Australia’s First Climate Risk Assessment, Long Overdue

The Australian Government’s soon-to-be-released first National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), which will be focused on domestic climate risks, has received some recent media coverage here and here. Here is the story on the long evolution of the NCRA and what to expect.

In 2021, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG), a group of former defence and security leaders, proposed to the Labor opposition (and the Morrison Government) that a comprehensive climate risk assessment be undertaken as a matter of urgency, and this was included in the ALP’s 2022 election platform. The case was made in an ASLCG report, Missing in action 

Shortly after coming to power, in mid-2022 the Albanese government decided to split the task in two, with priority given to a regionally-focused climate-and-security risk assessment to be conducted quickly by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), so it could feed into the Defense Strategic Review (DSR), which was basically a justifying-AUKUS exercise. The DSR gave scant regard to climate risks, despite the ONI report being very frank.

Before work on the ONI report had started, ASLCG provided an Implementation Proposal for the risk assessment/s, highlighting what appropriate methods would be, and warning of potential pitfalls.

The ONI report was delivered to the National Security Committee of Cabinet in December 2022, where it caused some shock and awe with members saying they had never heard anything like it before, which is unsurprising given the previous government’s climate denial, but also pointing to a lack of inquisitiveness about climate impacts and disruption amongst cabinet members.

ONI’s report was securitised by the PM’s Office, with no declassified version released, unlike the practice of Australia’s major allies, or with the Defence Security Review. This has severely reduced the report’s usefulness and denied parliamentarians the knowledge they need to carry out their responsibilities in this policy area. (A few independent parliamentarians were briefed on it in late 2024, probably because the government was worried they might need them after the 2025 election. Senator Pocock described the report as “frankly terrifying”.)

Whilst the report remains classified, there are reasonable assumptions that can be made on what was in the ONI report, based on similar work in other countries.  In early 2023, ASLCG issued Climate security up front: Transparency, security risks & the government’s duty of care on the need for transparency.

An unwillingness to discuss climate risks has been characteristic of the current and former governments, discussed in Government refuses to articulate ‘frankly terrifying’ security risks and The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price.

The second half of the risk assessment process was the domestically-oriented National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) initiated by the government in early 2023 and managed by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water. ASLCG was a stakeholder in the NCRA process.

The initial NCRA project was poorly conceived, and a multi-million dollar consultancy contract was eventually scrapped after concern from stakeholders, including Are we failing to see the wood for the trees on climate risks? Climate mitigation was excluded from the NCRA terms of reference.

The NCRA opted for a “bottom-up” approach in which stakeholders were asked to identify the most important risks to them. This almost inevitably leads to a partial picture that lacks coherence, instead providing a series of snapshots of particular risks, but with many black spots. This approach almost inevitably means treating risk in “silos” and not joining the dots, a problem that the post-9/11 inquiry in the USA identified as plaguing their intelligence and contributing to them not synthesising the evidence.

ASLCG concerns about the NCRA may be found in the Too hot to handle report. It was revealed in Senate estimates that the scenarios were too conservative (1.5-2°C by 2050), and had to be revised. When a draft report went to the government there was some more shock and awe and concern about the severity of the findings and that it could not be put out without a robust adaptation plan response, which would be alarmingly expensive. Surprise! The first version of the adaptation plan was rejected as not up to scratch and had to be redone. And the NCRA release was delayed till after the May 2025 election.

Now, finally, nine months late, the NCRA is about to be released. Media reports say it is “dire” on future impacts, but that is not unexpected since these things have never been said to any Australian Government before in this manner, except the ONI report which few have seen and cannot be discussed.  In fact, the NCRA may underestimate the risks if it fails to recognise that impacts are occurring faster than forecast, that 1.5C has arrived 15 years earlier than forecast by the IPCC, and that large-system tipping points have already been reached.

Another major problem was identified in the 2024 Australian Academy of Science report, A decadal plan for Australian Earth system science 2024–2033, which recommended the urgent establishment of an Australian Institute for Earth System Science, tasked with developing, coordinating and implementing the national science required to deliver answers to nationally significant questions. The report noted that “an unintended vacuum has emerged where no unifying agency or long-term funding initiative is addressing the fundamental understanding of climate to provide the foundations for climate intelligence needs in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. We are, in effect, building climate action and climate policy on foundations developed 10 to 20 years ago”.

My concerns about the NCRA method may be found at New National Climate Risk Assessment: More omission than commission?  As well, it remains the case that climate science does not yet understand well enough how extreme climate-change extremes will become. That’s why we keep on being shocked, over and again, by faster-than-forecast events:

• Extreme floods and rain events are often oddly described as a “one-in-a-hundred-year” or a “one-in-five hundred-year” event, suggesting they are unlikely to recur. But then they happen again, within a few years. This shows the assessments of future climate risks are often too conservative, and so vulnerable communities and governments are under-prepared.
• Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires were of an intensity not projected to occur till towards the end of the century.
• Parts of inland Australia are experiencing heat extremes several decades ahead of expectations. On 18 December 2019, Australia’s hottest day on record, with an average maximum of 41.9°C, the heat in some areas aligned with worst-case 2040-2060 projections.
• And Prof. Michael Mann says there is plenty of research showing that climate models fail to resolve some of the processes that are involved in summer season extremes, including floods, heat waves and droughts: “We argue that the models are underestimating the impact that climate change is already having on these extreme events.”

Nevertheless, the release of the NCRA is an important opportunity, as Georgina Woods described so well in this LinkedIn post:

“Now we’re getting to the bones of it. Reluctance to talk about the realities of climate change stems in part from a refusal to come to terms with everything that is unthinkable about it. On the one hand, its unthinkable impacts and cascading consequences, on the other, the unthinkable overhaul of society required to prevent the worst of it. Releasing the National Climate Risk Assessment will raise a clamour of questions about how and what will and should be done to protect people and ecosystems, who will pay for it all, who gets to decide what to save and what to leave behind, and why we’re still fudging on action to prevent it getting much worse.

“I’m *really* hoping that the government will do more than just drop the risk assessment to the media and launch an interactive website. Australian people have no idea how profound these consequences will be and they’re not paying attention to the media or government websites. Get out and about and engage people directly. Talking about it in person, in communities, and giving people the authority to decide how to respond, the space and invitation to engage and transform our social and economic systems from the inside out is the only feasible pathway to prosperity and peace. If there’s a deficit of social and political capital to take the necessary action to prevent cataclysm from swallowing Oz society and then throwing it back up again, it’s because almost no one with power has been talking to Oz society about the cataclysm.”