Climate change poses a predictable risk to Australia by 2050. The waste and recycling sector offers a simple, overlooked, and high-impact solution. Mike Ritchie, Managing Director, MRA Consulting Group and Mia Thompson, Environmental Consultant, explain.
In September 2025 the Australian Climate Service published the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) – a science-based assessment of the most significant climate risks facing Australia.
The assessment, published on behalf of the Federal Government, considered four key factors: climate hazards, exposure, vulnerability, and how we should respond.
The level of risk was identified on a scale from low to severe, assessing both the current risk and expected risk by the mid-term time horizon of 2050.
The NCRA also looked at different global warming levels with temperature thresholds of plus 1.5 degrees Celsius, plus two degrees, and plus three degrees.
Figure 1 shows the systems most at risk are natural environment, Defence and national security, health and social support, and primary industries and food.
But note that by 2050, every system investigated is expected to be at high to severe risk.
Current emissions trajectories still put us on track for a plus three degree rise in temperature. We are not doing enough, fast enough.
Figure 2 lists 11 climate hazards that will increase in severity, frequency, and/or duration under rising temperatures.
Here are just a few salient predictions for plus three degrees to send chills down your spine. And if not your spine, your kids’ spines, or their kids’. Your family, my family, your friends and neighbours.
Enough to denial.
We must act urgently.
Predictions:
- Extreme heatwave days – plus 14 days each year.
- Time spent in drought – up to 89 per cent increase for some areas.
- Marine heatwaves increase by 161 days.
- Frequency of coastal flooding increases by 193 days.
And these are with high data confidence levels. Pressure on farmers, business collapses, loss of the Great Barrier Reef, loss of marine species, thousands of houses flooded regularly and on and on and on.
By 2050.
No con job.
Physics.
Just like other physics in our lives – mobile phones, electricity, gravity, and the orbits of planets. No belief required. It is about science. Not about beliefs.
Whether you believe it or not is up to you. But the science is the science.
We need to get on with climate action.
In the waste/recycling sector, that comes down to a few key actions that can reduce Australia’s emissions by 10 per cent or 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year:
- Stop putting organics in landfill.
- Capture the methane gas that landfills produce from old organics.
- Drive up recycling to capture the embodied energy of materials (and thereby also reduce energy consumption by industry).
- Sequester carbon in soil via biochar and compost.
- Use battery electric waste vehicles (the biggest truck fleet in the country).
- Generate renewable energy from waste (particularly the organic fractions).
Simple, doable, cost-effective.
Ours is the overlooked sector that can reduce emissions by 10 per cent tomorrow.
For more information, contact: info@mraconsulting.com.au
(MRA Consulting Group is a national leader in carbon reporting, compliance, planning, approvals and project development. Mike Ritchie worked on the Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coast first pass national assessment for the Australian Government Department of Climate Change in 2009.)
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