Last week, CSIRO announced it will cut 92 positions from its environment unit, including roughly five of the twelve scientists who maintain ACCESS, Australia's own climate model. We want to be clear about what this means, and why it matters.
ACCESS (the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator) is the only global climate model developed in the southern hemisphere. It is the tool that tells us, with Australian landscapes and conditions in mind, what our climate future actually looks like: how much hotter our summers will get, how sea levels will rise along our coasts, how rainfall patterns will shift across our farms and cities.
Without it, we are left borrowing models built for European and northern hemisphere conditions. That is not good enough for a country that faces some of the most severe climate impacts on earth.
The timing makes this worse. While Australia is stepping up, co-chairing the next UN climate talks, our own government is quietly dismantling the scientific infrastructure that gives us credibility at those talks. And this comes just as the United States has gutted its own climate science programs, meaning the global pool of independent modelling capacity is shrinking fast. Australia should be filling that gap, not retreating from it.
We are also mindful of what scientists are now telling us: even under net-zero emissions scenarios, Australia is one of the parts of the world that will continue to warm. Understanding how, and planning for it, requires exactly the kind of high-resolution, Australia-specific projections that ACCESS provides.
Parents for Climate stands with the scientists who have raised the alarm about these cuts, including Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Professor Christian Jakob, and Professor Andy Hogg, who wrote this week: "The loss of these scientists means we face the threat of losing the capability of having an Australian global climate model altogether."
These cuts may not be reversed. But that doesn't mean they should pass without protest, or without a public record of what was lost, and who allowed it to happen.
We call on the Australian Government to:
- Restore funding to keep Australia's climate modelling capability intact
- Explain how CSIRO's $387 million funding boost failed to protect its core climate science
- Commit to sovereign climate modelling infrastructure as a long-term national priority
Our children will need to adapt to a changing climate for the rest of their lives. They deserve a government that at least maintains the tools to understand what that future looks like.