This aerial photo taken on April 5, 2024, shows a coral atoll near Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, located 270 kilometres (167 miles) north of the city of Cairns. (Photo by DAVID GRAY / AFP)
Sydney: Australia's oceans are turning more acidic, bushfires are raging longer, and droughts are becoming more severe, according to a major new climate report released Thursday by government researchers.
The State of the Climate report, compiled over two years by Australia's weather bureau and national science agency, paints a bleak picture of life in a sunburned country unless global emission reduction efforts are radically overhauled.
"It is the rate of change we are really concerned about here," Bureau of Meteorology climate expert Karl Braganza said.
"The science is just really clear, we have to get to net zero as quickly as possible. Obviously making that change is really hard and it doesn't happen overnight."
Australia's climate has warmed by an average of 1.51 degrees Celsius since 1910, while ocean temperatures have increased by 1.08C since 1900.
This warming has fuelled increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns over both land and sea.
Hotter and more acidic oceans were linked to damaging coral bleaching events in the tropical waters of the Great Barrier Reef.
The famed natural attraction suffered one of its worst bleaching events on record earlier this year.
Tumbling records
While some parts of Australia have started to see more intense deluges of flooding rain, other regions are documenting longer and hotter periods of drought.
Scientists noted a marked increase in "extreme fire weather" across much of Australia since the 1950s, while fire seasons were also steadily stretching for longer.
Many Australians are still scarred from the unprecedented "Black Summer" bushfires of 2019-2020, which razed swathes of forest, killed millions of animals and blanketed major cities in thick smoke.
Predicting the onset of these extreme weather events was also becoming more difficult, Braganza warned, as forecasting models struggled to account for ever-tumbling records.
"The rate of setting records in the climate system in the Australian region and globally is really significant," he said.
Emma Bacon from climate advocacy group Sweltering Cities said Australia was running out of time to get ready for these imminent climate impacts.
"One of the problems is that our timelines are too long, we think about climate impacts in 2030 or 2050, but we should be thinking about this summer and next year," she told AFP.
Bacon warned that temperatures in poorly shaded major cities have previously inched towards 50C (120 degrees Fahrenheit), which can cause severe health issues for people.
"There are some serious conversations that need to be had about where and how we live, and communities need to be at the table for those decisions," she said.
'Sobering'
The report found that while Australian emissions have declined since 2005, the nation must significantly accelerate efforts to meet its 2030 targets.
"It is sobering," said Jaci Brown from Australian national science agency CSIRO.
"We do have the technology out there and I try to remain positive and optimistic that we can pull that together."
Australia has had some success in scaling up renewable energy, and its residents are among the world's most enthusiastic adopters of household solar panels.
But it remains one of the world's leading exporters of coal and gas, despite being increasingly ravaged by the effects of climate change.
