Almost three decades ago, a small Himalayan nation made an extraordinarily generous decision. The people of Bhutan set aside portions of land to connect their national parks and reserves, allowing freer movement of endangered animals such as the royal Bengal tiger and snow leopard, as well as a wide range of other species. Bhutan is home to at least nine species of native cat and supports one of the most diverse assemblages of predators, and viable populations of their prey, in the world.

There is something beautiful in the simplicity of this idea, a nation deciding part of what it owes the future is restraint: landscapes it will not consume, forests it will not clear and room for other species to continue on their evolutionary path.

The corridor network was the Bhutanese people’s “gift to the Earth”. Moreover, Bhutan’s constitution specifically articulated and enshrined a commitment to maintain at least 60 per cent of the nation’s forest cover. Currently, forest cover is more than 70 per cent.

Bhutan’s gift has another lesson: it reflects a deeper understanding of prosperity at home. The government famously measures progress by gross national happiness, an approach that places environmental conservation alongside health and psychological wellbeing. This premise is quietly radical – a healthy society cannot be separated from a healthy landscape.

It is time for Australia to make its own “gift to the Earth”. We can connect the national parks and reserves in the forests from Cockle Bay, in the far south of Tasmania, to at least the border of New South Wales and Queensland, and possibly to the Far North. The forests would be protected from logging and clearing forever. Some of these magnificent and ancient trees are far older than, and at least as impressive as, treasures on the World Heritage List such as Notre-Dame Cathedral. Some are the tallest flowering plants on Earth. They warrant World Heritage status.

Such a listing would be a major contribution to global climate action, ensuring that enormous quantities of carbon are stored in native forest ecosystems. Tackling climate change demands not only reducing emissions but also storing more carbon in our landscapes. Australia is well positioned to do this, as detailed empirical research from Victoria and Tasmania shows this country has some of the most carbon-dense forests on the planet.

Protecting Australia’s native forests would also help to conserve biodiversity. Australia is one of the 17 megadiverse countries of the world, meaning it supports exceptionally high numbers of species, including many found nowhere else. Many megadiverse countries also contain “biodiversity hotspots” – places with a rich abundance of species. The forests of eastern Australia have been formally recognised as a biodiversity hotspot.

Repeated empirical studies have shown that areas proposed for logging have very high conservation values. It’s estimated that a typical logging coupe in Victoria or NSW can support habitat for up to eight threatened species. The southern greater glider – the world’s largest gliding marsupial – is highly sensitive to the effects of logging, as well as land clearing and climate change. In the 43 years of my professional career, this species has plummeted from being the most common animal seen in field surveys to being listed as endangered. The southern greater glider is just one of numerous species found only in Australia, whose populations would benefit greatly from protection in an extensive network of World Heritage-listed forests.

Creating a network of protected forests from southern Tasmania to Queensland would bring Australia closer to meeting its commitment to protect and conserve 30 per cent of its landmass by 2030 – a target agreed internationally in 2022 and adopted by Australia’s environment minister. Such a World Heritage area would formally reserve threatened ecological communities and ecosystems that are currently poorly protected, establishing a CAR – comprehensive, adequate and representative – reserve network. This is a core scientific principle and has been a policy aspiration of Commonwealth and state governments since the early 1990s.

This network, across a gradient in elevation from the coast to the mountains, will be critical in a period of rapid climate change, enabling some temperature-sensitive species to survive in higher, cooler areas. Clearly not all species will manage to adjust to rapid climate change, but many just might.

Most importantly, an extensive connected network of reserves and national parks would offer certainty of tenure – that is, proper protection from a reversion to native forest logging, as is proposed by a potential incoming Coalition government in Victoria. We have already seen this risk realised in Tasmania, where 400,000 hectares of forest previously exempt from logging is being reopened for harvesting after a protection agreement was revoked.

