastrophic fire weather warnings, watched cars wash out to sea in flash floods, and then braced again for returning extreme heat. 

It was not a fluke. It was the new rhythm of the Australian summer.

A report released this week by the Climate Council documents the arc of that season in troubling detail. Titled Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash, the report charts the back-to-back disasters that struck between December 2025 and February 2026, and sets out the science that links them to rising greenhouse gas concentrations from burning coal, oil and gas.¹

The picture it draws is one of a country whose disaster management systems, insurance markets and local government budgets are absorbing punishments that once came once a generation but now arrive in clusters, sometimes within days of each other.

A Season Unlike Any Other

The 2025-26 summer did not arrive with the signature of a dangerous El Niño, the Pacific Ocean warming pattern associated with drier, hotter conditions across much of Australia. Conditions were actually the reverse. Australia moved through the summer in a La Niña pattern, which typically brings cooler temperatures and wetter weather to large parts of the continent.

Yet the summer still delivered the fourth-hottest year on record for Australia and the globe's third-hottest year on record.² For climate scientists, that apparent contradiction carries a pointed message.

“Climate change is now firmly behind the steering wheel of Australia's temperatures,” said Adjunct Professor Andrew Watkins, a Climate Councillor and meteorologist. “In fact 2025 started and ended in La Niña, which usually cools large parts of Australia, yet this was our fourth hottest year on record. That tells us the baseline has shifted.”

The mechanism is straightforward, though its consequences are not. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap more heat in the atmosphere and oceans. That underlying warmth is now powerful enough to overwhelm natural cooling cycles that once reliably moderated Australian summers. What a La Niña could subtract, decades of fossil fuel pollution have more than added back.²

Records That Should Not Have Fallen

The summer's temperature records were not marginal. They were historic.

On 27 January 2026, Walpeup and Hopetoun in Victoria recorded a new state high of 48.9°C, surpassing the previous record set at Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. Almost one third of Victoria recorded its highest January temperature ever on that single day.³

In South Australia, the small outback town of Marree, near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, endured five consecutive days above 48°C. On one of those days, the thermometer reached 49.8°C. On the outskirts of Port Augusta, the mercury touched 50°C on 30 January, making it the most southerly place on Earth ever to reach that threshold.

Melbourne reached 42.9°C during the season. The city has now recorded eleven days at or above 42.9°C since the year 2000. It recorded the same number across the entire century from 1900 to 1999.⁴ In Mildura, 45°C was reached only six times between 1946 and 1999. Since 2000, the town has exceeded that mark a further 27 times in just 26 years.

In the Northern Territory, Alice Springs recorded more than 30 summer days above 40°C, almost twice its historical average of 17, before intense rainfall triggered dangerous flash flooding on 12 February.

The Physics of Whiplash

The whiplash pattern, where extreme heat is followed rapidly by extreme rainfall and flooding, is not coincidental. It follows directly from the physics of a warmer atmosphere.

“Our hotter oceans and atmosphere also mean more water evaporates into the sky than ever before,” Professor Watkins explained. “With more moisture in the atmosphere, storms produce more rain.”

Some towns in western Queensland recorded their average annual rainfall within the first five weeks of 2026. A tropical low in February then triggered flood watches across nearly half the continent.¹ Communities that had been cut off by smoke and heat in January found their roads submerged under floodwaters a month later.

Dr Linden Ashcroft, a Climate Council research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, points to shifts in atmospheric circulation as a further driver. Global warming is altering the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles, destabilising the jet streams and pressure systems that once kept Australian seasons more predictable.

“We've got more energy in our earth system than at any other time in human history,” Dr Ashcroft said, “and that means these events are packing more punch.”

The heatwaves this summer also broke from historical patterns in a second respect. Record temperatures in the south-east were not driven by hot northerly winds blowing off the desert interior, as has historically been the case. They arose from atmospheric conditions that were, in the assessment of climate scientists, reshaping themselves in real time.

Two Case Studies in Rapid Disaster

The Great Ocean Road communities in Victoria lived through perhaps the most compressed version of the whiplash cycle. Fire warnings one week, flood waters the next, then heat again. The speed of the transition left little room for recovery, for insurance assessors to complete their work, for damaged roads to be cleared, or for residents to weigh whether to rebuild.

