The fires, floods, and storms that we’ve been seeing are going to happen on a much more regular basis. Australia is going to suffer terribly.
Perth, WA
My name is Charles Watson and I am a public health physician in Western Australia. I believe that the potential impact of climate change in Australia is likely to be catastrophic.
I became strongly interested in climate change about 12 years ago. It quickly became clear to me that this is the greatest threat to life on earth that we have ever faced. Moreover, it is not something that is way in the distance – it is already obvious and will worsen over the next decade.
At a personal level, my stepdaughter just lost her house near Lismore in Evans Head. In the first day of heavy rain they had 500 millimetres – that’s half of the local annual rainfall in one day. The basement of their house started flooding, but the next day the house all but submerged in 7 metres of water that rushed into the town. It went right up to the top level of the two-storey house and it wiped out just about everything. The result for them is unimaginably awful – just as it is for all the people in Lismore.
The reality is that in the last few years we’ve experienced dreadful bushfires as well as incredible floods. This is just a taste of what is to come in the future. It is clear that the catastrophes like the fires, floods, and storms that we’ve been seeing are going to happen on a much more regular basis. Australia is going to suffer terribly.
Most people in Australia now recognise that climate change is an important issue, but no one in power seems willing to help them. We need to start doing something really really quickly because the fossil fuel and gas companies not going to stop pushing their products that release carbon dioxide.
I am seventy eight years old, so I am not going to be experiencing the disastrous effects personally, but my grandchildren certainly will. I feel desperately afraid of what the world will be like for them in the future.
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We have spent a summer trapped in our home with heatwave after heatwave hitting our city in the longest and hottest summer of my lifetime (and indeed the city’s lifetime). I have had to stop my three year old son playing outside day after day and we have all had to stay in the same room as it is the only air conditioned one. Summer used to be a time of fun, of outdoor barbecues for dinner, of freedom. Now it has a feeling of containment and dread. My job requires me to confront climate issues and victims of bushfire and other disasters and their experiences and the flood of climate information leave me feeling deep grief, distress and helplessness. My little son loves animals passionately and i dread the day I will have to tell him about climate change and about how so many of the creatures that inspire him are threatened by mankind’s very existence. I fear he will grow into an adult in a time of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, in a country weakened economically and fragmented socially by these disasters. That by the time he grows up the Great Barrier Reef we describe to him will be dead and gone. Having him despite my fear for his future was an act of hope and defiance, but that hope is hard to maintain when our governments will seemingly not act to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with renewables with the speed that will give my beautiful child the bright future he deserves. I hope and pray that this case changes the situation. And I thank these elders for bringing this action.
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