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If populations remain as they are today, more than 1.5 million people will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding risks by 2050, with sea waters inundating coastal infrastructure, homes and drinking water supplies, the report says.
It foreshadowed losses on property values of $611 billion by 2050 and warned of a risk to the financial system itself.
The political implications of the report are clear.
It sets the government up to defend the 2035 emissions reduction target, which is expected to be released this week, from criticism that it is too high and will cost too much.
“[The report] makes clear that the cost of action is smaller than the cost of inaction under any scenario,” Bowen said.
But perhaps more importantly, it shifts the national climate debate from one about potential future risk to one about a response to an immediate and tangible threat.
Those who argue against action can now more reasonably be asked what measures they would take, or to make their case for not acting at all.
But it will not inoculate the government from criticism that it is not acting ambitiously enough, or that it is hypocritical for it to back Australia’s fossil fuel export industry while seeking to cut its domestic emissions.
As Bowen spoke, it had been just three days since his colleague, Environment Minister Murray Watt, gave final approval for Woodside Energy to extend the life of its vast North West Shelf gas project by 40 years, a decision likely to release an extra 4 to 6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Asked what emission reduction target Australia should be announcing in light of the report, Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said grimly that “the tension between what is necessary and what is possible” was growing.
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A scientific analysis commissioned by the council says Australia has already missed the boat on a reduction target in line with 1.5 degrees, and that to be in line with 2 degrees of warming, Australia would need to adopt a target of net zero by 2035.
Given the economic and political reality, she said a minimum of 75 per cent would be achievable and “the minimum number for a credible target”. That number now seems unlikely as a minimum.
One argument we can expect to hear this week is that nothing Australia does alone can change the climate. This wilfully misses the point, according to Bill Hare, the physicist and climate scientist who heads the think tank Climate Analytics.
Countries can slow warming only by working together and can only urge greater action by one another by adopting their own ambitious targets.
When the Paris Agreement was adopted, the world was on track for an average of between 3.5 and four degrees of warming under current policies. Now we are on track for 2.7 to 3 degrees, Hare says, noting that Australia will warm significantly more than that average due to the size of its land mass.
He says the risk assessment shows more clearly what scientists already knew: that Australia has more to lose than most countries from climate change, and more to gain in leading the effort against it.
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