As people in regional communities experience wide-ranging impacts from climate change, action is needed to bring people together to share their stories, and develop community-led, bottom-up approaches, a #CroakeyLIVE webinar heard this week.
Experts also called for increased funding for climate health research and for greater investment in addressing women’s needs during climate disasters.
Marie McInerney writes:
During the federal election campaign, emergency physician Dr Simon Judkins has been shocked by the refusal of local politicians and community leaders to even mention the impact of the climate crisis on rural and regional communities.
The impact of climate change on economies, livelihoods and health, and on the future of regional and rural communities, has been a topic that ‘shall not be mentioned’, says Judkins, who is Director of Emergency Medicine of Echuca Health in north-western Victoria.
“There’s no political conversation about climate, there’s nothing about mitigation, there’s nothing about renewables,” Judkins told a #CroakeyLIVE webinar this week (watch in full here).
The silence he has observed in regional areas has also been evident nationally; the health impacts of climate change, long proclaimed by the World Health Organization as a fundamental threat to human health and a “threat multiplier”, have not been mentioned in leaders or health election debates or across mainstream media coverage.
Judkins was speaking at a #ClimateHealthMatters webinar, the second climate health event run by Croakey during the #AusVotes2025 campaign, supported by a grant from the Local and Independent News Association.
Moderated by leading health policy expert and Croakey Health Media director Alison Verhoeven, the webinar discussed how local communities are responding to the climate health crisis, with a focus on the Loddon Mallee area in north-western regional Victoria.
Panellists and participants made strong calls for action on misinformation and disinformation and for more engagement of young people and people with disability in co-design of climate research and advocacy.
They advocated for much greater investment in women’s needs during climate disasters, including addressing family violence and promoting breastfeeding (and the Operational Guidance on Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies) in disaster planning and responses
Council of Academic Public Health Institutions Australasia chair Professor Rebecca Ivers, also a Croakey director, called for more investment in climate health research, including for the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to apply climate change criteria to grants.
Amazingly, according to latest figures analysed in the 2024 report of the MJA–Lancet Countdown on health and climate, only two of 31 health and climate change grant applications to the NHMRC were funded in 2023.
Ivers also called for the health research sector to tap into the passion of young people on climate, including through co-designed research, saying this election campaign has shown that young people are very cynical about the two major parties and their failure to address young people’s needs.
These calls to action came as a new Amnesty International report called out Australia for undermining global progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by planning to increase, rather than scale down, coal and gas production by 2030.
This was “incompatible with global climate commitments” said the report, also noting that Australia had “no clear plan to phase out fossil fuels or curb extraction,” and its climate finance contributions were “critically insufficient”.
In Echuca
Judkins works in Echuca, a town built on the banks of the River Murray in north-western Victoria, on the lands of the Yorta Yorta people, where flooding, droughts and bushfires now pose an ever-present risk to livelihoods and health.
In recent months there’s been little rain and higher than average temperatures, and he’s worried about local farmers who may not be able to sow their crops this year.
“There’s obviously the health risk [from climate change), but the other risk is their livelihoods. They need climate stability to be able to farm and the way things are looking at the moment, over the next five to 10 years, they’re not going to have any of that stability,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody’s really having that conversation with them about how to prepare for that.”
Echuca is in the federal electorate of Nicholls, described as “Victoria’s food bowl, growing and processing fruit, tomatoes and milk as well as cropping, sheep and beef cattle”. It is held by Nationals MP Sam Birrell, whose chief rival is the Liberal Party.
Birrell hosted a Climate Leadership and Jobs Summit back in 2023, and highlighted climate change as a “complex challenge” for Australia in his 2022 maiden speech.
“The need to act is not in question. How we do it, without causing huge economic damage to our nation and its people, is the question,” he said, warning against “reckless” action with “unrealistic time lines out of step with our global competitors”.
Judkins said his efforts to engage the MP on climate action recently had just seen Birrell “toeing the party line” on nuclear energy and purported risks to agricultural land from renewable energy infrastructure.
Long a champion for climate action, Judkins is a former president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM), a member of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and a member of Croakey Health Media.
He knows first-hand that rural and regional areas are disproportionately on the frontline of climate emergencies such as Cyclone Alfred, which saw flood waters engulf Queensland, covering an area more than four times the size of the United Kingdom.
Health experts have warned that the flooding, which has submerged agricultural land and forced residents to evacuate, is also triggering a rise in waterborne diseases, mental health issues, infections and respiratory conditions.
