Climate Change

The majority voted against a motion introduced by Victorian Senator Janet Rice (Greens), which means it failed.

Motion text

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) the Bureau of Meteorology has advised that Australia will face 3.4 to 4.4 degrees of heating by the turn of the century, and that the latest science indicates an approximate 20% increase in the number of days per year with dangerous fire weather conditions per degree of global heating,

(ii) more than 20% of mainland Australia's forests burned during the 2019-20 bushfires, a globally unprecedented figure,

(iii) a recent study by Dietzel et al. (2020) found that since the mid-1990s, coral along the Great Barrier Reef has declined by more than 50%, showing the ability of the reef to recover is compromised, and

(iv) the values that underpin the World Heritage listing of the Great Barrier Reef and many of Australia's forests are currently at serious risk from global heating; and

(b) calls on the Government to:

(i) act urgently to tackle the climate crisis, consistent with keeping global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and

(ii) set an emissions reduction target for 2030 that is significantly more ambitious than Australia's existing commitment of a 26 to 28% reduction.