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The serious threat of climate change to Australia’s housing market – and the regions most at risk
Climate change poses significant risks to housing markets, with new data showing the highest-risk regions are home to Australians who can least afford it.
After nine years of policy failure, in a remarkable shift, voters across the country spoke loud and clear and Canberra will have to take ambitious action on climate change. And Australia, one of the world’s biggest per-capita carbon emitters, could now be on the brink of a turnaround.
Seats that were once Liberal strongholds will now be held by teal independents, focusing firmly on climate change action among other issues.
As the driest inhabited continent on the planet and home to delicate eco-systems, like the Great Barrier Reef, Australia is already suffering the impacts of worsening climate events like bushfires, drought, sea level rises, and flood disasters. It’s no surprise that many electorates took this to the ballots and, in a remarkable shift, delivered the message that the time for ambitious action on climate change is now.
Analysis by leading climate risk analysts, Climate Valuation, found that as many as one-in-25 homes across Australia could be uninsurable by 2030.
Hot on the heels of that alarming report was a study led by the World Meteorological Organisation, which found the threat of global warming has accelerated. There is now a 50% chance the world will cross the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold over the next five years.
It is "almost certain" the years between 2022 and 2026 will be the hottest on record, according to the report.
A 1.5 degrees Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels has been identified by experts as having devastating consequences. It is the cap set by the 2015 Paris Agreement in a bid to avoid increasingly harmful impacts of climate change.
When we view risk that has an instantaneous lapse between cause and effect, we act quickly – the last two years of COVID-19 have been a prime example of this. The unfortunate reality is that when it comes to climate change, the lag between cause and effect buries the urgency and incentive to fix.
Maintained through history by high commodity prices, Canberra has an unenviable task in climate adaptation. Australia’s new government must put in place appropriate risk mitigation strategies and harness the opportunity for change. At present, Labor’s climate agenda is only moderately more ambitious than the Coalition's was. Their plan to reduce emissions by 40% this decade would still leave Australia with emissions per capita that outpace Russia and most EU member states.
Climate change is already having a quantifiable socioeconomic impact and there are few communities on the planet that will be left untouched. Australia is no exception.
Already, Earth is estimated to have warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, leading to increased incidences of wildfires and floods, through to deadly heatwaves. However, the distributions of temperature are skewed and a seemingly small shift (+1.1 degrees Celsius) masks the reality of this change, with the extremes increasing in frequency and magnitude over past decades.
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