Introduction by Croakey: While climate change was at least raised during the ABC Leaders Debate this week, the harmful impacts of a warming climate upon our health have not figured prominently during the election campaign.
Now is the time for the health sector to engage in advocating for climate action, reports Jason Staines from a #CroakeyLIVE webinar this week that brought together medical leaders for a conversation, which ranged widely across personal and professional concerns, and identified ways forward.
Jason Staines writes:
When the local fire service told Professor Anthony Harris they would not come to his street in the event of a bushfire, he knew climate change had moved from abstract threat to immediate danger.
“Our local rural fire service has told us that if the bush around us lights up, they’re not coming anywhere close to us because they don’t think it’s a safe space for their crews to come to,” he told a CroakeyLIVE webinar on 15 April.
Harris, a psychiatrist living in northern Sydney, was not speaking hypothetically; this was the reality he and his family faced during the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, and one he anticipates every summer.
His experience was echoed throughout the webinar, where doctors shared personal stories that illustrated how climate change has already changed the way they live and practise.
The webinar brought together Dr Kate Wylie, a GP in Adelaide and Executive Director of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA); Harris, a public sector psychiatrist working in western Sydney; and Dr George Crisp, a GP in Perth. Between them, they have more than 90 years’ experience in caring for patients.
The session, moderated by Croakey Health Media Co-Chair James Blackwell, focused on climate change as a health issue – not one looming in the distant future, but that is already harming Australians’ health and wellbeing, while also affecting service delivery and health infrastructure.
The message was clear: action is long overdue. And not just from politicians, but also from health workers, voters, and communities.
What, they asked, can we actually do?
Addressing denial
Denial about the climate crisis is not the opposite of belief, it’s the companion of fear, the discussion suggested.
While political denialism is a familiar theme in discussions about climate inaction, the CroakeyLIVE panellists examined a subtler, more personal form of denial – one rooted in fear, exhaustion, and psychological self-protection.
Wylie, reflecting on patient behaviour, said: “I’ve had two patients with tumours the size of a fist and to be in denial about them … so, you know, it’s a very effective psychological defence mechanism,” she said.
Wylie was not just talking about patients. Her point was broader – many Australians know what is coming. They have seen the fires, lived through the floods, watched health warnings issued during heatwaves.
But still, it is easier to look away.
“Denial is powerful,” Wylie said. “No wonder people are in denial. How scary is that?”
This is precisely what fossil fuel interests exploit, the panel pointed out: the deeply human tendency to avoid acting on something overwhelming.
Harris added that even among climate sceptics who disrupt public forums, the desire to talk about climate persists.
Recognising denial as a coping mechanism – rather than just misinformation or apathy – allows for a more compassionate, productive response.
If people are retreating from the crisis out of fear, then creating supportive pathways back into the conversation becomes an urgent task.
As Wylie said, “People want to know what to do.”
Where are the leaders?
With the federal election just over two weeks away, the CroakeyLIVE panel was unanimous: climate and health matters are being sidelined in the national conversation, and the consequences are far-reaching.
Crisp told the audience that while long-term thinking is possible when it comes to the Defence portfolio, this is not the case for health and climate, which gets side-lined by short-termism.
Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), whose members include all three panellists, recently ran 12 public forums in marginal electorates across the country, aiming to make climate and health a central election issue.
But the experience revealed a worrying gap in awareness among candidates.
“There’s exceptions, but there were a lot of electorates where you could see the candidates had never thought about climate and health before either and lacked understanding, lacked education on it,” said Wylie.
“The dominant purpose of our events was to make sure that the people who are representing us next time in parliament understand that the policies they enact regarding energy and emissions impacts the health of their electorate,” she said.
DEA has outlined four priority actions for the next government:
No new coal or gas projects – It is the clearest line of defence for public health.
Ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship – Panellists drew direct comparisons with the long campaign against tobacco advertising, and the fossil fuel industry’s co-opting of youth sport, of which examples were given from Queensland to South Australia and Western Australia.
Maintain the ban on nuclear energy – DEA argues it is a dangerous distraction, water-intensive, and delays real decarbonisation.
Fund and empower the National Climate and Health Strategy – DEA is calling for major investment, especially in educating the entire health workforce.
These demands are grounded in science and framed explicitly in terms of human health. But they are still rarely discussed at campaign events or in mainstream media coverage.
