Australia’s climate report card as COP28 kicks off: solid progress, but more work to be done
With the annual UN climate change talks kicking off in Dubai, Australian negotiators should be encouraged by recent progress. But with the world on track for its hottest year on record, now isn’t the time for complacency.
On the face of it, Australia has made significant progress with its climate and net zero policies since Labor was elected in May 2022.
The pace of change has been frenetic: emissions targets have been legislated, the safeguard mechanism reforms came into effect in July, the Net Zero Authority was formed and instructions for the Climate Change Authority to devise sectoral emissions targets were given. Plans for a fuel efficiency standard, carbon border tariff and an expanded capacity investment scheme to underwrite dispatchable generation capacity were also unveiled.
Considering the tortured political past of Australian climate change policy, the field’s leading experts are eerily supportive of Australia’s net zero policies, with the safeguard mechanism, which sets reducing caps for the country’s largest emitters and the capacity investment scheme, which provides eligible renewable and battery generators with long-term electricity supply agreements, coming in for particularly universal praise.
“In the context of nearly 20 years of climate policy chaos in Australia, we have actually made significant progress,” says Investor Group on Climate Change policy managing director Erwin Jackson. “We have a national carbon price in the industrial sector and we are close to having mandatory, internationally comparable climate related disclosures.”