The second case is both more remote and more economically critical. The Eyre Highway stretches across the Nullarbor Plain and is the sole land link between Perth and Australia's eastern states. During the 2025-26 summer, the highway closed because of fires burning in 45°C heat. Two days later, floodwaters cut it again.¹

The economic consequence of losing that route, even briefly, ripples through freight costs, fuel prices and the supply of goods to and from Western Australia. It is a pointed illustration of how climate whiplash reaches beyond the communities directly struck by fire or flood. It enters supply chains, business continuity plans and infrastructure stress assessments.

In South Australia, Marree's ordeal extended over weeks. After five days above 48°C, a two-day rainfall event dumped ten times the town's normal February monthly rainfall. A fortnight later, eight consecutive days of rain cut all roads into the town. For a community that depends on those roads for food, medical supplies and commerce, the compound isolation was more than meteorological discomfort. It was a test of basic resilience.³

The Fire Season Rewritten

Greg Mullins, a former NSW Fire Commissioner and Climate Councillor, has spent his career measuring the boundaries of what fire services can manage. His assessment is unambiguous.

“We used to think of catastrophic fire conditions as once-in-a-generation events,” Mr Mullins said. “Now they're arriving every decade. The climate baseline has shifted, and that means bigger, more dangerous, destructive fires flaring up more quickly, more often.”

This summer, Victorian firefighters battled 200 fires in a single day, a volume of simultaneous demand that strains command structures, equipment and the endurance of personnel. The season ultimately resulted in the loss of 451 homes and more than 1,000 other buildings in Victoria alone.

In Tasmania, strong winds on 4 December fanned nearly 30 bushfires, destroying 19 homes on the east coast. Hobart recorded its windiest summer day at 98 kilometres per hour. Three weeks later, between 23 and 26 December, the state experienced daily snowfall. The range of extremes within a single month in a single state captures the disorienting character of modern Australian summers.

Mr Mullins noted that destructive fires are now occurring even on cooler days, driven by wind rather than heat alone. This expands the window of fire danger beyond the hottest days of summer, and confounds the traditional seasonal preparation models used by fire agencies and communities.

Mounting Costs, Stressed Budgets

The financial toll accumulates in ways that are visible in insurance premium notices, council balance sheets and government disaster recovery allocations.

Between 2019 and 2024, insurance companies paid out an average of $4.5 billion per year for extreme weather events. That figure is more than double the annual average across the prior 30 years.⁵ Those costs do not remain contained within the industry. They flow through to household premiums, through to properties that become uninsurable, and through to communities where rising premiums effectively price out lower-income residents.

At the local government level, the Mid Coast Council in New South Wales has applied for state and federal disaster recovery funding sixteen times since 2019. That frequency of application is not a sign of poor management. It is a measure of how regularly disasters now strike a single coastal council area and how thoroughly they exhaust local fiscal capacity.⁶

Summer extremes are also leaving lasting damage to ecosystems and agricultural land, with dead livestock, degraded pastures and compromised water catchments adding costs that do not always appear in insurance statistics but weigh heavily on regional economies.

What Comes Next

Dr Ashcroft noted that the Pacific Ocean typically resets between March and April, at which point climate scientists gain clearer sight of whether El Niño or La Niña conditions will dominate from May onwards. The prospect of an El Niño summer following the baseline already established by fossil fuel-driven warming is one that concerns scientists who observed what La Niña failed to prevent in 2025-26.

The Climate Council's report calls directly on governments to cease approving new coal and gas projects, and to accelerate the transition to clean energy. Mr Mullins framed the connection between energy policy and disaster cost as direct and immediate: “Disasters are costing Australians dearly.”

The report also identifies a specific mechanism by which continued fossil fuel investment worsens future fire risk. Every additional tonne of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere raises the heat baseline. A higher baseline means more days above the thresholds that drive catastrophic fire conditions, more moisture cycling through the atmosphere to produce extreme rainfall events, and less recovery time between disasters.

A Nation at a Crossroads

Australia occupies a peculiar position in the global climate conversation. It is among the world's most exposed countries to climate impacts, and among the most significant exporters of the fossil fuels that drive those impacts. The summer of 2025-26 did not resolve that tension. It sharpened it.

Communities along the Great Ocean Road, in the outback of South Australia, in the freight corridors of the Nullarbor, and in the suburban fringes of Melbourne and Mildura are absorbing costs, physical and financial, that compound with each season. Their fire services, council budgets and household insurance policies carry a burden that is growing faster than the systems designed to absorb it.