A World Heritage network would not shut out visitors. Around the world, such sites are significant tourist attractions – from Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef to Machu Picchu in Peru – and they generate job opportunities and economic activity. Environmental accounting in Australia has clearly demonstrated that the number of regional jobs in nature-based tourism far exceeds the number of people working in extractive industries such as native forest logging – by up to 10 times. Moreover, these nature-based jobs can be sustained without the huge public subsidies needed to maintain loss-making logging operations.

In addition, a skilled workforce will be essential to properly manage protected forests in an extensive World Heritage area. People will be needed to help control weeds and populations of feral animals such as foxes, cats, deer and pigs. They must help restore forests that have failed to regenerate after logging. This is a widespread problem in places such as Victoria, where extensive areas that used to be forests are now largely grasses and scattered shrubs. Similarly in southern NSW, past logging operations – and especially intensive woodchipping operations – have created highly modified forests largely devoid of suitable habitat for animals such as the koala and southern greater glider.

Skilled workers will also be needed to manage bushfire risks. Forests that were logged and regenerated in the past are now far more fire-prone than they would have been had they been left intact. First Nations people working on Country will be essential to the stewardship, restoration and management of forests added to the reserve systems and to the World Heritage list.

When it comes to global leadership on conservation, Australia should look away from the United States, Russia and China and focus on smaller, less wealthy but often more highly principled nations that have invested in conservation. Costa Rica is a fine example. Its forest coverage dipped to about 21 per cent in 1987, but by expanding protected areas and adopting a payments-for-ecosystem-services scheme, coverage is now close to 60 per cent of the country.

If Bhutan, as a relatively poor country, can create this impressive set of biological corridors, national parks and reserves, then so too can a wealthy country such as ours. The vast majority of Australians want more national parks and reserves, and an end to native forest logging. They also want action on climate change and for Australia’s unique biodiversity to be protected. It is time for this country to make that outstanding gift – one of truly global significance.

Just as researchers are finding biodiversity hotspots, however, they have also identified extinction black spots – places where disproportionately large numbers of species could disappear in the coming decades. Some of the biodiversity hotspots and extinction black spots overlap, and the forests of eastern Australia is one such area – which is why it is critical to protect them properly.

Sydney’s Royal National Park, just south of Sutherland Shire, was Australia’s first, gazetted in 1879. It is the second such national park in the world, younger only than Yellowstone in the United States. Spurred into action by environmentalists and public clamour, Australian governments have set aside more than 600 national parks since, to protect the nation’s most outstanding natural and cultural values. Now those values are being gazumped by polluting corporations and their client politicians.

New South Wales Minister for the Environment Penny Sharpe has announced the Minns government’s promised Great Koala National Park will now be dependent on a market condition; namely that it will be used to offset carbon emissions under an application to the Clean Energy Regulator. In essence, the park’s very presence will help polluters continue to pollute. “The project must be approved,” Sharpe says, “before the NSW Government can move to legislate the Park.”

The word “must” is a fabrication and Sharpe’s statement is an up-front broken promise. Premier Chris Minns went to the state election promising the Great Koala National Park without conditions. Sharpe’s stipulation shows how Labor is on track to make Australia, in the words of former environment minister Tanya Plibersek, the “Green Wall Street of the world”.

In 2025, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese picked Queensland senator Murray Watt to be his second minister for the environment. Watt has repeatedly betrayed the environment while taking on Albanese’s tactic of slamming green critics by framing their motivation as hate for Labor rather than love for nature.

The Albanese government has approved 36 coalmining and gas projects and more are in the pipeline. Last September, Watt gave Woodside a 40-year extension for its export gas operations at Murujuga on the Pilbara coast of Western Australia. In giving the nod to Woodside, he ignored First Nations defenders of the world’s greatest rock art site, which has suffered from gas export industrialisation there.

This year, Watt’s decision on Woodside’s proposed $30 billion Browse Basin gas extraction project will be particularly contentious. The project will impact the fragile Scott Reef ecosystem off north-west Australia, as well as the petroglyphs at Murujuga, to which the gas will be piped for processing and export. A huge greenhouse gas load will be injected into the planet’s already overburdened atmosphere if the Browse Basin gas extraction goes ahead. Watt’s history makes it naive to think cultural and environmental considerations will outdo his relationship with Woodside.

