Home

We recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the sovereign Traditional Owners of Australia and thank them for their stewardship of this Country, its lands, waters and skies. We respectfully acknowledge their culture and customary practices, and pay respect to their Ancestors, Elders and future leaders.

For the first time, the State of the Environment report includes a strong Indigenous narrative across all 12 thematic chapters, a narrative crafted through recognising the leadership, collaboration and authorship of Indigenous Australians who continue their connection as Traditional Owners to their lands, waters and skies.

Click to view the State of the Environment report

 

On 28 March 2025 the government assumed a Caretaker role. Information on websites maintained by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water will be published in accordance with the Guidance on Caretaker Conventions until after the conclusion of the caretaker period.

Due to technical issues, graphs, maps and tables are currently not displaying within the main content, however, are available via the chapter resources navigation bar. We are working on a solution to resolve the issue.

Graphs, maps and tables

Showing results 21 - 30 of 61
Figure 21 Range map showing the latest estimates of dugong population size and trends of various components of the dugong population in Australia
Map showing that dugong populations are falling on the Queensland coast, except the extreme south and north, and little is known otherwise.

GBR = Great Barrier Reef; NT = Northern Territory; QLD = Queensland

Note: Produced by Adele Edwards from information collated by Helene Marsh. Data sources included aerial surveys conducted using the Pollock et al. (2006) method, and the method of Hagihara (Hagihara et al. 2014, Hagihara et al. 2018). Baseline: trend unavailable or low confidence. The trend assessment for Shark Bay (Bayliss et al. 2018) and the Gulf of Carpentaria coast of the Northern Territory Northern Territory (Griffiths et al. 2020) are based on frequentist statistics. The assessment for Torres Strait is based on several lines of evidence (Marsh et al. 2015), but recent Traditional Owner observations are generally consistent with widespread seagrass dieback, which is likely to have adverse impacts on the dugong population; those for the east coast locations are based on data from Sobtzick et al. (2017), Marsh et al. (2020) and unpublished work by Marsh and Rankin.

For more information, go toCoastal species
Figure 22 Important Marine Mammal Areas in Australian waters for which the dugong is a qualifying species, identified by an expert workshop in 2020
Figure 23 The 2020 east coast low at Narrabeen Beach (New South Wales)
Figure 24 Sea level trends around Australia, based on satellite altimeter and tide gauge observations
Choropleth map showing that sea level rise is positive everywhere, and fastest off the New South Wales coast.

mm/yr = millimetre per year

Note: The contours indicate geocentric sea level trends as measured by satellite altimeters from 1993 to July 2020 and the coloured dots indicate trends from tide gauges in the Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Project (relative to the tide gauge bench mark) from the installation of the gauges in the early 1990s until July 2020.

For more information, go toClimate change
Figure 25 Projections of sea level rise (in centimetres) relative to the land, 2081–2100 relative to 1986–2005 under (a) RCPs 2.6, (b) RCP 4.5 and (c) RCP 8.5 based on the IPCC AR5 and SROCC projections, and (d) high-resolution dynamical downscaling of dynamic sea level
Four maps showing that rises will be around 40 centimetres in the mildest scenario and close to a metre in the more extreme scenario, and worst on the east coast.

AR5 = Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC; IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; RCP = Representative Concentration Pathway; SROCC = Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate

Source: CSIRO regional sea level projections under RCPs 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5 based on the IPCC AR5 and SROCC projections and high-resolution dynamical downscaling of dynamic sea level (McInnes et al. 2015, Zhang et al. 2017)

For more information, go toClimate change
Figure 26 View of Kingscliff Beach, northern New South Wales, showing 3 responses to shoreline erosion
Figure 27 An example of the Coastal Risk Australia coastal inundation mapping for 2020 (dark blue) and 2100 (light blue) for the Moruya River on the New South Wales south coast
Figure 28 Number and percentage of visitors undertaking nature-based activities, 2008–18
Figure 29 Average number of plastic items per clean-up site per day, across the Australian coast, 2009–19
Maps showing that debris and plastics are found around most of the coast (less around the Gulf, the Northern Territory, the Kimberley and the Bight). The top of Cape York and a few spots on the east coast are the worst.

Source: Gacutan et al. (2022)

Notes:

  1. Averages were calculated from clean-up entries between January 2009 and December 2019 (inclusive) from filtered Australian Marine Debris Initiative data. Coasts with insufficient sites for interpolation were masked from analysis. Plastics refers to the sum of ‘hard’, ‘soft’ and ‘expanded’ plastics.
  2. Reprinted from Science of The Total Environment, 807(2), J Gacutan, EL Johnston H Tait, W Smith & GF Clark, Continental patterns in marine debris revealed by a decade of citizen science, 150742, Copyright 2022, with permission from Elsevier.
For more information, go toPopulation
Figure 30 Debris counts (as a percentage of the total) of materials recovered from clean-ups across Australia and per region, 2009–19
Diagram showing that plastics are by far the most common, especially hard plastics.

Notes:

  1. Completed using the filtered Australian Marine Debris Initiative Database.
  2. Reprinted from Science of The Total Environment, 807(2), J Gacutan, EL Johnston H Tait, W Smith & GF Clark, Continental patterns in marine debris revealed by a decade of citizen science, 150742, Copyright 2022, with permission from Elsevier.

Source: Gacutan et al. (2022)

For more information, go toPopulation