The Climate Council's report lands at a moment when Australia faces a federal election and questions about the pace of its energy transition remain sharply contested. The summer's record heat, its fires and its floods do not determine how those political questions will be resolved. But they do define the conditions under which future Australians will ask the same questions, if the present trajectory continues.

Whether Australia's political settlement will keep pace with its physical reality is a question the 2025-26 summer raised with unmistakable urgency, and one that neither the heat nor the floodwaters have yet answered.

References

1. Climate Council: New report: Aussies flung from summer fires to floods in breakneck climate whiplash (2026)

2. Climate Council: Bronze Medal Nobody Wants: 2025 Earth's Third-Hottest Year (2026)

3. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash – full report (March 2026)

4. Bureau of Meteorology: Melbourne climate data, December 2025

5. Insurance Council of Australia: Catastrophe statistics

6. Canberra CityNews: Summer climate ‘whiplash’ hitting harder and faster (March 2026)

7. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed – report landing page (2026)

8. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis (2021)

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Australia’s Fossil Fuel Subsidy Paradox: Billions flow to coal, oil and gas as governments promise a clean energy future - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

Australian governments provide billions annually in fossil fuel subsidies [1] The diesel fuel tax credit scheme is the largest subsidy [2] Subsidies now exceed $16 billion a year across governments [3] Critics say subsidies undermine climate policy goals [4] Supporters argue subsidies protect regional industries and jobs [5] Debate intensifies as Australia faces a rapid global energy transition [6]

On a dusty coal haul road in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, trucks the size of houses move slowly through the red earth.

Each burns thousands of litres of diesel a day, fuel partly underwritten by Australian taxpayers.

Across federal and state budgets, billions of dollars flow quietly each year to support fossil fuel production and use.

At the same time, governments promise voters a future powered by clean energy.

The contradiction sits at the centre of Australia’s climate debate.

A Quiet Stream of Public Money

Australian federal and state governments together provide an estimated $16.3 billion a year in subsidies and tax concessions to fossil fuel industries.^[1]

The figure includes direct spending, tax breaks and concessions for fuel used in mining, transport and heavy industry.

Researchers estimate this support equals roughly $31,000 every minute of the year.^[1]

Most Australians never see the payments, because they appear in budget papers as tax arrangements rather than direct grants.

Yet their scale rivals some of the country’s largest social programs.

The Diesel Rebate at the Centre

The largest subsidy is the federal Fuel Tax Credit Scheme, which refunds fuel excise to industries that use diesel away from public roads.^[2]

The program is expected to cost about $10.8 billion in a single financial year.^[2]

Mining companies, agricultural producers and construction firms are among the biggest recipients.

The scheme dates back decades and was designed to ensure industries did not pay road taxes for fuel used off road.

Critics now argue it has evolved into a large subsidy for fossil fuel consumption.

Climate Policy Meets Budget Reality

The subsidies exist alongside ambitious national climate targets.

Australia has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Yet economists and climate analysts say fossil fuel subsidies can slow the transition to cleaner energy.^[4]

Lower fuel costs encourage continued reliance on diesel and other carbon intensive energy sources.

That dynamic complicates efforts to reduce emissions in sectors such as mining, transport and agriculture.

Regional Economies and Political Pressure

Supporters of the subsidies say the policies protect regional industries that underpin Australia’s economy.^[5]

Mining and agriculture rely heavily on diesel powered machinery that currently has few affordable alternatives.

Industry groups warn that removing fuel credits could increase production costs and weaken export competitiveness.

In resource regions, these arguments carry political weight.

Communities built around coal mines or gas fields often view the subsidies as essential economic support.

A Growing National Debate

The issue has drawn increasing scrutiny from economists, climate experts and sections of the business community.

Several policy groups argue the subsidies distort markets by favouring fossil fuels over emerging clean technologies.

Some companies in the resources sector have also begun calling for reform as they invest in renewable energy and green hydrogen.

International agreements have added pressure.

Many countries, including Australia, have pledged to phase out what they describe as “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.^[3]

The Energy Transition Question

The debate arrives as global energy markets begin to shift.

Government modelling suggests the value of Australia’s coal and gas exports could fall sharply in coming decades as countries move toward net zero emissions.^[6]

At the same time, demand for minerals used in renewable technologies is rising rapidly.

