15 September 2025
BUSHFIRE SURVIVORS FOR CLIMATE ACTION (BSCA) has spoken out in response to the release of the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) today, urging the Albanese Government to set 2035 climate target strong enough to save lives, and to fund the vast costs of climate adaptation by making coal and gas corporations pay a climate pollution levy.
The NCRA reports that on the current trajectory of emissions reduction the world will reach 2.7 degrees of warming by 2100. While climate change is already impacting Australians, the future impacts of climate change will be cascading, compounding and concurrent. The report shows that communities - particularly in the regions, outer suburbs and in northern Australia - will be impacted heavily in many ways (health, homes, insurance and infrastructure) and that climate change will disrupt our very way of life.
Dangerous fire weather days are projected to continue to become more frequent in southern and eastern areas parts of the country, with a longer fire season and the potential for more megafires. Bushfires were identified as key risks across all seven of the country's ‘key systems’ including communities, defense and national security, economy, health and social support, infrastructure, primary industries (including food) and the natural environment.
“We greet this report with a mix of emotions: dread, relief and optimism. The report findings lay out in shocking black and white what our members know in their hearts from their own bitter experience - that catastrophic climate change is unfolding now and will get much worse in the years to come.” said Serena Joyner, Chief Executive Officer of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.
“However we are also relieved that Australia can now have an honest conversation about the very real costs and consequences that climate change is bringing to this country. And with that comes optimism that we have the information and the opportunity to act quickly to lessen the worst impacts, and to dramatically increase funding to communities now to be better prepared for extreme weather and unnatural disasters.”
Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action is part of an alliance calling on the Albanese Government to help pay the escalating damage bill faced by communities in Australia and neighbouring Pacific, by placing a climate pollution levy on coal and gas corporations. The alliance makes the case for raising up to $46 billion annually to fund essential local government and community-led climate adaptation investment across Australia and the Pacific.
Quotes:
Fiona Lee, Elands NSW:
“My family’s home burned to the ground in the Black Summer bushfires. It’s taken a long time to get back on our feet, having shouldered the financial burden of rebuilding our lives from nothing. And emotionally, the toll has been devastating.
“All the while, massive coal companies like Whitehaven continue to post record profits. They are fuelling the climate crisis that is costing us everything, yet paying none of the price. It is ordinary families like mine who are left to carry the emotional, physical and financial burden of the impacts of climate change they are responsible for creating.”
Amy Blain, ACT
“My family lived through the terrifying 2020 bushfires in Bermagui. We carry that trauma, our kids carry the anxiety the fires burdened them with. We can't forget that living nightmare, it's etched into our being. We bear witness to increasing numbers of climate disasters, increasingly severe bushfires and floods, algal blooms, communities thrown into a loop of disaster, recovery, disaster. Hit over and over again. What does it take? How bad does it have to get before the government feels like us, desperate to make it stop?
“Why are we bearing the cost? Why are communities wearing the price of climate disasters? Why are we being burdened again and again and again? Why are we being told to be "resilient" when the ones to blame pay nothing. We didn't cause this. We cannot keep being hammered with disasters and see a government letting polluters do this to us. Make polluters pay.”
Jack Egan, Rosedale, NSW
“‘Privatise the profits, socialise the costs. Better still, make future generations pay – they aren’t old enough to vote us out yet’. That’s how it has always been in Australian climate policy.
"We need a climate pollution levy on big polluters. The levy should get paid into a climate compensation fund to cover the increasingly expensive damage and chaos the big polluters products cause. Make big polluters pay. It’s only fair.”
Media enquiries: Sean Kennedy, 0447 121 378 or [email protected]
About Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action:
Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action (BSCA) is a non-partisan, community organisation made up of bushfire survivors, firefighters and their families working together to call on our leaders to take action on climate change. BSCA formed in 2018, and its founding members were all impacted by bushfires, including Tathra 2018, the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20, Blue Mountains in 2013, Black Saturday in 2009 and Canberra in 2003.
BSCA has been at the cutting edge of legal reform to reduce climate emissions and hold governments, agencies and companies to account. In 2021 we took the NSW Environment Protection Authority to court challenging them on their lack of action on climate change and won. Our landmark win in the NSW Land and Environment Court was the first time that an Australian Court ordered a government to take meaningful action on climate change.
Contact details:
Sean Kennedy, 0447 121 378 or [email protected]