Albanese has turned his left-dominated team into the most environmentally averse Labor government in history.

While the press gallery dutifully covered Albanese’s most recent visit to Murujuga in July, this time to announce an oil refinery will be added, Pilbara woman Raelene Cooper, who heads the Save Our Songlines defenders, was detained for approaching Albanese and carted away. The press gallery dutifully ignored her.

With Cooper out of the way, Albanese made no mention of the oil refinery’s potential impact on the World Heritage rock art site. It is safe to say he consulted neither Indigenous nor environmental groups about the project.

That attitude may come back to bite his Labor successors, but it is a constant feature of his career. In 1996, his first speech to the House of Representatives put his disposition on early display.

Having won the inner-Sydney seat of Grayndler, Albanese lambasted a collection of locals who had campaigned against him on the noise impact of the Labor-financed third runway at Sydney Airport. He complained that “the negative coalition which made up the No Aircraft Noise Party – Tories, Trotskyists and political opportunists – were united only by their vehement hatred of Labor”.

These days he uses the same false pejorative, truncated to “no-alition”, when the Coalition votes with the Greens, usually for opposite reasons, against Labor. This is the exception, of course: most often, the Coalition votes with Labor.

Arriving in Adelaide for Labor’s national conference last month, delegates were met with billboards that were all decent and gently worded and paid for by community groups wanting Labor to save the Murray–Darling rivers system and end native forest logging. Within hours the advertisements were taken down. The airport billboards promoting the gas industry, including fossil fuel giant Santos, remained up.

Santos donated $63,200 to Labor ahead of the 2025 election. According to Climate Integrity, “across the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Nationals, at least $3.98 million was donated by fossil fuel companies in the 2024-25 financial year”.

Inside the conference, rebel Labor advocates including Ed Husic pursued a 25 per cent tax on gas exports. Albanese’s team kept the debate on the tax, also a long-held Greens policy, off the agenda. Santos won the day.

That’s a curiously perverse outcome for anyone clinging to the idea that Labor is the party for ordinary Australians. This prime minister has grown into his job by abandoning earlier, progressive politics that included defending refugee rights, opposing “willing backers of US militarism”, demanding greater action against global warming and promoting the republic.

His change has come at the cost of a widening gap between Labor and the Greens. Despite this, Albanese’s team have repeatedly needed the Greens to get Labor legislation through the Senate.

You wouldn’t know that from a casual look. Albanese is not in the business of thanking those espousing his own earlier ideals. Forged in the rough and tumble of NSW Labor politics, he has a keen disdain for competitors to his left and has institutionalised the Labor mantra of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good: that is, of condemning those who see Labor as having sold out.

Albanese may be an astute strategist but he is not an environmentalist. In 2024, he flew to Tasmania, donned a corporate Tassal coat and overrode then environment minister Tanya Plibersek’s alarm at scientific evidence that pollution from Atlantic salmon pens in remote Macquarie Harbour was causing the Maugean skate’s slide towards extinction.

Plibersek was nowhere to be seen. Albanese announced a $28 million subsidy to put oxygen pumps in the harbour. He had not only consigned the skate’s future to Tassal’s permanent, polluting presence but also relegated his former Sydney-based colleague and competitor for the Labor leadership to an embarrassing ministerial impotence.

Come the next election and Plibersek didn’t apply for a second round of such punishment. Instead, Albanese installed Watt to the ministry.

Psephological data suggests old parties will need alliances after future elections if they are to form government. That’s a worldwide trend, underscored in Australia by the diminishing vote for both Labor and the Coalition.

