Each new fossil fuel project can now be linked to additional global warming and specific climate disasters

Individual fossil fuel projects can no longer be considered ‘too small to matter’, with researchers now able to link harmful impacts on our society and environment to each new investment in coal and gas extraction. 

The majority of Australia’s new fossil fuel projects describe their anticipated greenhouse gas outputs as ‘negligible’ in the context of global emissions, and claim they’re unable to measure contributions to global warming, while also ignoring expected impacts. 

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states unequivocally that every additional tonne of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions adds to global warming, and a robust framework exists for linking national emissions to global totals.

By extending this methodology down to the level of individual projects, researchers have shown how leading climate science can be better incorporated into decision-making around future emissions.

The work, conducted by researchers at six Australian universities, and led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, is based on the Scarborough gas project that has been approved for development offshore of northwest Australia.

Liquified Natural Gas production from the Scarborough field is currently expected to start in 2026 and continue for 31 years, with the potential for further expansion. In its own evaluation, the project proposal claimed “it is not possible to link greenhouse gas emissions from Scarborough with climate change or any particular climate-related impact, given that the estimated emissions associated with Scarborough are negligible in the context of existing and future predicted global greenhouse gas concentrations”.

However, the estimated greenhouse gas emissions from the lifetime of the Scarborough project total 876 million tonnes (Mt) of CO₂ emissions, which is far from negligible. The researchers involved in this study employed a robust methodology known as the Transient Climate Response to CO₂ Emissions (TCRE) to calculate the contribution of these emissions to global warming. The TCRE is a major tool of the IPCC and works using a combination of our scientific understanding of the earth system, direct observations, and climate model simulations.

The team estimated that the 876 Mt of CO₂ emissions from this project will cause 0.00039°C of additional global warming, with a 66–100% likelihood of causing global warming of between 0.00024°C and 0.00055°C.

While this estimate of 0.00039°C of additional warming caused by the Scarborough project seems relatively small, its impacts are actually large. It would expose 516,000 people to unprecedented extreme heat, and leave 356,000 people outside the climate niche that has allowed humanity to thrive in recent millennia, prior to industrialisation. 

In Europe alone, we would expect this one project to cause 484 additional deaths directly due to extreme heat by the end of this century. Closer to home, approximately 16 million corals in the Great Barrier Reef would be lost in each new mass bleaching event, which would occur more frequently due to the additional global warming as a consequence of emissions from the Scarborough project.

Associate Professor Andrew King of the University of Melbourne, a contributing author on the paper, said: “These findings contrast sharply with claims that individual fossil fuel projects will have negligible impacts. In this case study alone, it is shown that the additional warming caused by CO₂ emissions from the Scarborough project will persist for multiple decades to centuries, and cause long-term environmental and social impacts.”

When it comes to nationally agreed emissions reductions targets, the researchers calculated that by 2049, the anticipated Australian emissions from the Scarborough project alone will comprise almost half (49%) of Australia’s entire annual CO₂ emissions budget.

Beyond 2050, all emissions from the Scarborough project would require durable CO₂ removal from the atmosphere if Australia was to meet its emissions reduction targets. That would require a huge increase in the effectiveness and scale of carbon capture and storage technology. For example, in 2023, human activities to move CO₂ from the atmosphere into storage amounted to only 0.04 Mt CO₂ globally, which is equivalent to just 0.6% of the planned annual Australian emissions from the Scarborough project.

According to contributing author Dr Nicola Maher of the Australian National University, this research “provides a science-based foundation that can be employed by companies and governments in quantifying the consequences of fossil fuel production and use, and in assessing whether these projects fall within acceptable levels of environmental and societal risk.”

Contributing author Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, also of the Australian National University, said: “Companies proposing new or extended fossil fuel projects must better account for the impacts of their projected emissions. It is no longer defensible to simply state that their consequences will be negligible.”

The results have been published in the Nature journal Climate Action and are available here.

Led by members of 21st Century Weather, the work was a collaboration between the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the Climate Change Research Centre and School of Law at the University of New South Wales, the University of Adelaide, James Cook University, and the University of Oxford in the UK. The work was also supported by the Minderoo Foundation.