“We need responsible, strong, principled leadership, so that these sorts of uncertainties and difficulties will be far more easy to navigate,” he said.

Loading

Baxter said the IEA report reaffirmed the importance of having clear government action on climate change to reduce emissions and support a transition to renewable energy - a challenge for whichever political party takes charge of the country in the coming weeks.

“We are well overdue for a government that is interested in certainty [of energy future]. I am not interested in what colour that government is, but it is in Australia’s interests both domestically and internationally to invest in energy security and climate impacts, and for us to be taking the lead on reducing emissions globally, we have been at the back of the pack for far too long.”

The IEA report comes after the UK Met Office - the national weather and climate service - warned there was a nearly 50-50 chance that the world would experience a year in the next five years in which the average temperature surpassed the 1.5 degrees warming level defined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The world experienced its first year of average temperatures 1 degree over pre-industrial levels in 2015.

“The basic thing that’s changing is that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, are slowly creeping up,” Dr Leon Hermanson from the Met Office, the lead author of the report, told the BBC.

The IEA, once an organisation focussed on supporting the secure supply of fossil fuels, has become increasingly vocal in its support for a rapid transition away from them.

Last year it published a report saying that if the world was to meet net zero by 2050, there should be no new oil and gas developments, while in 2020 it provided analysis showing that solar provided the cheapest electricity in history.

A guide to the environment, what’s happening to it, what’s being done about it and what it means for the future. Sign up to our fortnightly Environment newsletter here.