To seek reprieve from blistering heat during the 2019-20 bushfire summer, scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick took her young children to a neighbourhood pool near their north-west Sydney home.Within minutes, smoky ash began to fall on the girls' heads.
It was so "horrendous", the climate scientist and her volunteer firefighter husband decided to make a very big change.
"We realised that we weren't very climate resilient there. We lived in a house with a dark roof and no insulation, and because Sydney is just so frightfully expensive, we just didn't have the means to help safeguard ourselves," she said.
The family moved to Canberra because it had cooler weather, more affordable housing and career opportunities.
"It's colder at night, which is great during extreme heat events and the overall climate is drier. Heatwaves when they occur here aren't as hot as other places in Australia," Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
"It doesn't mean that Canberra is resilient against climate change, far from it, [but] it was a safer and better place for us to live."
Canberra's highest recorded temperature in 2019-2020 was 44 degrees, which remains the maximum temperature recorded since at least 2009.
The ACT appears to have cooler hot days than most states and territories. Tasmania is the only jurisdiction with a lower maximum temperature.
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick and her husband built a house in Canberra for their three daughters, who are now aged three, seven and eight.
It is designed to stay cool in summer without much energy use, has solar panels and a battery. They also drive electric vehicles to help reduce their emissions.
"I can't stop those fires from happening, but I can give my children a better chance to be more safeguarded from [the] impacts," she said.
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a Professor in Climate Science at the Australian National University (ANU), specialising in extreme weather events, particularly heatwaves.
During a lecture for the ANU's 2026 Climate Update series on Thursday, she warned Australia was likely to continue experiencing heatwaves even after reaching net zero emissions. That is when the amount of greenhouse gases emitted is not higher than how much is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere.
Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said the later the world reached net zero, the harder it would be to recover and the more ongoing problems it would create.
"It really does matter when we reach net zero," she said.
"The later we reach net zero ... the more likely we are to have ice-free summers in Antarctica and the worst heatwaves will be virtually everywhere in the world."
"For Australia, the trends in heatwaves just keep going up no matter when we reach net zero, and this is because of what we think of what's going on in the Southern Ocean and how it's heating up.
"We must reach net zero as soon as we possibly can."
The issue flared up again in November last year, when the Australian Liberal Party ditched their target for Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
According to Net Zero Australia, the country is projected to reach net zero emissions a decade later, in 2060.
Australian sea surface temperatures reached highest on record in 2025. Ocean temperatures are considered a good measure of overall trends because there is less variability caused by externa; factors like weather patterns, Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.
Canberra has had two heatwaves this summer so far, with Tuggeranong recording an all-time high of 43.5 degrees in January.
While still cooler than late January, the Bureau of Meteorology expects the city to get hotter again next week, with a maximum forecast temperature of 32 degrees next Wednesday.