Wylie told the webinar that climate health initiatives receive less than one ten-thousandth of a percent of the federal health budget, although the World Health Organization has described climate change as “the greatest threat to public health in the 21st Century”.
DEA and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have released an open letter urging voters to support candidates committed to strong climate action to protect health.
The letter, signed by both organisations, highlights the direct health impacts clinicians are already treating – including heatstroke, respiratory illness, trauma from climate disasters, and disruptions to healthcare access.
“Voting for climate action is voting for healthier communities and a safer, more equitable future for everyone,” the letter says.
New research
The imperative for action is underscored by the seventh annual report of The MJA–Lancet Countdown, a comprehensive study tracking progress on key climate and health indicators, which shows that exposure to heatwaves is growing in Australia, and highlights “continuing deficiencies in Australia’s response to the health and climate change threat”.
The study reports that a key component of Australia’s capacity to respond to bushfires, its number of firefighting volunteers, is in decline, dropping by 38,442 people, or 17 percent, in just seven years.
“Nationally, regionally and globally, the next five years are pivotal in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning energy production to renewables,” say the authors.
In 2023, there was less Australian media attention to health and climate change than there was in 2022, as measured by the number of articles on this topic in major newspapers and in ABC online content. This change might have resulted from a temporary uplift in 2022 during the federal election campaign, the researchers say.
By contrast, there was a 29 percent increase in scientific publications about health and climate change in Australia in 2023 compared with 2022. Temperature and bushfires remained the most studied health risks.
In comparison with 2022, there were more than twice as many health and climate change grant applications to NHMRC in 2023, but the success rate was only six percent (two of 31 applications).
State and territory parliaments continued to engage with climate change as a health issue in 2023, with 15 Bills introduced and 27 inquiries held on topics dealing with climate health issues. The national Parliament showed less engagement.
The report’s new indicator of health and climate change litigation in Australia showed that health was raised as an issue in eleven climate cases from 2014 to 2023.
Election ratings
James Blackwell, a proud Wiradyuri man from Boorowa in regional NSW, brought some of his many hats to the conversation, including as the first Indigenous person to be elected to Hilltops Council, and as a Research Fellow in Indigenous Diplomacy at the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.
He urged webinar participants to be proactive when they meet local candidates while out and about during the election campaign.
“Don’t just take the flyer and walk away,” he said. “Ask the question. Ask them what they’re going to do. They are there in public trying to win your vote.”
Major scorecards released ahead of the election have underlined the need for the major parties to do more on climate health matters.
The Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA) assessed the major parties’ policies against 20 health-focused climate indicators and found only the Greens met the threshold for meaningful action, awarding Labor a moderate score and the Coalition “zero ticks”.
The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) has also released a scorecard evaluating major parties across seven public health priorities, including climate and health.
The Greens received ‘green’ ratings across all categories, indicating strong alignment with PHAA’s policy goals. Labor’s performance was mixed, with ‘green’ ratings for Indigenous health and establishing an Australian CDC, but ‘orange’ or ‘red’ in areas such as climate and health, obesity, and universal oral health.
The Coalition scored ‘red’ in most categories, including climate and health, indicating its limited alignment with public health priorities (see more in this recent Croakey article).
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) scorecard on climate and nature policies awarded the Coalition just one point out of 100, while Labor received a bare pass (54%), and the Greens achieved a high distinction (98%).
From denial to agency
The climate crisis can feel overwhelming – vast, slow-moving, and politically paralysed.
But the CroakeyLIVE panel was adamant that individuals are not powerless. In fact, recognising what you can do is the antidote to the despair that often accompanies climate awareness.
Wylie described her personal strategy for staying motivated and resilient: “I have this practice of acknowledging when I do something. So, you know, tonight, I’ll acknowledge that I was on a webinar this evening and so that I tried to do a positive thing today.”
This small act of acknowledgement, she explained, is a way to stay grounded in action rather than hopelessness: “Just remembering that I’m trying to be one of the good guys in this big global disaster.”
Crisp pointed to the importance of community and connection: “Like-minded people doing things collectively, is also a really, really important support.”
He added: “Becoming active, doing stuff, you know, that’s probably the best antidote, I think, to what otherwise might be sort of distress or hopelessness.”
Likewise, Harris stressed the importance of acting on multiple fronts, describing action as the solution to the “paralysis of fear”.
The panellists outlined three key spheres for action:
Personal: Talk to friends. Share your fears and your hopes. Make sustainable choices, yes – but more importantly, break the silence.
