Climate stories

I started to understand the reach and severity of climate change when working as a tour guide in Sydney in the mid 2000s. Over lunch at the pub tour guests from all over the world would share stories of unpredictable and unseasonable weather in their own countries. It didn’t matter where these people were from – Scandanavia, Japan, the US, Australia – everyone had stories of strange whether events and of weather patterns becoming less predictable over time.

When I started travelling in South and Southeast Asia I saw many of these changes with my own eyes, and heard more and more stories. I spent a week in a heatwave in Delhi – while not new, heatwaves are becoming much more common and more severe. I was in Mumbai when the Monsoon arrived late and abruptly stopped after only a couple of days – this was unheard of and led to widespread panic and confusion. I was in Nepal when an unseasonably late snowfall and frost wiped out a season’s potato harvest.

Back home in Australia, I’ve seen heat, floods and fires that line up with the overarching patterns of more extreme and intense weather events that scientists have been predicting for decades. I saw the red skies of the 2020 bushfires, and helped out in one of the areas that was hit by the disaster. I saw people who had lost their homes pleading for help, and grappling with the fact that the places they and their families had lived for generations may not be safely habitable in the future.

I’ve seen people spend decades of their lives trying to mitigate the harm that climate change is likely to cause, and fight for a liveable planet and a more just future. I’ve seen the barriers that are put in their way, and the way they are marginalised, mocked, gaslighted and even imprisoned by big polluters and their enablers. I can only wonder what will happen next.