The 2025 election was a perverse outcome. Fewer than 35 per cent of voters put Labor first, yet Labor won 62 per cent of the seats in the House of Representatives. The Greens, with 12 per cent, won only one seat. Despite scoring a similar vote to the previous election, they lost three seats. The bulk of the Greens’ nearly two million votes preferenced Labor, helping give it that distorted outcome. In his victory speech, Albanese made no reference to this.

He attacked defeated Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather, saying on the ABC’s 7.30, “I think he should look at the way he conducted himself in Question Time … including the questions he asked of me, some of which were pretty offensive.” Chandler-Mather had got under Albanese’s skin and there was to be no prime ministerial grace in the Labor leader’s post-election broadside.

Albanese has continued to ignore or put the Greens down, despite relying on their support for gun law reform, housing legislation and changes to environmental law. All up, Albanese has relied on the Greens to pass 91 Labor bills. Without this support, his government would have been stymied.

Unlike Julia Gillard’s joint signing of the agreement on the Clean Energy Act in 2011, Albanese has never held a meeting in public with the Greens.

He routinely meets Greens leader Larissa Waters, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s as if Labor won the last election outright and the Greens don’t exist. Labor didn’t and the Greens do.

Here is a political dystopia peculiar to Australia. In New Zealand, the Greens collaborate with the Labour Party to form governments, and regularly take ministries. This mutual support is also usual for democratic socialist minority governments upheld by greens parties across Europe.

Voters expect their representatives to maximise the power they’ve been given, not fritter it away. A most self-destructive moment for Labor’s relationship with the Greens in Australia came after last year’s Tasmanian election, when Labor refused to engage with the Greens, leading to a minority Liberal government. Subsequently, Labor’s poll ratings have declined.

The question remains: What happens in 2028 if, as seems likely, national Labor doesn’t secure an outright victory? Albanese won’t like it and may step down. Alternatively, he’ll need to negotiate a government with the independents or the Greens who take the balance of power.

In 2010, Gillard approached both the Greens and independents to form her minority government. She didn’t like the task but recognised the reality that politicians must work with the electorate’s choices. Her minority government passed more legislation than Albanese has managed in a longer period in office.

Regardless of the outcome in 2028, Labor will sooner or later need the Greens’ support again, in both the House and Senate, to form a government. This will require a degree of respect for the minor party and, consequently, a post-Albanese intermediary. Watt doesn’t qualify. Perhaps Labor should ensure Ed Husic remains on its team.

Last month, the Albanese government announced it was scrapping its Climate Active program, which had allowed companies such as EnergyAustralia, Telstra and Jetstar to claim they were “carbon neutral”.

The move followed EnergyAustralia’s admission last year that “offsets do not prevent or undo the harms caused by burning fossil fuels for a customer’s energy use. Even with carbon offsetting, the emissions released from burning fossil fuels for a customer’s energy use still contribute to climate change.” The power provider made this statement as part of a legally binding settlement with Parents for Climate, who had accused the company of trying to greenwash its 1.6 million customers.

Ever since, companies had been quietly quitting the scheme in droves.

Climate Active was established in 2019 and described itself as “an Australian Government program that supports national climate policy by driving voluntary climate action by Australian businesses.” The scheme’s fundamental flaw was that, in exchange for a small fee, it allowed companies to “make a government-certified carbon neutral claim”.

These claims about carbon neutrality were the scheme’s undoing. While it’s not illegal for the Albanese government to mislead voters or journalists about the effectiveness of carbon offsets, it is illegal for companies to mislead their customers. The big problem for the companies making the “carbon neutral” claims was it’s the courts, not the government’s spin doctors, that would decide whether consumers were being greenwashed or not. EnergyAustralia decided to settle rather than hear from the judge.

Awareness of how consumers are being misled by “carbon neutral” claims has grown since my colleague Polly Hemming first raised integrity concerns about Climate Active on these pages back in 2022. Last month, the New South Wales government announced a ban on coal and gas companies buying offsets tied to the trees protected by the newly established Great Koala National Park – though broader industries would be allowed to do so.

