Australia has an Everest to climb if it wants to protect itself from climate catastrophe. But do we have the political resolve?

I t is a warm spring day in my home town in regional Victoria. The sun is shining, an ocean breeze rocks the tea trees and swarms of dragonflies dance outside my window. There is, however, a cloud over me as my mind keeps returning to the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) released earlier in the week.

I have been assessing climate risks and translating this into policy action for 35 years. Even for people like me, the National Climate Risk Assessment findings are confronting. They are also not new, nor alarmist.

In 2022 and signed off by the then Coalition government, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that Australia and New Zealand “faces an extremely challenging future” and “the projected warming under current global emissions reduction policies would leave m