Some analysts argue redirecting subsidies toward clean energy infrastructure could accelerate that transition.

Others warn that rapid policy shifts could disrupt industries that still employ tens of thousands of Australians.

Conclusion

Australia’s fossil fuel subsidies reveal a deeper tension in national climate policy.

Governments promise a rapid transition to renewable energy while maintaining financial support for industries that produce coal, oil and gas.

Part of the reason lies in economic reality.

Fossil fuels remain a major source of export income, government revenue and regional employment.

Another reason lies in political caution.

Energy transitions reshape economies slowly, and governments often prefer gradual change over abrupt disruption.

Yet the scale of the subsidies raises difficult questions.

Every dollar spent supporting fossil fuels is a dollar not invested in renewable energy, energy efficiency or climate resilience.

For some economists the issue is not only environmental but fiscal.

They argue that removing subsidies could free billions for public services or climate adaptation.

For industry groups the concern is different.

They warn that rapid changes could damage sectors that still anchor Australia’s export economy.

The tension is unlikely to disappear soon.

As climate targets tighten and global markets shift, Australia will face a fundamental policy choice.

Whether governments continue subsidising fossil fuels, or begin redirecting those funds toward the industries of a low carbon future, remains an open question for the decade ahead.

References

1. Australian fossil fuel subsidies growing faster than NDIS, hitting $16.3 billion in 2025–26
2. Australian governments subsidising fossil fuel use by more than $30,000 a minute
3. Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Australia 2025
4. Fossil fuel subsidies hit $14.5 billion in 2023–24
5. Fuel tax credits scheme faces scrutiny
6. Treasury modelling on Australia’s fossil fuel export outlook

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The Tipping Point Problem: Why the World Is Running Out of Room to Manage Climate Change - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

The global mean temperature for 2024 reached 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, surpassing the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C aspirational threshold for the first time in a calendar year.1 Climate scientists warn that tipping points, once crossed, trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that can accelerate warming beyond human capacity to manage or reverse.2 The Great Barrier Reef suffered its most spatially extensive mass coral bleaching on record in 2024, with coral cover declining by up to 30 per cent across entire regions in a single year.3 Australian governments collectively subsidised fossil fuel producers and major users to the value of $14.9 billion in 2024-25, a figure rising year on year despite mounting climate costs.4 The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report identifies a deep governance failure, warning that humanity is managing a non-linear planet with institutions designed only for linear, incremental change.5 Preventing catastrophic climate change will require not only rapid emissions reductions but a fundamental restructuring of global governance to confront vested interests and align economic priorities with planetary boundaries.6

For decades, climate scientists have warned that warming the planet is not a simple, smooth process. 

Push the Earth's systems hard enough, and they push back, accelerating change in ways that no international agreement was designed to handle. 

A landmark report now puts that warning in blunt, institutional terms: humanity is governing a non-linear planet with instruments built for a more predictable world.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report, produced by the Global Challenges Foundation and authored by experts including University of Oslo governance researcher Manjana Milkoreit and climate scientist Eva Mineur, identifies catastrophic climate change as the foremost of five civilisation-level threats facing humanity today. 

The report does not merely rehearse familiar emissions data. It argues that the architecture of global climate governance, from the Paris Agreement to successive UN Climate Conferences, is structurally incapable of managing the cascading, non-linear disruptions that accelerating warming is already setting in motion.⁵

A Threshold Already Crossed

The numbers at the start of 2026 leave little room for measured optimism. Every year between 2015 and 2024 ranked among the ten warmest in recorded history. 

The global mean temperature for 2024 reached 1.55°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, breaching the 1.5°C threshold that the Paris Agreement had set as its most ambitious target.¹

One year above that threshold does not constitute permanent overshoot. The science is clear on this point. But it illustrates how rapidly the margins have narrowed. The report's authors write that each additional fraction of a degree "narrows the space for stability" in ways that are not always visible until a system fails. The risk is not just continued warming; it is cascading disruption.²

That disruption is already arriving. At 1.5°C of sustained warming, climate models project dramatically more frequent and severe extreme weather events. At 3°C, entire regions could shift to climate conditions unseen for millions of years, with sea-level rise, crop failures and lethal heat rendering large parts of the planet effectively uninhabitable. Mass displacement on that scale would overwhelm political systems, international institutions and the concept of managed adaptation altogether.

