The Albanese government kicked off what will be a big week in climate and energy-related publications with the release of its National Climate Risk Assessment report. It’s 284 pages and I must confess to not having read the entire thing, but my basic summary is that by 2050 every sector in Australia will be exposed to “very high” or “severe” climate risks, regardless of what “we” do between now and then.
So, what’s a government to do about something over which it has no control? Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, thinks:
“Today the National Climate Risk Assessment is clear: while we can no longer avoid climate impacts, every action we take today towards our goal of net zero by 2050 will help avoid the worst impacts on Australian communities and businesses.”
The first part of that statement contradicts the second part. But since when has the truth ever stopped Chris Bowen?
Anyway, Bowen’s office would have had a strong influence on the structure and outcomes of the report. It makes many bold claims, for example that heatwaves will become more likely, and that:
“At +3.0°C of global warming, heat-related mortality is projected to increase by 444% in Sydney, 259% in Melbourne, 335% in Townsville, 312% in Perth, 146% in Launceston and 423% in Darwin compared to current conditions (note that the population demographics do not change in these mortality calculations).”
The report cited something called the Health and Wellbeing Technical Report, which I had to manually find separately on the website. It’s a 158-page behemoth, which itself cited a State of the Climate 2024 report as justification for rising heat-related deaths. I had to go and find that one too, which is where the trail ended: it’s a backward-looking document that found “warming has led to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events over land and in the oceans”.
In other words, it says nothing about whether those trends are likely to increase, nor does it make any claims about heat-related deaths, other than:
“Extreme heat has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard.”
That’s true, but it’s largely because other natural hazards don’t kill that many people: extreme heat in Australia directly kills around 30 people a year, with even fewer killed by the likes of floods. Excess mortality analysis finds much greater numbers, but that’s largely because the victims are often elderly or otherwise compromised, and a hot day is what pushes them over the proverbial edge.
Such findings should be adjusted for average lifespan, but then they wouldn’t make much of a headline (I’m sure KPMG won some government climate-related contracts on the back of its work).
But when those excess mortality figures are projected forward—which I can only assume is what the Albanese government’s report did, as the citation trail proved to be a dead-end—they tend to omit other important variables too, such as increased wealth and adaptation (e.g. technological change, air conditioning, or simply not going outside as often on hot days).
So, it sounds scary, but while Australia will probably be warmer in 2050, I suspect that—at least as a share of the population—we won’t have many more extreme heat-related deaths than we do today. That’s assuming, of course, that the government hasn’t completely destroyed the economy or our energy security, rendering many people unable to insulate their homes or run their air conditioners because of the prohibitive cost.
Anyway, the report comes across as very sensationalised. Compare and contrast its findings to the more modest IPCC, which concluded that “for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers”.
If the Albanese government considers climate change to represent a “very high” or “severe” risk to every sector in Australia by 2050, then how does it categorise “population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development” that the IPCC believes will have a much larger impact on our lives than climate change?
To me, the catastrophising messaging in the National Climate Risk Assessment report lends credence to a new peer-reviewed report from the US, which found that there’s a disconnect “between past government reports and the science itself”.
In what should surprise no economist, it turns out that governments tend to misrepresent aspects of climate science to nonexperts to push their preferred policy agendas. That’s important, because politicians are fond of taking extreme scenarios, modelling them, and stating that we have to act now or we’ll face disaster.
Here’s the US report again:
“Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.”
The same is true for Australia, which emits around 1% of global emissions. Yet here’s Chris Bowen again pushing the case for ‘action’:
“After a decade of denial and delay, we are acting on climate change – and it’s working.”
There is nothing Australia can do to limit climate change because of our small relative size, and I’m not aware of a comprehensive cost benefit study that supports such heavy-handed action on climate change in Australia. As an author of the US report concluded:
“Climate policies must balance the risks of climate change against a response’s costs, efficacy and collateral effects. Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science. Acknowledging the facts is essential for informed policy decisions.”
If the Albanese government’s climate agenda produces no climate benefits for Australia—it might still have positive spillovers in terms of reducing pollution-related deaths, for example—but comes with large and ongoing costs that make it more difficult for people to adapt to higher temperatures, then it might be worth a rethink.