"We don’t need an imagination to know how bad it can get,” said their CEO, Serena Joyner.
Mon 27 Oct 2025 13.00
Photo: AAP Image/Diego Fedele
The CEO of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action has highlighted five key asks in the fight against climate change.
Serena Joyner addressed the Climate Crisis Summit in Canberra, where she shared stories from people who had been on the front line of extreme weather events caused by climate change.
“We don’t need an imagination to know how bad it can get,” Ms Joyner said.
Ms Joyner said the phase out of fossil fuels was key to fighting climate crisis, expressing frustrations given what Australia had already been through.
“I hoped [the Black Summer bushfires] would be a wakeup call for Australia,” she said.
Climate scientist, Dr Sophie Lewis, who also addressed the summit, highlighted a “catalogue of climate change impacts” and said that things are only set to get worse unless there is urgent action.
As well as the Black Summer bushfires, Dr Lewis flagged flooding events in New South Wales and Queensland and the recent devastation caused by algal bloom in South Australia.
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Ms Joyner spoke about the ongoing effects from extreme weather events, such as being unable to insure your home, or rebuild.
In July, co-CEO of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, wrote:
The scientific reality is that sea level rise and increased storm damage will make heavily populated parts of Australia uninhabitable, and the economic reality is that houses in those areas will be uninsurable.”
Ms Joyner said her organisation has a list of five asks:
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This week, the Prime Minister announced $1.1bn in funding for the Kwinana Westport container terminal proposal. But while this project has long been argued by Western Australian governments as necessary, it relies on assumptions that have not materialised and would result in billions of dollars committed to an unecessary project rather than to the urgent and visible crises in housing, healthcare, and education infrastructure.
At the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, conversations are circling back to first principles — what the science says, and what it would mean to act accordingly.