The Mechanics of a Tipping Cascade

What distinguishes catastrophic climate risk from ordinary environmental degradation is the concept of tipping points: thresholds beyond which self-reinforcing feedbacks take over, driving further change independent of human emissions. Melting Arctic ice reduces the surface reflectivity of the planet, absorbing more heat. Thawing permafrost releases stored methane. Dying rainforests shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Each of these processes, once triggered, makes the next tipping point more likely.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report draws directly on the Global Tipping Points Report of 2025, which found that coral reefs have already passed their tipping point and could functionally collapse within a decade without coordinated global action to bring temperatures back below 1.0°C in the longer term.² 

The critical word in that sentence is "functionally." A world without functioning coral reef ecosystems is not a world with one fewer natural wonder. It is a world in which hundreds of millions of people lose access to fisheries, coastal protection and the marine biodiversity on which those services depend.

Milkoreit, in a conversation accompanying the report's release, observed that climate governance was never designed for this kind of non-linear disruption. The institutions managing climate risk were built to handle gradual, predictable change. Tipping points are neither gradual nor predictable. They produce sudden, irreversible shifts, and the governance systems meant to prevent them have no binding ecological red lines, no global institution specifically tasked with safeguarding Earth system resilience.⁵

Australia's Reef: A Live Experiment in Tipping-Point Science

No place in the world illustrates the tipping-point problem more vividly than the Great Barrier Reef, which stretches for more than 2,300 kilometres along Australia's Queensland coast and supports an estimated 1,500 species of fish and 400 types of coral.

In early 2024, the reef suffered the most spatially extensive mass coral bleaching event in recorded history. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), which has monitored the reef since 1986, reported that the bleaching affected all three regions of the system simultaneously, with high to extreme bleaching prevalence across the majority of surveyed reefs. The primary driver, AIMS scientists concluded, was climate change-induced heat stress from record ocean temperatures.³

The consequences were severe and rapid. Coral cover declined by between 14 and 30 per cent across entire regions in a single year, with some individual reefs losing more than 70 per cent of their coral cover compared to 2024 survey levels. Northern GBR cover fell from 39.8 per cent to 30 per cent, recording the largest single-year decline since monitoring began. 

In early 2025, a sixth consecutive mass bleaching event occurred, focused on the Northern GBR and parts of western Australia, where a marine heatwave produced water temperatures 3°C to 4°C above normal along the Kimberley coast.³

The Climate Change Authority has noted that globally, coral reefs are projected to decline by 70 to 90 per cent if warming remains at 1.5°C for an extended period. At 2°C, up to 99 per cent of corals could be lost or fundamentally altered. The GBR's recovery windows are visibly shrinking with each successive bleaching season.³

For the roughly 60,000 people employed in the Great Barrier Reef's tourism and fishing industries, the ecological deterioration is already an economic one. For coastal communities in the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, it is more fundamental still: the reef provides food, cultural identity and physical protection against storm surge. Its decline is not an abstract environmental statistic.

The Governance Gap: Fragmented Policies, Cascading Risks

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report reserves some of its most pointed analysis for the structural inadequacies of the current governance framework. The Paris Agreement, it argues, remains the indispensable foundation of global climate diplomacy. But successive UN Climate Conferences have produced incremental commitments that collectively fall well short of what the science demands.⁶

The report identifies four distinct dimensions of governance failure. Climate policy remains fragmented from related domains, including biodiversity, energy, food and finance, despite deep interconnections between them. Unequal access to finance and technology limits the capacity of lower-income countries to transition away from fossil fuels or adapt to impacts they did not cause. 

A leadership gap persists, with political courage to confront vested interests in chronic short supply. And there are no binding ecological red lines: no global institution is charged specifically with protecting Earth system stability as a whole.

"We are governing a non-linear planet with institutions designed for linear change," the report's authors write. "That is the major reason for governance failure."⁵

The consequences of that failure are not evenly distributed. The harshest climate impacts fall on those least responsible for cumulative emissions: low-income communities, small island nations, Indigenous populations in vulnerable coastal and arid regions. The moral and political tension embedded in that asymmetry, the report argues, will itself destabilise governance unless addressed through equitable finance and shared accountability mechanisms.

