Australia’s emissions have fallen 1.6% in the last year. That’s nowhere near enough

The latest greenhouse gas emissions data for the March 2026 quarter were released on Friday – as ever with no fanfare or advance notice – by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW).

They showed that in the past year, Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions fell 1.6%.

While it is always good to see that emissions are falling, the problem for the government (and anyone who actually wants to prevent the horrific tragedy of climate change, such as has been witnessed last week in Nepal) is that emissions are neither falling fast enough to meet the government’s 2030 or 2035 targets, and certainly not fast enough to accord with the science.

The government has set the target of reducing Australia’s emissions to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030 and (at best) 62% below 2005 levels by 2035, with the longer-term goal of hitting net zero emissions by 2050.

These targets are nowhere near enough to ensure Australia does its part to limit global warming to 2ºC above pre-industrial levels.

The Climate Council has noted that “to have a strong chance of meeting this goal, Australia would need to set a net zero target for 2035.”

Unfortunately, while we are not on target for net zero by 2035, neither is the current trajectory anywhere near the path to achieving net zero by 2050:

It’s bad enough to set emissions targets that don’t accord with the science, but to fail to achieve them is utterly pathetic.

And while the official fall in emissions will be 25% since 2005, this is only because the Albanese government has continued to use the accounting method devised by the Howard government in which we count the level of emissions from “land use, land-use change, and forestry”, which is essentially “land clearing”.

2005 was a big year for land clearing in Australia.

Land clearing takes away trees which consume CO2. So, in effect, clearing land “adds” to CO2 emissions because those trees are no longer consuming the CO2.

This means that, for example, if you clear enough trees in one year, that is the equivalent of adding 100 MtCO2 into the atmosphere. So then purely by not clearing that number of trees the next year, you have “reduced your emissions”.

Australia is the only nation that includes land clearing in our targets, all because back in 1997 at the Kyoto COP, Australia’s environment minister, Nick Minchin, demanded Australia be able to count land use in 1990 towards the 2005 target (1990 was also a big year for land clearing).

Australia was allowed to do so, and then didn’t sign up to the agreement anyway, which is about as low an act of economic bastardy as you can do, really.

Because we clear a lot less land than we did in 2005, it looks like we have massively reduced our emissions:

If you exclude land use, however, Australia’s emission in the year to March were just 4% below the annual emissions of 2005. Not exactly amazing.

And once you exclude land use, the overwhelming bulk of emissions reduction has come from the switch towards renewable energy.

We have a long way to go to get to net zero, and unfortunately, we are not going there fast enough to do our part to limit global warming.