Is the Australian Public Service fit-for-purpose to handle existential climate risk?

The first duty of a government is to “protect the people”, their safety and well-being. Nowhere is this duty more important than in addressing climate change, which now constitutes a near-term existential threat to human civilisation. It is an open, and pressing, question whether the Australian Public Service (APS), and particularly the intelligence services, currently have the capacity to properly consider and assess the climate threat to the people of Australia, and to offer sound advice on action to minimise that threat.

Credit: One World House

 Recently, UN Secretary General António Guterres noted that “We face a direct existential threat” from climate change as “we career towards the edge of the abyss”. A recent research paper is typical of concerns which have been expressed by scientists for years, yet ignored by incumbent leaders:

Only a drastic, economy-wide makeover within the next decade, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, would avoid the transition of the Earth System to the Pliocene-like conditions that prevailed 3-3.3 million years ago, when temperatures were ~3°C and sea levels 25 metres higher. Unmitigated scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions produce climates like those of the Eocene, which suggests that we are effectively rewinding the climate clock to approximately 50 million years ago, reversing a multimillion-year cooling trend in less than two centuries.

Read the Climate Code Red by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop - “Is the Australian Public Service fit-for-purpose to handle existential climate risk?”