But Judkins says, for some in rural and regional areas, even mentioning the term ‘climate change’ still prompts anger. Others don’t see a direct line between the climate crisis and health.
Citing the villain from the Harry Potter books, Judkins said: “Climate change is a bit like Voldemort: ‘it shall not be mentioned’.”
“Nobody’s talking about it and we’re not preparing our regional communities for the impacts that are with us now and are just going to get worse and worse.”
Election campaign
Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor Adam Morton also sounded the alarm this week about the silence surrounding climate change, writing that the 2025 election “is unlike any I’ve seen”.
“The climate crisis has been a consistent presence – from the emissions-fuelled cyclone that delayed the start of the campaign to the near constant arguments over energy prices – but, bizarrely, the issue itself has rarely been named. It has been nearly completely absent from a policy perspective, at least from the major parties.”
Peri Strathearn, Managing Editor and Founder of Murray Bridge News in South Australia, echoed Judkins’ concerns in a recent interview with Croakey, raising the need for greater civics education and media literacy in the face of overwhelming misinformation and disinformation.
The Murrayland region that his outlet covers suffered huge flooding two years ago and is now in the grip of drought, all superimposed with the stresses of rising cost of living.
Yet still people don’t draw the dots, Strathearn said.
“When you start using words like climate change, people switch off, [thinking] ‘I’ve always voted Liberal, I don’t think I should be talking about climate change’. [They’re] just thinking about the current drought, the current flood, not whether we should be cutting emissions.”
The reasons for this go beyond individuals not wanting to consider the impacts of climate change, the webinar heard.
They include the denial and weaponisation of climate change and disinformation by some media and politicians, led now by US President Donald Trump, the influence of vested interests like fossil fuel industries, the dramatic decline of media outlets in rural and regional areas, and a sense of hopelessness for some on the ground in the face of such a huge threat.
Communities’ concerns
Dr Jo Adams, a research fellow at La Trobe University in Bendigo, joined the #CroakeyLIVE panel to describe a recent research project in the Loddon Mallee region that sought to listen closely to three population groups whose perspectives are often overlooked in both research and public discourse.
Their project involved a range of participants in the Loddon Mallee area, including neurodivergent individuals, multicultural community members from a regional farming area, and older adults with limited access to digital technology, reflecting priority groups outlined in the National Health and Climate Strategy (which is unlikely to continue if the Coalition is elected).
As Adams wrote recently at Croakey, the study aimed to understand these group’s views on climate change, how it’s affecting their health, and what kind of support they need to navigate an increasingly uncertain future.
One of the big common concerns was “mistrust of information”, particularly from media, around climate change, she told the webinar.
“People in rural areas don’t know what to believe, and they don’t know where that puts them,” she said.
Some find it difficult to “bridge the gap” between catastrophic information on the global scale and their local experiences, or struggle with the language around policy when they don’t necessarily accept that climate change is anthropogenic, she said.
“The language that we often use is not really acceptable to some rural people,” Adams said.
Even just the term ‘climate change’: “it rolls off our tongues, but it’s not something they would normally relate to, and often you have to use other wording, like extreme weather events or something different that is not so assumptive about what’s going on.”
Yet climate change is having a clear toll in the community. Participants shared diverse concerns about climate-related health threats, ranging from allergies and asthma to skin cancer, heat, and mosquitoes.
“But the most prominent was mental health and anxiety,” Adams said.
Some of that anxiety relates to the viability of their townships, whether they can continue working or investing in agriculture. For others, it’s about being able to rely on or afford electricity.
Much worry was centred around “a sense of powerlessness about ‘what can I do that will make a difference?’.”
“People are feeling anxious about climate change and about the impact that it’s going to have on them, and sometimes that anxiety leads to them disengaging from a whole debate, because they don’t feel there’s anything they can do,” Adams said.
Flood watch
That sort of anxiety is not confined to adults, said fellow panellist Dr Karen Anderson, a senior health promotion and public health advisor at Women’s Health Loddon Mallee, who is concerned for younger and coming generations as the impacts of the climate crisis worsen.
Anderson grew up in a small rural town and thought she was used to extreme weather events until she was overwhelmed by the scale of the October 2022 floods in Bendigo. Devastating and prolonged flooding affected 63 of Victoria’s 79 municipalities, with multiple communities losing homes, businesses, infrastructure, roads, and crops.
“I’ve lived through floods, I’ve lived through bushfires. I’ve lived through drought…but I hadn’t experienced anything quite like the intensity with which the rain fell, just how rapid it was,” Anderson told the webinar, describing how Bendigo River rose up behind her home.
