The so-called National Climate Risk Assessment was expected to be released late last year. Its delay has led to fears in the climate movement that it has been caught up in increasingly complicated domestic and international climate politics.
Former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner Greg Mullins said that at two degrees of warming emergency service responses of the sort Australians are used to become unsustainable.
“In terms of emergency services, there’s no way in the world they could cope. When I say cope, I mean, be able to actually beat bushfires and save people from floods. With the sort of scenarios we’re looking at, it’s wholesale retreat from coasts because of coastal land inundation; it’s thousands of homes [in] areas that aren’t flood plains now, but will be as flooding gets worse; it’s moving homes out of elevated bushfire prone areas. It’s a horror show.”
A second person briefed on the report recalls confronting detail about everything from ocean acidification to loss of biodiversity to the impact on supply chains, but the most shocking data she recalls was about prolonged drought in the nation’s southwest, and coastal inundation, especially around north Queensland.