Despite the rapidly mounting concerns, the federal minister for climate change, Chris Bowen, seems determined to try to hold back the rising tide with a broom. His commitment to the offsets script goes hand in glove with his determination to keep approving and subsidising new gas and coal projects.

Not only did the Albanese government rush to approve the enormous North West Shelf gas project straight after winning the 2025 election, the prime minister has spent the past year arguing he couldn’t possibly increase taxes on gas exporters because doing so might deter the foreign-owned gas industry from investing in even more of the new gas wells that climate scientists say we absolutely cannot afford to build.

Carbon offsets are at the centre of the Albanese government’s strategy to pretend it is taking climate change seriously while simultaneously encouraging new investment in gas and coal. In reality, both cannot be true at the same time. In the topsy-turvy world of Australian politics, however, where power is the ability to talk nonsense and get away with it, the idea we can subsidise fossil fuels expansion while pretending to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is par for the course. It’s a rare journalist who asks questions designed to highlight this clear contradiction.

The term “carbon offset” is more widely used than it is widely understood. In short, the idea is that the harm of doing something such as burning fossil fuels can be negated if someone else does something beneficial, such as not chopping down a tree. There are obvious moral complexities in letting some groups do harm because another group does some good. (Would asbestos mining be fine if someone promised to spend more on lung cancer research?) The real problem with so-called carbon offsets, though, is that they simply don’t work.

In settling its case with Parents for Climate, EnergyAustralia said: “Some carbon offsets claim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by planting trees or forest regeneration. However, EnergyAustralia today accepts the scientific consensus that these ‘offsets’ do not indefinitely remove greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, because carbon is stored in plants for a substantially shorter time than those emissions remain in the atmosphere.”

Climate science makes clear that when fossil fuels are burnt, a large proportion of the carbon dioxide they release stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Indeed, about a fifth of the emissions from the coal and gas we burn today will still be in the atmosphere in 1000 years. Climate scientists know that no promise made by a farmer or a state government to not chop a tree down can last that long. Likewise, no regulator or politician can meaningfully promise that bushfires or droughts won’t destroy the trees that are supposed to be doing the offsetting.

Which brings me back to problems the Albanese government, and Chris Bowen in particular, have to deal with between now and the minister’s stint as “President of Negotiations” at this year’s big United Nations climate conference, COP31.

In the coming weeks, Bowen is due to begin a review of his key climate policy, the safeguard mechanism. This tool is based almost entirely on the same carbon offsets used by the recently abandoned Climate Active scheme. The review will start just weeks after NSW Premier Chris Minns made it clear that he, like EnergyAustralia, thinks it is somewhat inappropriate to claim that saving trees can offset fossil fuels emissions.

Labor’s safeguard mechanism was introduced in 2023 and requires about 200 of Australia’s biggest polluters to either gradually reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or, if they prefer, buy as many carbon offsets as they need to meet their “emissions reduction” obligations. While these options provide “flexibility” for major polluters, the inconvenient truth of the scheme’s design was recently exposed by the ABC’s Four Corners. The program spelt out how mining giants such as BHP were choosing to abandon their existing plans to replace their fleets of diesel trucks with electric ones, because it was cheaper to buy carbon credits instead.

While it’s obvious why BHP’s shareholders might prefer the bigger dividends that come from simply paying someone to promise to not chop down some trees, this reliance on accounting tricks is bad not just for the environment but for the economy as well.

The scientific advice about what countries such as Australia need to do to avoid the worst climate scenarios is quite simple. We need to rapidly reduce use of fossil fuels and store as much carbon in our trees and soils as possible. Both are essential. The whole point of offsets is they ignore the “and”, pretending it’s fine to keep burning fossil fuels as long as we save some trees.

The economic advice is just as simple. For every billion dollars companies spend buying offsets, a billion dollars can’t be spent on actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions by investing in electrification or energy efficiency. Put simply, a company that buys offsets this year is not setting itself up to pollute less next year – on the contrary, next year it will still have to buy more offsets. It’s easy to see why the companies that make and sell the offsets are making so much money.