Australia's Subsidy Paradox

Australia's climate position illustrates the governance gap in precise and measurable terms. The country has committed, under its updated Nationally Determined Contribution submitted in September 2025, to reducing emissions by 62 to 70 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035, with a long-term net zero target of 2050.

Yet at the same time, Australian governments collectively provided $14.9 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users in 2024-25, a 3 per cent increase on the previous year, according to The Australia Institute's annual subsidy audit. 

The federal government's Fuel Tax Credits Scheme alone cost $10.2 billion, returning fuel tax to major diesel users including multinational mining companies.⁴ In 2025-26, that figure rose again to $16.3 billion, growing faster than the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

That sum equates to roughly $548 for every person in Australia, or $28,381 for every minute of every day. By contrast, the nation's Disaster Ready Fund, the primary mechanism for responding to climate-induced floods, fires and cyclones, held $4.75 billion in reserves. Australia's governments were committing approximately 14 times as much to the activities that cause those disasters as to the funds designed to manage their consequences.⁴

The Climate Change Performance Index rated Australia poorly in its 2025 assessment, noting that while the country's updated NDC represented progress, "the 70% upper end is for creating the perception of greater ambition than what is actually planned." Australia continues to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure, has no policy to cap fossil fuel exports, and has not joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.

The contradiction is stark. Australia simultaneously positions itself as a climate leader in Pacific diplomacy and one of the world's largest per capita producers and exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas. The two positions are not obviously reconcilable within the timeframes that climate science demands.

What the Science Demands

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report does not take the position that catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Its core argument is more conditional and, in some respects, more challenging: the physical science of tipping points, cascading feedbacks and Earth system resilience is now sufficiently understood to define what avoiding catastrophe requires. The gap is not scientific. It is political, economic and institutional.

Preventing catastrophic outcomes requires, at minimum, rapidly peaking and then steeply reducing global emissions, financing the transition for lower-income countries, and restructuring governance to treat climate as what it is: a systemic stability issue with binding ecological limits. The report calls for stronger accountability mechanisms, binding red lines, integration of climate with biodiversity and food governance, and the political courage to confront vested interests who profit from the current trajectory.⁶

Carbon pricing, green financing and removal of fossil fuel subsidies are identified as immediate economic levers. But the report's authors are clear that these are necessary rather than sufficient. The deeper requirement is a form of governance that can anticipate non-linear futures rather than react to linear trends, and that can mobilise collective action at the speed those futures demand.

The Question That Remains Open

Australia enters this reckoning from an unusual position: a wealthy, high-emitting country with extraordinary exposure to climate impacts, an economy still structurally tied to fossil fuel exports, and a political culture that has historically struggled to sustain consistent climate policy across election cycles. 

The reef bleaching, the subsidies, the updated NDC, the Fuel Tax Credits Scheme, all of these sit within a single national story about priorities, vested interests and the distance between stated commitments and enacted policy.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report's most unsettling observation is not about emissions curves or temperature thresholds. It is about the relationship between governance and time. Climate tipping points operate on timescales that political systems typically cannot see or plan for. The reef does not wait for an election cycle. Permafrost does not respond to a ministerial announcement. The carbon already in the atmosphere will continue warming the planet for decades regardless of what parliaments resolve this year.

What remains genuinely open is whether the political imagination necessary to bridge that gap exists within democratic institutions, or whether it will need to be built, through new forms of accountability, new international frameworks and a willingness to treat the stability of the Earth's systems as something more than a line item in a budget. 

The answer to that question, the report's authors suggest, will be written not in scientific papers but in the decisions made in the next few years by governments, industries and electorates that still retain the power to choose.

References

1. World Meteorological Organisation, State of the Global Climate 2024 
2. Global Challenges Foundation, Global Catastrophic Risks 2026: Catastrophic Climate Change Overview 
3. Australian Institute of Marine Science, Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Condition 2024/25 
4. The Australia Institute, Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Australia 2025 
5. Global Dispatches, How to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change (interview with Manjana Milkoreit and Eva Mineur) 
6. Global Challenges Foundation, Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 (full report) 
7. Climate Change Authority, Understanding Climate Threats to the Great Barrier Reef 
8. Climate Change Performance Index, Australia Climate Performance Ranking 2025 
9. The Australia Institute, Australian Fossil Fuel Subsidies Growing Faster Than NDIS, Hitting $16.3 Billion in 2025-26 10. Global Tipping Points Report 2025 

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Have your say on Canberra’s next Climate Strategy: It will be make or break - Gregory Andrews

Lyrebird Dreaming - Gregory Andrews

The ACT’s electric bus depot.

