Snapshot
- The Australian Government has undertaken a first national assessment of climate risks.
- The National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) collates existing studies and expert opinion into a comprehensive framework to assess broad scale, sector-based impacts.
- The NCRA kickstarts a national conversation on the importance of climate resilience and poses many questions around how we finance and incentivise resilience.
Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) was recently published after nearly three years of development. This comprehensive review by the Australian Government consolidates expert opinions, observational and modelled data, and assesses exposure and vulnerabilities to climate-related risks across the country. The NCRA aims to provide a national knowledge baseline to support inter-generational climate policy, such as natural disaster mitigation funding and the net zero energy transition.
The NCRA covers ten priority hazards, including extreme temperatures, drought, bushfires, and coastal flooding, across four time horizons and three global warming levels. It identifies 63 nationally significant climate risks, with 11 assessed in detail, focusing on risks to people, places, and ways of life.
Key findings highlight that climate change will amplify existing vulnerabilities and inequalities within human and natural systems.
The NCRA emphasizes the importance of understanding present-day risks as a foundation for assessing future risks, and calls for more research to address uncertainties around changing flood, cyclone, and hailstorm risks.
The NCRA underscores the urgent need to address the resilience financing gap to limit the cost of physical climate risks to Australia’s economy and population in the coming decades.
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