Climate Adaptation: employment and productivity outcomes from investments in climate resilience

The Australian Government released the first National Climate Risk Assessment in August 2025, highlighting the impacts of a warming climate, including increasing heat waves, coastal flooding, and extreme weather events.

Renew Australia for All – an alliance of more than 80 organisations across social services, unions, community and environment groups – has developed the Climate Safety Plan, a package of over $13 billion annually through 2035, that invests in community services and local government, a resilient health and emergency services system, climate proof homes, schools and workplaces, and secure farming and food supply.

Our study found:

1. The Climate Safety Plan would support more than 90,000 new jobs annually over the next decade: 42,500 direct jobs and 50,500 indirect jobs would be supported across a wide range of regions.
2. Investment in climate adaptation can deliver large productivity benefits: across global and Australian studies, adaptation investments consistently are found to deliver strong positive economic returns, with benefit-cost ratios typically ranging from 2:1 to over 10:1.
3. Without sustained investment in adaptation, the economic costs of climate change will rise sharply: while the high degree of uncertainty about the level of warming means that the estimates of the costs of inaction vary significantly, all major studies predict serious and long-lasting economic impacts without action. Notably, the Network for Greening the Financial System (2025), a coalition of leading international central banks and financial supervisors, estimates Australia’s GDP to be 14% lower by 2050 which adds up to $6.8 trillion in cumulative economic losses.
4. The balance of public funding needs to shift from disaster response to proactive investments in adaptation to avoid spiralling economic loss and realise productivity benefits: historically, 97% of expenditure on emergency management has been directed towards disaster recovery rather than proactive resilience and risk mitigation.