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.

Approach

This is the first state of the environment report to have a dedicated theme relating to extreme events – a response to the increasing scale, frequency and impact of climatically driven events over the past 5 years. In many cases, these events been disastrous for individuals, communities, industries and the environment.

Our aim has been to bring together an overview of the hundreds of reports, reviews and research papers written about these topics in recent years, and to provide an entry into the vast scholarly literature and community-informed reporting that have developed. In part, this has meant identifying a small number of representative case studies that exemplify the sorts of impacts that we see, hear about or measure. Some of these are reported here; others are featured in the other domain-specific themes.

We have also tried to strike a balance between identifying the consequences of extreme weather events for natural systems and for permanently settled, industrialised Australia – its communities, industries and infrastructure. In natural systems, extreme events may cause disturbance but also stimulate rapid response to that disturbance. In some cases, they are essential – if irregular and unpredictable – drivers of environmental change. Natural events only become disasters when people and their property are impacted, and this occurs frequently in post-colonial Australia.

However, climate change is producing weather events and climates beyond our measured records, and seemingly outside the range of events that many of our environments and species have become adapted to. Changes in the frequency, intensity and distribution of events, compounded by habitat fragmentation, introduced species, hard infrastructure and environmental modification, are threatening the resilience of some of our natural communities. Consequently, in our assessments, we have frequently identified the trend as ‘deteriorating’, although with low or limited confidence because our understanding of long-term trends in the spatial and temporal distribution of rare events is poor, and our forecasts are based on modelled scenarios.