Australia

Environmental resources and challenges of Australia

The driest continent after Antarctica, Australia is highly exposed to bushfires, whose scale and frequency have increased in recent decades (the devastating 2019–2020 "Black Summer" fires burned tens of millions of hectares), as well as to droughts and cyclones. The country holds about a third of the world's identified uranium reserves and is one of its leading exporters, but generates no nuclear electricity: it is among the only G20 countries to combine large uranium reserves with zero domestic nuclear generation, as building power plants has been banned at federal level since the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999 (EPBC Act) — a ban whose repeal has been the subject of growing political debate since the mid-2020s, but which remains in force. Its electricity generation, long dominated by coal, has been shifting rapidly to wind and solar since the mid-2020s.