AUTHOR   Gregory Andrews is: Founder and Managing Director of Lyrebird Dreaming A former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner in West Africa Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner A leader in Indigenous policy

The ACT Government is inviting submissions on its next Climate Change Strategy which will run out to 2035. Public consultation closes on 18 March 2026. 

I’ve already lodged a submission because this is one of those moments when a government process like this really matters. 

Decisions made in this strategy will shape not just how Canberra cuts emissions, but whether it remains a liveable, safe and resilient city in a rapidly changing climate.

The ACT has done important things already, and it should get credit for them. 

• Its achievement of 100% renewable electricity was nationally significant. 
• Its investment in electric buses is real and visible. 
• The new Woden facility is Australia’s largest electric bus depot and a strong example of the kind of practical climate infrastructure governments should be building. It charges up to 100 electric buses.

But climate leadership isn’t something you get to claim forever because you were early in one area. Targets and announcements are one thing. Delivery is what matters.

That, and the latest climate science, are why this next strategy is so important. The ACT Government is not meeting its existing emissions reduction targets. Across the globe we are already feeling the impacts of the climate crisis. 

My submission argues that mitigation and adaptation both need equal and greater priority. Climate change is no longer a future emergency. It is already affecting how cities like Canberra function, how infrastructure performs, and how communities cope with heat, smoke, storms and flood. 

What Canberra does now on emissions reduction and climate adaptation will help determine whether it remains a safe, fair and liveable city for the people who live there.

That means stronger mitigation efforts. Transport is one of the hardest sectors. The ACT needs to keep pushing electrification, public transport and active travel. Electric buses are part of the story, but cycling is too. 

Canberra will not seriously cut transport emissions unless it improves cycling infrastructure with safer and more continuous lanes. Active travel is climate policy, public health policy and resilience policy at the same time.

It also means stronger adaptation. Buildings, precincts and infrastructure must be designed for the climate ahead rather than the climate behind us. A city cannot call itself climate ready if new assets remain vulnerable to foreseeable heat or flooding. 

The new CIT building in Woden, for example, was not designed for today’s climate. Its basement is closed and lifts are not fully functional because of flood damage. Adaptation needs to be built into planning, procurement and design from the start.

My submission also argues for a stronger strategy on waste reduction, recycling, organics and the circular economy. The ACT once had a ‘No Waste by 2010’ strategy but it quietly faded away.

And then there is Country. This strategy should have a much stronger Caring for Country lens. Not as symbolism and not as an afterthought. Caring for Country has practical relevance to biodiversity, urban cooling, water, fire, community wellbeing and long-term stewardship. 

A better climate strategy for Canberra will take First Nations knowledge, relationships and governance seriously.

So yes, I’ve made a submission because this feels like a make-or-break moment. The ACT has strong foundations. The real test now is whether climate ambition becomes delivery.

If you live in Canberra or care about its future, consider making a submission before 18 March. 

It does not need to be an expert paper. Simply tell the ACT Government clearly that climate action needs to be stronger, more practical and more honest about the scale of the challenge ahead. 

Canberra needs a plan that cuts emissions faster and adapts to the impacts already arriving.

 Gregory Andrews Climate Change Articles

• Global Warming Has Accelerated: Evidence from Observations After Removing Natural Variability
• IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023
• Global Temperature: Vital Signs of the Planet
• Effects of Climate Change
• Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided
• Global Warming in the Pipeline
• Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
• Global CO₂ Emissions Trends

Victoria’s Climate Strategy Tests the Politics of Transformation - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

Victoria’s new strategy sets the pathway toward net zero emissions by 2045 1 The state aims to cut emissions 45–50% by 2030 and 75–80% by 2035 2 Rapid expansion of renewable energy and storage underpins the transition 3 Policies link climate action to jobs, industry and economic growth 4 Communities face both opportunities and tensions during the transition 5 The strategy frames climate policy as an economic and social transformation 6

Victoria has unveiled a sweeping climate strategy that seeks to reshape the State’s energy, economy and landscapes over the next decade.

The document, Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy 2026–30, sets out a roadmap to slash emissions, expand renewable energy and prepare communities for a hotter, more volatile climate.

