Predicting Climate Futures

The climate models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses have tracked the change so far with a fair degree of accuracy.  The main changes are:

• Overall, average temperatures will become hotter.

• There will be more extremes – more intense heatwaves, more intense droughts, more intense rainfall events, and more intense cyclones which may occur further from the equator although not necessarily more cyclones.

• Sea levels will rise as polar ice melts, leading to more coastal erosion, worse and more frequent inundation via storm surges and exacerbated flooding of tidal rivers.

• This will have a number of effects that directly impact on housing and on low income tenants – there will be more and higher floods, more severe storms, more heat stress.

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These risks not not just abstract changes in the environment, they have serious impacts on how we live.  The Australian National Climate Risk Assessment, published in 2026 by the Commonwealth Government, provides a detailed and sobering outline.  It identifies 63 nationally significant risks, including 

• risks to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

• risks to rural, regional and remote communities

• risks to defence and national security

• risks to the economy, trade and finance

• risks to the health and social support system

• risks to infrastructure and the built environment

• risks to the natural environment

• risks to primary industries and food supplies.

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These risks apply across the nation, but the precise nature of their impact will vary from place to place.  So how can we find out more detail about our own area?

 

One quick resource, released by the Climate Council in 2022, is the Climate Risk Map of Australia.  This provides a suburb-by-suburb guide to level of risk of particular climate -related events by 2030, 2050 and 2100 under high, medium and low emissions scenarios.  It provides estimates of the number of properties at risk overall, and of specific events including riverine flooding, bushfire, surface water flooding, coastal inundation and extreme wind.  The advantage of this tool is that you can look really quickly to see what the issues are likely to be in a particular location.  The disadvantage is that it doesn’t provide much detail about these risks or how to manage them.  It is more a tool to raise awareness than a detailed planning resource.

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For something more thorough and nuanced, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have collaborated on a resource called Climate Change in Australia.  This provides a detailed look at the drivers and impact of climate change on our country, and includes projection tools that divide Australia into four ‘super-clusters’ (essentially, north, south, east and central), eight clusters and fifteen sub-clusters.   It then allows you to look at projections for a range of variables to do with temperature, rainfall and coastal changes based on the outcomes of different climate models.  There are a number of different ways to view the data and it’s easy to get lost exploring it, but from the point of view of practical planning it lacks the level of locality and specificity you would need.

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If you want detailed local advice, the best option is to talk to your local Council planning department.  Most Councils have detailed data on potential for flooding, coastal inundation, bushfire risk and other natural disasters, although the quality of these may vary from Council to Council and they may be more or less future-focused.  Some of this information is published on their websites but it can be hard to navigate, and often Council staff have a better level of knowledge and more ability to find and interpret the various pieces of data they hold.