There’s a chilling line in Australia’s new climate adaptation plan:

It is prudent to plan for global warming levels of 2°C to 3°C by the end of this century, with temperatures in Australia likely to track higher than the global average.

Australia is already adapting to the existing 1.3°C of climate change, but as the new National Climate Risk Assessment shows, we will need to adapt to much more change. This includes the warming locked in due to the lag time between emissions and warming, as well as the warming yet to come from future emissions. Climate adaptation is many things, from planting mangroves to slow coastal erosion to rebuilding flood-damaged bridges to tolerate more extreme conditions.

For well over a decade, we and other climate adaptation scientists have called on successive governments to create a national plan to guide Australia’s response. It’s finally here. Is it up to the task?

The plan does many things right, such as describing which tier of government is responsible and laying out the government’s thinking about future programs. But there are gaps. Proposed future actions are not clear nor proportionate to the challenge, while monitoring and tracking won’t start for several years. Until we have effective monitoring, we won’t know which actions work best – and which don’t.

We should think of this plan as........

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