by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations
The Los Angeles fires have again demonstrated the need for a steely-eyed approach by governments to climate risks, ensuring that the assessment of those risks is up-to-date, considers the plausible worst-case scenarios, and is made widely available so the public understands what we are facing.
But the Australian Government’s work-in-progress National Climate Risk Assessment appears to be sinking fast, leaving us ill-prepared.
You can’t get to the solution to a problem if you don’t first elaborate the question. That is why risk assessments have become such a big thing in business, at all levels of government, for community-based organisations… and even at my local tennis club, where one is to be done yearly.
But not if you are the Albanese Government, which has blithely set about its climate policy agenda — renewables, batteries, EVs and the grid, all well-mixed with a large expansion of Australia’s coal and gas industries — without ever understanding, or explaining to Australians, the basic question: what is the nature of the threat to be mitigated, and how does their policy contain that threat?
The government has climate policy blindness. Because it has not produced an adequate evidence base of impacts and risks by which it can formulate, and judge the efficacy of its own climate policy, it is working in the dark.
The Albanese Government, whilst still in opposition, promised to undertake a climate and security (or climate threat) risk assessment if elected. This is a complex task, dealing with whole-of-system risks that cascade through the global physical climate system — including many nonlinear and difficult-to-forecast physical processes — and then impact food and water security, reverberate through communities and societal structures and undermine human and global security. It requires an integrated, systemic, approach that does not try and assess risks separately, in boxes or silos.
And that’s where the government’s first big mistake was made. With AUKUS and beating-up on China top of the agenda, the climate risk assessment was squeezed into the needs of the Defence Security Review: it was decided a quick climate-security threat analysis would be carried out by the Office of National Intelligence as an input into the DSR, with an emphasis on regional issues but not domestic climate impacts. This decision ended any chance of a systemic-risk assessment, with the domestic issues carved off to a separate process run by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, to be completed over a leisurely two-year period, despite the urgency of the climate threat.
In contrast, the ONI assessment was completed post-haste in four months, delivered end-2022, and was brutal. The likely contents were a case of shock and awe for ministers on the security committee of cabinet who had never seen anything like it. It was too hot to handle and was immediately locked in a bottom drawer on “national security” grounds. Shhhh!
Unlike the DSR, a declassified version was not released. And while ministers spent endless time talking up the China threat, lips were buttoned on the climate-security threat. Michael Pascoe asked: What is Albanese hiding? Maybe it’s the experts’ vision of the climate hell ahead.
Many Labor backbenchers have told me they support a declassified version of the ONI report being released. Green and independent MPs and senators have persistently asked the government: how can we and the parliament do our job overseeing climate and security policy when we are not even told what the government knows about the risks?
Just before Christmas, a number of independent MPs and senators received a confidential briefing on the report from ONI. This means they are not able to discuss what they learned.
Which takes us back to the other half of the story, the domestically focussed NCRA. As P&I reported on 7 August 2023, the NCRA “is poorly conceived, won’t do the job and should not proceed in its present form”. It was looking at risks in silos; from the bottom-up rather than systemically; the assumptions were too conservative; and the method narrow.
The NCRA was planned to be delivered to the government in this term of office, supposedly by last December. But there is silence. A prospective timeline has disappeared from the DCCEEW website, communications with stakeholders have withered, it was not mentioned in Climate Minister Chris Bowen’s end-2024 Annual Climate Statement to parliament, the official in charge has moved on and his supervisor has retired. A DCCEEW official told Senate estimates that the NCRA was focussed on a 1.5-to-2°C-by-2050 scenario, which was known at the time and has now been shown to be way out-of-date, with 2024 coming in at 1.6°C.
Accelerated warming, faster-than-forecast impacts and the proximity of large climate-system tipping points can be ignored by the NCRA only at the cost of the report’s relevance. If the government has gone back to its key advisers — including the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Climate Service — it would have heard scientific news that will require a recasting of the NCRA process. The government may also be aware by now that what the NCRA needs to say, if it is to be scientifically credible, would make its policy of gas-and-coal expansion look appallingly irresponsible and hypocritical. And that is why it can’t afford to know.
Has the NCRA been put on pause till after the election, or has the government killed it? I hope not. In some ways, the most efficient thing to do would be to hand the whole thing over to ONI, which has shown it can deliver on time, is somewhat detached from inter-departmental and inter-agency bureaucratic wrangling, and has the capacity to call a spade a spade, at least as far as climate is concerned. This would allow a return to systemic analysis, and work from the intelligence sector is more difficult for an LNP or ALP governments to dismiss.
Australia’s security now needs a climate focus. It would be a terrible result if a full term of a Labor Government produced half a risk climate assessment which was too hot to handle, and another half which sank without trace. Shhh!
