Against a backdrop of catastrophic flooding along Australia's east coast, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has warned that the country must adapt to the imminent reality of climate change.

The report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, released this week, followed a previous report that focused on the science of climate change and further emphasized the need for immediate and intense environmental actions.

Dr Nina Lansbury from the University of Queensland (UQ) is among 270 international researchers who, as part of Working Group II, have assessed the impact of climate change on ecosystems, biodiversity, and humanity.

Lansbury on Tuesday said that climate change was already hitting Australia's ecosystems. It is expected to bring even drier conditions to areas where rainfall is decreasing, while conversely, some regions could see more extreme wet weather such as the current deluges and floods in Queensland and New South Wales (NSW).

Lansbury noted that the fatal impact of climate change went beyond the immediate deaths during natural disasters such as bushfires or floods.

"If we think about the bushfire season that happened in late 2019 and early 2020, there were 33 deaths, however, there were more than 400 deaths related to respiratory problems (caused by the air pollution)," Lansbury said.

Furthermore, the nation's dwindling supplies of fresh water are increasingly being jeopardized by climate change.

This has recently become apparent during floods when huge volumes of water quickly swamp the land and become too much for desalination plants and sewage treatment systems to properly process.

Lansbury said Australia was already a very dry country with a heavy reliance on underground water, aquifer water and groundwater. These vital resources are increasingly threatened by evaporation amid the increasingly hotter climate.

The report said Australia's adaptation efforts have increased since the last IPCC assessment, but due to implementation barriers and limits to adaptive capacity, the progress was "distinctly uneven."

In providing a guideline to prompt more realistic actions, the report emphasized a "climate-resilient development," which suggests policymakers think about climate change from three perspectives: sustainable development, adaptation to the changing environment, and mitigation.

"We are very clear that there is no time for delay," Lansbury said. "Urgency is very important. If we think about those perspectives through development, then it means that people can be protected when there are extreme weather events."

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