A group of former national security leaders has warned that Australia is deeply under-prepared to deal with the existential risks posed by climate change. They're pressing the government to make much more rapid cuts to carbon emissions ramp up assistance to countries in the region to help them deal with climate threats and set up a new climate intelligence branch to help plan for disasters.
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00:00This group is a collection of senior security leaders who have now all retired but who share
00:08common anxieties or really deep concerns about just how profound a threat climate change
00:13poses to Australia's national security and who believe that the government simply isn't
00:18doing nearly enough to plan adequately for some of the shocks which are already coming
00:23our way and which are likely to intensify over time.
00:26Now for example Chris Barry, the former Chief of the Defence Force, is part of this group.
00:31So these are people who have held fairly senior positions in the Australian hierarchy.
00:35What do they want?
00:36Well they really want an overhaul of the way that Australia plans for climate change disasters.
00:40They say the government and the bureaucracy hasn't yet really grappled with the scale
00:45of the challenges which are coming our way.
00:47For example they point out that if you look at the science there's a decent chance, depending
00:51on what happens with emissions, that large swathes of northern Australia could become
00:55effectively unlivable within a few decades because of the extremes of heat that people
01:00there will have to endure.
01:01They also say that we're likely to see mass displacement of people from particularly perhaps
01:06South East Asia and South Asia as rising sea levels and other shocks really force people
01:12out of their homes to look for safer harbours.
01:15Now their argument is that the government does need to do much more.
01:18Not only increase the amount of assistance it's giving to the region to help deal with
01:22climate disasters, also they say Australia needs to deal up a new intelligence unit within
01:27the Australian government, within the Office of National Intelligence, to try and better
01:31assess exactly what threats are coming and how they can be dealt with.
01:35As well as of course making more rapid cuts to emissions to ensure that Australia's doing
01:40its bit to avert a global calamity.
01:44Now let's take a listen to John Blackburn, he's a member of this group, a former second
01:48in command of the Royal Australian Air Force, speaking about some of the problems that we're
01:52already seeing, including in the US in the wake of Hurricane Helene and what the government
01:56should be doing in response.
01:59If you stand up and say to the Australian people, here's a set of risks, then rightly
02:03the Australian people say, well what are you going to do about them?
02:06So there is a reluctance there to say what the scale of the problem is.
02:11We know the government's worried about the economic impacts, we can see what's happening
02:15in the US.
02:16They're worried about the impacts on insurance.
02:17There will be people in areas in Australia in the future that won't get insurance and
02:21that's a significant problem, not just for them but for the mortgage market.
02:26What they won't talk about gets more interesting.
02:28There will be areas, science tells us in the future, where we won't be able to live.
02:33Yes, it might be decades away, but we've got to plan for that.
02:36And also, the scale of what this could look like.
02:40Talking about two or three degrees doesn't mean much to most Australians.
02:43Talking about what it was like for people experiencing Hurricane Helene, remembering
02:47what we experienced in the bushfires in 2019-20, well we've forgotten about that.
02:52We've got to tell people what it's going to feel like for them and their children to make
02:56them understand why we've got to invest in preparing.
02:59Stephen, the government has conducted a climate change risk assessment but it hasn't been
03:04publicly released.
03:05Why is that?
03:07Well, the government says it's an intelligence product and it's not typical for intelligence
03:12products to be released to the public.
03:13Now that's true, but the climate leaders that we've spoken to today say that there's simply
03:18no good reason why a declassified or an unclassified version of this couldn't be released.
03:23And they say not only do the intelligence agencies need to make their own assessments,
03:27but they also need to speak to people on the ground, people who've already been impacted
03:31by climate change, people whose homes may be rendered uninhabitable in the future, people
03:36who may struggle to get insurance as premiums skyrocket, in order to really grapple with
03:41the full scale of this problem.
03:42And they say at the moment, there simply isn't enough evidence that the government is fully
03:47seized of the scale of the challenge that's coming.