While southern Europe sweltered in July and August 2023, Australia also recorded its hottest winter months on record, with the national average temperature 1.53°C (2.7°F) above average. The country’s unseasonably warm winter happened in the year when the World Meteorological Organization declared July 2023 to be the Earth's hottest month on record. Australia’s land mass has warmed by an average of 1.4°C (2.5°F) since 1910, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), compared with a global average of 1.1°C (1.98°F).
Torrential rainfall in February 2022 brought catastrophic flooding to Brisbane and other parts of south-east Queensland. After the city received around 80% of its average annual rainfall in 72 hours, the Brisbane River flooded and inundated the city and outlying suburbs. In total, 13 people died. Pictured here is the suburb of Goodna on the far south-western outskirts of Brisbane, where residents were caught out by rapidly rising flood waters. The risk of extreme flooding is predicted to increase with climate change.
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The 2022 deluge was the largest in the country’s history and its most expensive natural disaster with an insurance bill of more than £2.8 billion ($AU 5.65bn), according to the Insurance Council of Australia. The torrents also affected communities in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales when rivers broke their banks. The low-lying city of Lismore was particularly hard hit as it was completely engulfed by water. The central business district was destroyed, and thousands of residents saw their homes and possessions ruined. The beleaguered city suffered yet more flooding in March of the same year.
In February and March 2022, Queenscliff in Manly and many more Sydney beaches were closed due to pollution from heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding, with people advised not to swim in the affected waters. Some of the city's most popular and picturesque stretches were affected during their busy summer season. As storms become more powerful and frequent in the region, polluted waters are likely to become a recurrent problem.
Exceptionally heavy rains saw parts of Australia’s largest city flood in July 2022, with evacuation orders issued and a natural disaster declared. Windsor, pictured, was one of the suburbs most severely affected after the Hawkesbury River burst its banks. The intense weather was caused by weather phenomenon La Nina and exacerbated by climate change, which is leading to increasingly damaging storms and torrential rainfall. In 2022, Greater Sydney recorded around twice its annual average rainfall, with many areas recording their wettest year ever on record.
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This giant kelp forest is one of Australia’s most at-risk marine environments. Marine heatwaves linked to greenhouse gas emissions have seen these fragile forests, which once thrived in the cooler waters of southeast Australia, nearly disappear. A marine heatwave in 2017/2018 decimated kelp on Tasmania’s east coast. Warmer waters lead to lower levels of nutrients, causing new creatures such as long-spined sea urchins to shift south, who overgraze on the kelp. While a Giant Kelp Restoration Project is currently underway in Tasmania, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has forecast that an area of the Tasman Sea could rise to at least 2.5°C (4.5°F) above average temperatures between September 2023 and February 2024.
As the planet warms up, mountain areas around the world are being severely affected. Australia’s alpine regions are experiencing a shorter snow season, according to the BOM. As recorded by Snowy Hydro at Spencers Creek in the Snowy Mountains, peak snow depths decreased by 0.14inches (0.35cm) a year between 1954 and 2022. As average winter temperatures increase, it’s more likely to rain than snow in the Australian Alps, with the snow cover melting more quickly. As well as creating disappointing conditions for ski resorts, such as Thredo, this has a critical effect on alpine biodiversity. The now critically endangered mountain pygmy possum is one species on the edge, as it depends on snow cover and cooler temperatures to survive.
As global warming causes sea levels to rise and brings more frequent and violent storms, coastal erosion is an ever-present problem facing many Australian communities. Narrabeen and Collaroy beaches in Sydney’s Northern Beaches have suffered major erosion in recent years and a 23 foot-deep (7m) seawall is being constructed to help defend the community from the increasing threat of the ocean. The defence construction began after a ferocious storm surge in June 2016, which caused around 164 feet (50m) of the beaches between Narrabeen and Collaroy to disappear.
One of Australia’s most popular coastal towns suffered shocking coastal erosion during king tides and strong storms in December 2020. As well as sweeping away huge volumes of sand on Byron Bay’s Main Beach and Clarkes Beach, the wild weather caused damage to dunes and trees to collapse. While coastal erosion and shoreline recession are a natural process, it is accelerating as climate change brings more damaging cyclones and heavy rainfall. The destruction of dunal systems is worrying as they provide a natural defence to the ocean. The local council has invested in beach scraping, fencing and revegetation to help speed up the dunes' recovery.
Australia’s Torres Strait islanders are at the coalface of the country’s climate crisis. This isolated, low-lying archipelago is particularly exposed to extreme weather, with storms and flooding eating into its land and regularly submerging homes and sacred sites. Mangroves, which create a protective barrier against coastal erosion and storm surges, have also been damaged. A 3,353 foot-long (1,022m) seawall has recently been constructed at Boigu Island, Australia's most northerly inhabited island, as part of defences to protect the Torres Strait Islands. The 200-plus islands are in a part of the Pacific where sea levels have risen between two to three inches (6-7cm) in the last 10 years – double the global average.
Warming seas, hotter beaches and fiercer storms are having a stark impact on Australia’s already endangered turtle species. As nesting sites get hotter, more hatchlings are born female, while more storms will damage nests and destroy the seagrass meadows that turtles feed on. Floodwaters from Queensland’s 2022 floods led to a major decline in the meadows, as did Cyclone Yasi in 2011, when much of far north Queensland’s seagrass meadows disappeared. Seagrass meadows also help alleviate climate change through carbon storage. A major restoration project led by James Cook University’s Seagrass Ecology Lab is underway at Mourilyan Harbour south of Cairns.
