Many houses were buried in landslides or swept away. We had to rescue our neighbours from death or injury.
Main Arm, NSW
Our region, the Northern Rivers, has been impacted heavily by both flooding and bush fires in the past years. In the community where I was living during the big floods, many houses were buried in landslides or swept away. We had to rescue our neighbours from death or injury. The government was not very helpful. We had to organise ourselves.
Many have moved into homelessness or insecure living arrangements due to flooding displacement. Most people I know have some connection to the flooding and it’s impacts or bushfires or both. So far government has failed to offer any reasonable support to transition or act to prevent more climate damage. Every action we take now is so important in assisting the community to transition and creating a more liveable future. We need responsibility from our government now.
Hundreds of people from across the country are sharing their stories to send a clear message to the Australian government - it's time for real action on climate change.
Every story appears as a point on this map. Click around to read how climate change is affecting our communities, and add your own story to the map.
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.
Read my storyPeople all across Australia are being harmed by climate change. These are some of their stories.
We're reviewing your story now. As soon as it's up on the website we'll send you an email to let you know. We need as many people as possible to share their climate stories - so we can show the government that Australians need urgent climate action. Will you spread the word by sharing this campaign on social media?
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It doesn't matter how big or small the impact you've felt - everyone's story is important.
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