For the past decade Australia has been meeting its commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015? It doesn’t need to do anything more.

Fact:

 Australia only met its commitments between 2015 and 2022 because those commitments amounted to very little. In fact, at that time the country was doing a lot less than other, comparable nations. What the Coalition government agreed to in Paris was to reduce our 2005 level of emissions by 26-28 percent by 2030. However, Australia also claimed the right to achieve this by using ‘carryover credits’ from the time of the Kyoto Protocol, when it was allowed to include changes in land use (i.e. a drop in deforestation) in the calculation of its emissions. The fact that it did manage to reduce its emissions during that period (largely due to Labor’s carbon tax, which was in operation from 2012-14) meant that the government could slacken off in its own efforts and still achieve its 2030 target. 

To the nation’s shame, Australia was the only country in the world that was using this subterfuge, even though others had also earned the right to do so. As the IPCC pointed out in 2019, doing this would “reduce what Australia needs to do to meet its 2030 target by more than half.” And even using these carryover credits, Australia was still not on target to meet its Paris commitments! [As an aside, it is worth noting that the nation’s two biggest mining companies, BHP and Rio Tinto, opposed the use of carryover credits. Both believed that Australia should make real emissions reductions, and not just paper ones.]

According to government figures, Australia’s emissions fell by 19 percent between 2005 and 2020. About two thirds of that occurred prior to the abolition of the carbon tax in 2014, 3 percent occurred as a result of the COVID economic downturn and 4 percent from initiatives by the government itself. If we use 1990 as our base year (like all other nations do), then Australia’s emissions were only set to fall by 8-11 percent by 2030! 

When the Labor Party returned to power in 2022, it committed Australia to a 43 percent reduction in emissions by 2030, then upped this in 2025 to a 62-70 percent reduction by 2035. These are significant improvements on the previous government’s target but are still inadequate to meet the ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement. That said, it will take a great deal of effort to achieve them, given how little was done under the Coalition.