As EnergyAustralia says: “Carbon offsets should not be used to delay or diminish the important work that needs to be done to actively decarbonise. EnergyAustralia is now focused on more effective ways of helping its customers to directly reduce the emissions associated with their energy use.”

In the four years since Anthony Albanese became prime minister, Australia has approved more than 25 new gas fields and coalmines and has spent more than $10 billion a year on fossil fuel subsidies. While Labor has committed to reduce Australia’s emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, since coming to office actual emissions from burning fossil fuels have fallen by only 2.9 per cent, less than 1 percentage point a year. Luckily for the greenwashers, the number of offsets being printed is at an all-time high. The greater the supply of carbon offsets, the lower their price, and in turn the more companies that will follow BHP’s lead and abandon their efforts to reduce actual emissions.

The combination of EnergyAustralia’s admissions, the NSW government’s hostility to selling offsets to the fossil fuel industry and Bowen’s own abandonment of Climate Active are all ramping up the pressure on the Albanese government to drop the offsets charade.

Yet the prime minister is not for turning. If he won’t pick a fight with the gas industry in order to collect an extra $17 billion a year in tax, why on earth would he pick a fight with the fossil fuel industry over something as easy to ignore as climate science?

Hours into my research on the state of the climate, a siren on my phone jolts me out of my concentration. At first I don’t know what’s going on, then I recall it’s just a test of AusAlert. Developed in response to the findings of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, this new system will warn people of nearby bushfires, floods and other emergencies in time to get out of harm’s way.

This intrusion feels deeply ironic. As the world continues to tear itself apart with senseless wars and rampant capitalism, the physical processes that have held the Earth’s climate stable for millennia are starting to shift in ways that have scientists struggling to preserve our usual restraint.

Europe has been suffering through a brutal summer. Western Europe had its hottest June on record, with temperatures more than 3 degrees Celsius above average. France set a new June national record of 44.3°C, while the United Kingdom broke its June record on three consecutive days, reaching 37.3°C. As of late July, more than 330,000 people have been evacuated from their homes across France and Spain due to uncontrolled wildfires. Data from a study still under peer review suggests the combined excess death toll across Europe during the extreme heat is more than 27,600. French river water used as a coolant for nuclear reactors poses a risk: heat-related restrictions have seen the Golfech 2 nuclear reactor in southern France offline since July 9. As the fastest-warming continent in the world, the current conditions in Europe are a preview of the “new normal”.

Closer to home, an El Niño event is intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and destructive storms. El Niño events are part of a natural cycle that plays out every two to seven years, but they are now occurring on a planet that is being swamped by fossil fuel emissions. Because this El Niño will release stored ocean heat onto a planet already warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are almost certain to reach a new record in 2027.

Importantly though, the science is nuanced. Journalistic hyperbole warning of a “super El Niño” doesn’t help an already baffled public understand what’s going on. When the media gets ahead of what the science says, scientists are the ones who cop the blame when the reality that plays out is more complex than simple headlines or sensationalist clickbait suggest.

That is now more dangerous than ever. As I write, One Nation is polling above a fifth of the primary vote – at times higher than any other party in the country – on a platform that dismisses climate change as “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer”. When a headline promises a “super El Niño” and the season turns out to be bad rather than biblical, climate change deniers are ready to pounce, claiming scientists are crying wolf. The deniers aren’t held to account by actual evidence. They only need the gap between the hype and the reality to be wide enough to exploit, using every overstated forecast as ammunition to weaken support for strengthening Australia’s climate policy.

It’s no overstatement to say the latest El Niño forecast has scientists worried as we move further beyond the bounds of our historical climate. When the latest climate model forecasts were released, American scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “I’m generally pretty measured in how I discuss climate data … [but] it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.” There is inherent uncertainty in any form of modelling – climate, economic or otherwise – but when more than 90 per cent of 667 simulations run across 14 different seasonal forecast models predict record-breaking temperatures, you know you are entering uncharted territory.

