Australians are used to messages at this time of year offering advice on preparing for bushfires and other extreme weather.
“Between the Christmas promotions, [we’re] I’m seeing more and more warnings about extreme heat and fires and how we can deal with them and stay safe,” Belinda Noble, the founder of climate organization Comms Declare, told Al Jazeera.
While there is nothing new about these types of announcements from government agencies, the messages have taken on added significance as the weather becomes more unpredictable and memories of the serious wildfires of three years ago linger.
“Australia urgently needs national public information campaigns to keep people safe,” Noble told Al Jazeera, stressing that similar campaigns were also needed on how to “cut emissions and combat lies about fossil fuels, renewables and climate science” .
Australia passed groundbreaking climate laws in March this year, ten months after a new centre-left Labor government led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office.
“Unlike our previous administration,” the new administration now “recognizes that climate change is very real, here now and exacerbating extreme weather events and disasters,” said Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for New York state. South Wales told Al Jazeera.
But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they are undoing all their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.”
Even as the Albanian government passed its new legislation in March, the annual list of major resource and energy projects included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021,” according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute .
Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, advocacy group Oil Change International said recently.
Many of the planned fuel projects – on land and at sea – are facing opposition from indigenous people, who are seeing first-hand the consequences of fossil fuel extraction and climate change.
“My community is not only dealing with fracking, but also with mining [and] overgrazing,” says Rikki Dank, director of Gudanji For Country, an indigenous charity. “Moreover, we feel the consequences of climate change. The weather patterns are all over the place,” she said.
“There is no longer as much rain as before and the heat is becoming almost unbearable,” said Dank, who spoke to Al Jazeera from COP28 in Dubai, where she drew attention to Australia’s plans to develop its traditional lands.
Fracking or hydraulic fracturing involves injecting fluid under high pressure into shale rock to release gas.
“We’re seeing a lot of people in Australia losing their homes because it’s getting too hot or we can’t live there anymore because of mining or fracking,” she added.
But at a special COP28 meeting on Sunday where leaders were encouraged to speak off script, Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen backed calls for a global phase-out of fossil fuels.
The comments sparked confusion given Australia’s expansion of fossil fuels domestically.
“We don’t consider ourselves a petrostate, but Australia is by far a bigger exporter of fossil fuels than the United Arab Emirates,” Ebony Bennett, deputy director of the Australia Institute, wrote last week, comparing Australia to the host of the United Arab Emirates. COP28.
Australia is “the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world,” Bennett added. The country is one of the largest coal exporters in the world, together with Russia and Indonesia.
‘Your whole world’
While Australia’s messages may seem mixed on the world stage, the messages at home, at least on the dangers of fire, are much clearer.
An advertisement from the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services shows images such as a twisted dog litter box and a child’s bicycle in a burnt landscape, while a narrator says “your best friend” and “your whole world”.
While increased disaster preparedness is welcome, Mullins says the recently announced funding “is still just a drop in the bucket and climate change is causing that bucket to leak.”
The former fire chief and founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action says greater efforts are needed to tackle the growing climate crisis.
“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters, how many planes or trucks you have,” Mullins told Al Jazeera. “We cannot simply tackle the damage once it has been done, we must tackle it at the root cause – which is the continued extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas.
“We must take urgent action now to see emissions plummet during this crucial decade,” he added, “to give future generations some hope.”
For Dank, the solutions include using Indigenous people’s experience of caring for their lands as a nature-based solution.
“Unfortunately, there is a “current culture” of “Band-Aid solutions for how we can fix something that makes us uncomfortable right now, rather than actually looking at the problem and addressing it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Noble says public awareness campaigns are also needed to dispel the influence of the fossil fuel industry.
“Communities need more consistent, accurate and reliable climate information to meet the enormous challenges ahead,” said Noble, whose organization is also campaigning to ban misleading fossil fuel advertising in Australia.
“There’s no doubt people are worried,” she added, but it is possible to “turn fear into action against the fossil fuel companies that are causing the extreme heat, fires and storms.”