Professional: For those working in health, especially, this means raising the climate-health link in clinical practice, medical education, and peer discussions.
Political: Engage with your local MP or candidate. Ask about their climate and health policy. Attend local forums. Raise your voice.
“Health is the biggest employer in the country,” said Wylie. “If the health workforce understood that climate change is a health issue, it would change the narrative overnight.
“And so, DEA would like to see every health practitioner – be they a doctor, nurse, allied health, or an orderly, anybody that works in the healthcare system – educated on climate and health.”
Stories matter
One of the strongest themes from the discussion was the power of stories to change minds – particularly when facts and statistics fail to land.
Crisp said it was difficult to achieve cut-through communication at a time of so much overwhelming news.
“It’s getting difficult because of how extraordinary the word ‘unprecedented’ is used almost every day.”
He described a conversation at work about events in the United Kingdom: “Just this week, I was having this conversation in our tearoom at work, basically saying that there were fires in the UK. I think there’s 115 wildfires in the UK. In April.
“If you’d gone back 15 years and said to people that there would be fires in the UK in April, you would have been laughed at by everyone.”
Instead of prompting outrage, these events are met with weary resignation. “This is maybe a bit of a slow boiling frog thing,” he said. “Because we get acclimatised to these … evermore crazy weather events.”
Wylie agreed that data alone rarely shifts public perception. “Facts are kind of boring to lots of people’s brains, you know, people’s brains turn off and you start hitting them with percentages and pie graphs and things like that.”
“But maybe the stories that we tell of, you know, the climate experiences we’ve had as clinicians and what we see in our work, you know, we do all increasingly see it, and what we feel personally is humans alive on this planet, that’s a good lever,” she said.
What works, she says, is the personal: the GP speaking from the heart, the neighbour sharing how smoke impacted their child’s asthma, the flood survivor explaining what it is like to lose everything.
The message is that if you want to make change, don’t just cite the IPCC. Tell a story. Make it local. Make it human.
The tools exist
Crisp put it plainly: “We now have all the tools to act. We can decarbonise our energy systems, and quickly. We can change our transport systems. We know a lot more about how to modify our diets and food production.”
He noted the irony of standing on the threshold of possibility, yet still lacking the urgency: “It’s kind of ironic that here we stand up with all of the ability to actually solve the problem now, which we didn’t have 20 years ago.”
So what changed?
One factor could be the media landscape – not just traditional media, but the rise of digital platforms that shape public discourse, attention, and political pressure.
If media are not asking the question, and platforms allow the rapid spread of disinformation, candidates can glide through election cycles unchallenged and doubts can be sown.
And in the age of social media, fragmentation is magnified. Echo chambers, misinformation, and ‘doom fatigue’ compete with the need for clarity and sustained attention.
Against this backdrop, storytelling becomes not just a communication tool but a way to re-centre the human experience and keep the crisis real.
Wylie stressed that political engagement remains vital, especially so close to an election. “We need to decarbonise ASAP, and most people are going to decide who they vote for the day before, and so many people are not engaged.”
Despite the challenges discussed, the CroakeyLIVE webinar closed on a cautiously hopeful note: the science is clear, the solutions exist, and the window for action – while ever-narrowing – is still open.
Whether that action is talking to your GP, your local member, your neighbour, or your children, the call to action is the same: speak up, share your story, and don’t wait for perfect conditions.
As Crisp put it, “There is still time. And it just requires some courage.”
Making headlines
At the end of the webinar, Croakey invited participants to suggest a headline that could capture the discussion.
Here is a selection of responses:
Climate care is healthcare; Fossil fuels are a health hazard – Dr Kate Wylie
I can turn up, and time to speak up – Dr George Crisp
Country burnt to a crisp, met with soggy response – Professor Anthony Harris
Climate changes everything, so make a change in you – Professor Melissa Haswell
You’ve got to be ready to talk to your candidate because you might meet them walking down the street or cycling down the street – Dr Rosalie Schultz
Health is precious. Protect it by action on climate – Dr Elizabeth Haworth
Climate change is a heart attack – Cardiologist Dr Fiona Foo.
Watch
Please join us
Register here to join another #CroakeyLIVE on #climatehealthmatters, with a focus on how regional communities are responding.
From 5-6pm AEST on Monday, 28 April.
These events and associated journalism are supported by a grant via the Local and Independent News Association (LINA).
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the National Health and Climate Strategy