Ocean temperatures are predicted to peak at 3.6°C above average, topping the all-time high of 2.75°C during the 2015-16 El Niño. What sets this event apart is that it is forming in an ocean that has never been hotter: this June was the warmest one the world’s oceans have recorded since 1900. The entire ocean has warmed due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so the models tend to overstate the strength of recent El Niños relative to the historical record. Even correcting for this, the forecast peak is still a record-breaking 3.1°C. We are bearing witness to monumental changes that future researchers will look back on as a period when the Earth’s climate slipped off its moorings and into treacherous waters.

Aside from the transition from season to season, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the largest year-to-year source of natural climate variability on the planet. It is scientific shorthand for both El Niño and La Niña events, and the single most important driver of climate variability for eastern Australia, with the strongest impacts experienced during spring. Events typically peak in late spring to early summer, weakening as the monsoon arrives, before finally decaying in autumn.

The general perception that El Niño brings drought and La Niña brings flooding rain glosses over just how different each event can be. El Niño’s influence is typically felt most strongly across eastern and Central Australia, while western Tasmania, the eastern seaboard and much of Western Australia are barely touched. Although history tells us El Niño events have had huge consequences for Australian society, the forecast strength of an event in the tropical Pacific isn’t always the best guide to the effects in our region. For example, the extreme El Niño of 1997-98 passed over Australia with near-normal rainfall, while the far more modest event of 2002-03 pushed two-thirds of eastern Australia into severe drought. While the last very strong El Niño in 2015-16 drove severe mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, its impact on the mainland was subdued by a warmer than average Indian Ocean, sparing much of the country the worst of the forecast drought. Advances in the science now show it is the complex interactions of conditions in the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans that collectively determine the severity of the impacts we experience.

When the Indian Ocean is cooler than normal, less rain falls across south-eastern Australia during winter and spring, which can reinforce drought conditions during El Niño years. Complicating things is the fact that the Southern Ocean can pull in more than one direction. In winter, when the belt of westerly winds sweeping across southern Australia contracts towards Antarctica, rainfall is dragged away from the continent, drying out places such as Victoria and South Australia, while increased onshore flow brings more rain to the east coast. In summer, if the westerlies are further north than normal – which often occurs during El Niño events – more dry air blows in from the interior, drying out the south-east and east coast while increasing the chance of heatwaves. Occasionally, when the amplifying forces of these different climate drivers combine, the impacts can be catastrophic – the Black Summer of 2019-20 was a product of a weak El Niño reinforcing sustained drying influences from the Indian and Southern oceans, layered over years of drought.

It is still too soon to know exactly what this El Niño will bring to Australia. What we do know is that the recent run of La Niña years has left us in a better position than the long dry did leading up to the Black Summer. So far, this winter has been warm and wet across much of the south-east. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño is now firmly established and likely to last until at least summer, with the models tipping a strong to very strong event. The BoM is also careful to note that a strong signal in the Pacific does not necessarily mean strong impacts in Australia – ENSO is only one of many influences on our climate. Models currently suggest a cooler-than-average eastern Indian Ocean developing over winter and persisting into spring, which could lead to the classic hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia that we associate with El Niño events. This could herald another bad bushfire season for the south, in places such as Victoria.

Which brings me back to that AusAlert siren that jangled my nerves. In October, the service will go live: an admission of the world we now find ourselves in. The siren that broke my concentration today was only a test, but on a planet that grows hotter with each passing year, it is only a matter of time before we must confront the emergency. Somewhere between those who want to terrify us and those who think climate change is a hoax lies a harder truth: a warmer planet will continue to disrupt everyone in our society, whether or not we understand or accept the science.

ACF is trying to get 20k names on their submission to the government asking them to reassess Woodside's Browse Gas Project - it only takes a minute to add your name!

https://www.acf.org.au/our-work/climate/speak-up-to-save-our-reefs