Behind the policy language sits a deeper question that echoes across Australia. Can a prosperous industrial state rapidly cut climate pollution while maintaining economic growth and social stability?

A State already in transition

Victoria enters the next phase of climate policy with a record of measurable change.

State emissions have fallen about 31 percent since 2005 while the economy expanded by more than half, evidence that economic growth and emissions reduction can occur simultaneously ³.

The government credits renewable energy investment, energy efficiency programs and industrial reforms for the shift.

The new strategy builds on legislated targets that require emissions to fall 45 to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and 75 to 80 percent by 2035 ².

Ultimately, the state aims to reach net zero emissions by 2045, five years earlier than the national target ¹.

Rebuilding the energy system

The heart of the strategy lies in a profound transformation of electricity generation.

Victoria plans to replace coal-fired power with renewable energy supported by storage, new transmission lines and offshore wind farms.

The state has legislated a target for 95 percent renewable electricity generation by 2035 alongside the largest energy storage targets in Australia ³.

The revival of the State Electricity Commission aims to accelerate publicly backed renewable projects while helping stabilise electricity prices.

Officials argue this approach can deliver cleaner energy while reducing long term costs for households and industry.

Transport and daily life

The strategy extends beyond electricity into the everyday rhythms of transport and housing.

Victoria aims for half of new light vehicle sales to be zero emission vehicles by 2030, part of a broader shift away from petrol and diesel engines ⁵.

Charging infrastructure and electrified public transport form part of that transition.

In homes, energy efficiency upgrades and minimum energy standards for rental properties aim to reduce energy bills while cutting emissions.

For many households the changes will appear gradually through new appliances, rooftop solar systems and quieter electric vehicles.

Climate policy as economic policy

Government planners increasingly frame climate action as an economic development strategy.

Modelling suggests Victoria’s economy could be tens of billions of dollars larger by 2070 if strong climate action aligns with global decarbonisation efforts ⁴.

The transition is also expected to create thousands of jobs across renewable energy, environmental restoration and low carbon manufacturing.

The state’s energy workforce alone could expand by more than 60 percent by 2040 ³.

Supporters argue the shift mirrors earlier industrial revolutions that reshaped economies while generating new industries.

Nature and resilience

Climate policy now extends beyond emissions reduction into adaptation and ecosystem restoration.

The strategy includes programs to restore native vegetation, protect forests and strengthen biodiversity.

More than 20,000 hectares of native vegetation could be restored through initiatives such as the BushBank program ⁶.

Urban greening and tree planting programs aim to reduce extreme heat in rapidly growing suburbs.

These measures recognise that some climate change is already locked into the system.

Communities on the front line

Policy documents often speak in numbers, but climate transitions unfold in real communities.

Farmers negotiating wind turbine leases, electricians installing rooftop solar and families replacing gas heaters with heat pumps all become participants in the transition.

Some communities welcome renewable investment and the jobs it brings.

Others worry about transmission lines, land use and the pace of change in regional landscapes.

Managing those tensions may become one of the most complex challenges of the decade.

The national context

Victoria’s strategy sits within a broader national debate about Australia’s climate trajectory.

The federal government targets a 43 percent emissions reduction by 2030 and net zero by 2050.

Victoria’s earlier timeline places the state among the more ambitious jurisdictions in Australia.

That ambition also carries risk.

If technologies, infrastructure or political support falter, progress could slow.

Conclusion

Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy 2026–30 presents a vision of transformation rather than incremental change.

The plan recognises that climate policy now touches almost every part of the economy, from power generation and manufacturing to housing, transport and land management.

Its architects argue that acting early will position the state to thrive in a low carbon global economy.

Critics caution that large scale infrastructure projects, community concerns and economic uncertainty could complicate the transition.

Both perspectives reveal the deeper truth behind modern climate policy.

Decarbonisation is no longer simply an environmental objective.

It has become a test of how societies manage technological change, economic restructuring and political consensus at the same time.

Victoria’s strategy offers one answer to that challenge.

Whether it succeeds may depend less on policy design than on the willingness of communities, industries and governments to move together.

And in a warming world, the pace of that collective movement may matter more than anyone once imagined.

References

1. Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy overview
2. Victoria climate action targets
3. Victoria’s climate change strategy progress data
4. Economic benefits of meeting Victoria’s targets
5. Victoria zero emissions vehicle roadmap
6. Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy 2026–30 summary

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