Food shortage, starvation, civil war: the climate math is simple

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at COP28 was blunt: "A growing population means the global demand for food is likely to increase by an estimated 50 per cent by the year 2050. An escalating climate crisis means that crop yields could drop by as much as 30 percent over that same period. So do the math."

The math is this: many people will starve and die, including in civil wars, as has happened in parts of the Middle East and across the Sahel.

Chronic food shortage and high prices will drive political instability and state breakdown. Australia's own food growing systems will be disrupted, and regional insecurity will drive people displacement.

In the face of this threat, the Albanese government's performance has been a huge disappointment and its recent Annual Climate Change Statement 2023 (ACCS23) shows it has not "done the math", and Australia will remain the world's fifth-largest fossil fuel producer.

The government insists on sticking to its minimalist pre-election climate promises - and overseeing expansion of the coal and gas industry - for fear of attack from a denialist opposition, but the laws of physics are not interested in political relativity. It needs an honest acceptance and public acknowledgment of climate risks as the basis for policy formulation, but ACCS23 ignores the risks.

There has never been a coherent and comprehensive statement of those risks by any Australian government, so the Parliament and the people have never had an adequate tool by which to judge and respond to climate risks, and we remain unprepared.

The ACCS2023 reaffirms our view that our leaders do not understand climate risk.

To its credit, this government did undertake to properly assess them, but dropped the ball by unwisely splitting the work between an external assessment carried out by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), and a departmental domestic National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA).

The ONI work was delivered a year ago but remains secret, a practice different from our allies. The NCRA will not be completed until the end of 2024 and appears to be off the tracks, ignoring the latest science and assessing risk based on participants' historic knowledge, which is a poor guide to the future as climate extremes become dangerously more extreme. It focuses on adapting to threats, rather than preventing them in the first place, so outcomes will address symptoms rather than causes.

There is no reason, national security or otherwise, why the climate science analysis of the ONI report should not be made available, and it is grossly irresponsible not to inform the public about the real risks this country is facing on a hotter, disrupted planet.

READ MORE:

ACCS23 mentions risk only in a narrow national security context, implying the need for increased military spending to boost conventional defence activity, which misses the point that climate is an existential risk unlike anything previously experienced, and will only be solved by unprecedented global cooperation, not militaristic fear-mongering.

ACCS23 contains a survey of many sensible measures, though some are complex, compromises designed to overcome the failure of Australia's political and business leaders to agree on a straightforward, escalating, comprehensive price on carbon, largely due to decades of fossil fuel industry pressure.

The ACCS23, by omission, confirms that industry capture of government continues unabated.

New fossil fuel projects are being approved, with massive subsidies intact, despite authorities such as the International Energy Agency insisting long ago that no new projects should be developed.

The additional emissions they generate will supposedly be sequestered by carbon capture and storage technologies which do not exist at scale and are unrealistic. The respected Energy Transition Commission dismisses such reliance as a "dangerous delusion".

The government's secrecy on climate risks, and the influence of the fossil fuel industry work hand in hand; a nexus that must be broken.

The math of fossil fuel expansion is simple: the world is headed toward a catastrophic three degrees of warming, threatening to bring the curtains down on contemporary civilisation as the UN Secretary-General has repeatedly warned.