The biggest impact has been seeing the impact on her eight-year-old daughter, who now worries about another flood anytime there’s a real threat of rain.
“We had rain on the weekend, and …[she] sat on the couch going, ‘Are we going to flood? I feel like we’re going to flood, Mum. The rain’s coming, it’s really hard, it’s really loud, we’re going to flood.’
“So every time she now sees clouds coming in, [she’s asking] ‘Is it going to rain? How much rain? And how quickly will it come, Mum?’
“So that anxiety is already there and my fear is, what does that do for her as her understanding around climate change grows,” said Anderson.
Through her work on the Loddon Mallee Women Rising project, Anderson has heard similar stories of women being on ‘flood watch’ every time it rains and their children anxious about ‘the inevitability that this will happen again”.
Women Rising, she wrote, has funded 19 projects across the region in the wake of the 2022 floods, applying an intersectional feminist lens to flood recovery, centring women’s lived experiences, with a focus on mental health and wellbeing.
That included Nurture and Nourishment on Country weekends, with local First Nations women leaders, helping to provide a culturally safe space that “recognises the enormous load that they are carrying within their communities”.
Asked what announcements she would like to see in these final days of the federal election campaign, Anderson urged record funding for women-led climate initiatives to enhance community resilience, and commitment to primary prevention of gender-based violence, which is one of the biggest threats to women’s health and safety in times of climate related disasters.
She also urged better sex and gender disaggregated data, saying there are massive data gaps when it comes to women’s health and well-being. Better data was needed to develop evidence- and place-based programs and to “capture the stories” that actually resonate with politicians and policy makers.
Ways forward
Climate and Health Association (CAHA) CEO Michelle Isles told the webinar she is buoyed by knowing that some of the first climate emergency and sustainability groups, and progressive independent MPs, emerged from regional communities.
This was “in response to the stark evidence about what was happening to our planet but also through this lived experience….seeing the impacts and wanting change”, Isles said.
She came to her role at CAHA after being the general manager of a regional hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a region already under stress that then was hit by storms, floods and fires.
“I saw the pressure of health leaders being on the front line [of climate change], and the need to work with multiple sectors and multiple people across community on the solutions.”
While there is strong social capital in rural and regional areas, political capital and resourcing is missing, and more needs to be done to elevate the voices of people who “don’t tend to be heard”, Isles said.
CAHA recently joined forces with the National Rural Health Alliance to warn that rural communities, in the wake of devastating floods in Northern Queensland and bushfires in Victoria, were grappling with significant and long-term health impacts.
Isles warned in the statement that health professionals are not currently equipped to deal with the frequency and scale of climate change events, and that CAHA had been observing hospital admissions rise and health services unable to evacuate from fire zones.
While it is important to have election policies that commit, for example, to a Regional Australia Future Fund, and to bulk billing and a free, nationwide 24/7 health advice line and afterhours GP telehealth service, she asked: ”where is climate change in all of this?”.
“Because we know that is pressuring regional communities and the health systems they depend on.”
Equally important, Isles said, is the need to address issues of trust and perception, to co-design ways to bring people together, share their stories and values, to make solutions practical, and to work together to cost the impacts on health from both fossil fuel extraction, for example through air pollution in mining regions, and the costs of climate change.
“We need to get it on the agenda to be the first thing that politicians say and the first things that media outlets report,” she said.
But while it was important to have national frameworks and strategies to address national challenges, having community-led, bottom-up approaches “is the way forward”, she said.
In closing the event, Verhoeven said her key takeaways were:
- The need to find a way to communicate the cost of the climate emergency and failure to act in financial terms so it has relevance to conversations ranging from the hip-pocket to the Treasury.
- How do we address misinformation and disinformation, including where and how independent news outlets like Croakey can make more of an impact?
- How do we talk to different groups of people, including young people, people with disability, women, small rural communities and, of course, First Nations communities? How do we engage, empower and support them to lead their own responses and initiatives so that it promotes a genuine community-up approach?
Participants’ comments
Watch the webinar
Further reading
Dr Jo Adams: Learn from regional communities’ diverse perspectives on the climate crisis
Dr Karen Anderson: Women are rising to address the climate crisis
Jason Staines: Health workers urged to break the election silence on climate and health
X thread from the #CroakeyLIVE
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the Local and Independent News Association for supporting the #CroakeyLIVE webinars on #ClimateHeathMatters and associated journalism.