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In January 2022, many Australian regions experienced an extreme heatwave. Onslow, a remote coastal town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, reached a staggering 50.7°C (123.26°F) on January 13 – the hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia. State capital Perth recorded temperatures of above 40°C (104°F) nine times during the season, with coastal areas from Geraldton right down to Cape Naturaliste in the southwest region recording their hottest summer on record, according to the BOM.
Tasmania is known for having a far cooler and wetter climate than other states in Australia, but in 2022 the island state experienced its driest summer in 40 years, when total rainfall was a dramatic 43% below the long-term average. More than 20% of Tasmania is a designated World Heritage wilderness area – a vast 1.5 million hectare stretch that is one of the three largest cool-temperate wilderness areas remaining in the Southern Hemisphere. These fragile rainforests and alpine ecosystems are highly vulnerable in the face of hotter and drier weather, which increases the risk of bushfires. Many endemic Tasmanian species like the Huon pine are highly sensitive to drought conditions.
A sustained drought across the Murray Darling Basin was declared to be the worst on record by the BOM in 2019 after record-low rainfall for extended periods. Pictured here are dead mussels in the bone-dry bed of the Namoi River, one of the Murray-Darling Basin's major sub-catchments. Australia is prone to drought, with many severe instances marking its history, but higher temperatures due to climate change are increasing their intensity.
The severe drought and exceptionally low river flows of 2019 led to the death of one millom fish in Menindee – a town on the banks of the Murray River – due to low dissolved oxygen levels. Another mass suffocation of fish occurred in the Menindee Lakes in March 2023, with millions of dead fish washing up. It is thought to have been caused after flooding led to another severe decline in water quality, although a review is underway. Among the dead fish was the native species bony bream, along with Murray cod and golden perch. With droughts and floods expected to increase in frequency due to climate change, mass fish deaths are expected to rise in frequency.
Scorched red earth is emblematic of Australia's Red Centre in the Northern Territory, but many verdant farmlands across the country were reduced to terracotta-hued dust in the severe drought from 2017 to 2020. This image was taken on a drought-stricken farm in northern New South Wales in 2020. Record low rain and higher than average temperatures saw large swathes of New South Wales experience a prolonged drought, which had an especially devastating impact on farming communities. The drought was officially declared over in 2022.
The world’s largest coral reef system is highly vulnerable to the escalating climate crisis. Rising ocean temperatures are a major cause for concern as they trigger mass bleaching of the critical ecosystem. While bleaching, a stress reaction by the coral to overheating, doesn’t kill them, it does raise the risks of starvation and disease. Marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe. The sixth mass bleaching event took place in Queensland in 2022 – especially worrying as it took place during a cooler, wetter La Nina year, which scientists had hoped would be a time for the affected corals to recover. Cyclones, flooding and storms are other threats to the reef’s complex ecosystems.
The rural Victorian town of Mildura on the Murray River was inundated with water in December 2022 in what was its worst flood for 70 years. Many other riverside communities in the state were affected, with homes and livelihoods destroyed. The region's orchards, citrus groves and vineyards were catastrophically affected by the natural disaster. After the deluge, grape farmers in the region saw their harvest blighted by downy mildew disease, a devastating infection that thrives in wet conditions.
It's already a tough environment to live in, and now Australia’s Outback communities are facing an even more hazardous future as temperatures are projected to continue to rise around the country. Some of the area's notoriously hardy flora species are already suffering from the effects of rising temperatures. Research undertaken at Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park found that more than half the park’s spinifex grasses had died during the country’s 2018-2021 drought. Other small shrubs including desert grevilleas, desert myrtle and several wattle species were also badly affected.
Daintree in far-north Queensland is the world’s oldest living rainforest and the largest in Australia. This wet tropics landscape supports a mind-blowing amount of biodiversity including 30% of the country’s frog, reptile and marsupial species, 90% of its bat and butterfly species, and 18% of all bird species. A long-term study published in Nature in May 2022 found the death rates of tropical trees in the old-growth tropical forests of northern Australia have doubled in the last 35 years – a phenomenon researchers believe is most likely caused by global warming. Increased heat draws more moisture from the trees, leading to water stress and a higher risk of death.
Bushfires are a natural part of life in Australia’s landscapes, commonly occurring during Australia’s summer and autumn months. However, increasingly intense heatwaves and prolonged droughts have led to even more ferocious infernos and increased the length of the fire season. The spring and summer of 2019/2020 saw uncontrollable blazes rage across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Kangaroo Island, a haven for native species, was one of the areas worst hit, with 211,474 hectares of land – almost half of the island – burnt after lightning strikes ignited fires during a scorching summer.
Known as the "Black Summer", 2019/20 was one of the worst bushfire seasons in the country's history as firefighters battled against unprecedented blazes from November to February. More than 12.6 million hectares burned across Australia's south, east and west and over 3,000 homes were lost. The disaster also caused 34 direct deaths and hundreds more indirectly, due to the longer-term consequences of the fires. WWF Australia’s 2019-2020 Bushfires: The Wildlife Toll report estimated that nearly three billion animals died or were displaced by the fires.
Western Australia’s mid-west coastal town of Kalbarri was struck by high winds and pummelling rain as ex-tropical cyclone Seroja swept in from Indonesia in April 2021. It was an extremely unusual occurrence as these weather systems don’t normally strike so far south in the state. According to ABC reports, oceanographers could not say for sure that climate change played a part, but marine heatwave conditions in Western Australia did allow the storm to maintain its intensity. Sea surface temperatures were up to 2-3°C (3.6-5.4°F) higher than normal that year, influenced by La Nina weather conditions.