2026-07-24
The climate crisis is here. What we do next matters.
By Senator Larissa Waters
Like so many of you, I’ve watched in horror as the scale of the disaster in Nepal and the Himalayas has become clear.
A wall of ice, rock and water tore through communities, killing more than a thousand people, with thousands more still missing. Whole villages have been devastated.
We see so many climate disasters now that there’s a risk they start to blur together. But behind every image is a family, a home and a community trying to pick up the pieces. Wildlife and landscapes devastated.
What has stayed with me most is the sheer unfairness of it.
Nepal has contributed almost nothing to the pollution driving the climate crisis. Yet its people are being asked to bear the consequences created overwhelmingly by wealthier, higher-polluting countries.
And watching those images, I also thought about communities here in Australia that know what it is to watch fire, flood or cyclone tear through a place they love.
That’s the thing about climate change. It can feel distant until suddenly it is very close.
People feel it in whether they can insure their homes, what they pay for food and energy, whether they can work safely through extreme heat, and whether their community will be ready for the next disaster.
So when we talk about climate action, we should be talking about people’s lives.
About safer homes and communities. Cleaner, cheaper energy. Secure jobs in the industries of the future. Protecting the places and the creatures that we love before they are damaged beyond repair or made extinct.
And we also need to be honest about what real climate action requires.
When they were first created, carbon offsets were never meant to become a substitute for cutting pollution. They were supposed to play a limited role where emissions genuinely could not yet be eliminated, ‘hard to abate’ sectors.
Instead, Australia has built a system where major fossil fuel and industrial polluters can use unlimited carbon credits to avoid reducing actual pollution under the Safeguard Mechanism. That mechanism is being reviewed right now, including whether it is actually driving enough pollution reduction at the source. It’s clear that it’s not.
Coal and gas pollution should not simply be greenwashed away with an accounting exercise.
Recently, the Greens secured an important precedent - the first ever ban on coal and gas companies using carbon credits from a particular methodology. We also secured stronger protections designed to permanently reduce logging and protect forests.
That is progress. But it is very much the beginning, not the end.
Now we need to ensure that coal and gas can never buy their way out of emissions reductions ever again.
We need climate laws that require genuine pollution cuts, protect nature and stop fossil fuel companies treating offsets as permission to keep expanding.
And we need a government to stop approving new coal and gas projects like there is no tomorrow. The Albanese government have now approved 37 new or expanded coal or gas projects, in absolute denial of climate science. They always say yes to their coal and gas donors.
The fossil fuel industry has spent decades building political access, industry bodies, public relations operations and influence designed to protect its interests.
If we’re going to change that, we have to be just as persistent.
That means building strong organisations, informed communities and the capacity to keep organising long after any single campaign is over.
Because the climate crisis was not created overnight. Changing course will take the same thing real change always takes: persistence, organisation and people who refuse to give up.
And I’m proud to be part of that movement with you.