Like all Australians, I have seen with my own eyes the marks that disasters have left on this country, disasters which will be — and have already become — more common and more intense as climate change continues to worsen. 

I remember moving to Canberra in 2008, arriving in a city still massively scarred by the 2003 bushfires, which left houses destroyed and hillsides barren. In 2011, I remember being stranded in Brisbane as houses just down the street were destroyed in the supposedly “once-in-a-century” floods. Almost a decade later, I remember wearing a N95 mask as the 2020 bushfires made the Canberra air unbreathable. 

Anyone who lives in this country will have experienced similar consequences. But does that mean that we should see climate change from a primarily self-interested, national perspective? Some commentators and politicians, though they rightly accept the reality of climate change, refuse to see it any other way. David Shor, a centre-left analyst, once infamously tweeted that he “would rather live in a world where we see a 4-degree rise in temperature than live in a world with China as a global hegemon”. 

This kind of thinking is, of course, the same justification Donald Trump uses for wanting to pull the United States — again — out of all international efforts to combat climate change, as he and his administration “drill, baby, drill” to fuel economic success over China. 

The spectre of China haunts Australia’s climate policy. Our government’s recently signed deal with Tuvalu, the Falepili Union, grants Tuvalu some money for climate change adaptation and grants preferential migration rights to Tuvaluans. The inevitable catch? Australia receives veto power over any security-related partnerships Tuvalu may enter into in the indefinite future.

Accelerating climate change for short-term nationalist expediency or tying climate action to diplomatic gamesmanship is against the interests of ordinary people around the world. Climate change is a global issue, but like all problems of note, it is likely to affect poorer nations far more than the richer ones, even Australia, which is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. The more climate action and the money attached to it become dragged into petty political and diplomatic squabbles, the less effective it becomes, and the fewer lives it will save. We should not be complicit in forcing tiny Pacific nations to choose between an independent foreign policy, which aids their security and economic development, and essential climate measures that ensure their long-term survival.

The lack of seriousness with which Australia, in particular, takes measures to combat climate change from a global perspective can be seen in its financial contributions. The Green Climate Fund, established alongside the Paris Agreement, is the world’s largest multilateral fund. It distributes billions of dollars to aid developing countries in emissions reduction and climate adaptation. Australia shamefully withdrew from the fund in 2018 under the former government, before returning in 2023 with a pitiful $50 million contribution, far less than the contributions of Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland and others. 

Our direct bilateral contribution to improving Tuvalu’s climate defences — in exchange for control over that nation’s security — was $38 million dollars. Our government, constantly increasing defence spending to greater heights, including finding hundreds of billions for submarines, can find nothing more than chump change for multilateral and bilateral climate funding efforts.

Much has been said about the fall of the “rules-based international order”, a collapse accelerated by Russia’s war of territorial annexation in Ukraine and the West’s complicity in the disastrous invasion of Gaza. I have little patience for liberal, moralistic, empty platitudes about international collaboration that should be left squarely in the 1990s. But the people of all nations, Chinese, Pacific or Australian, really do have a genuine and strong interest in internationalism of material commitment rather than non-binding aphorisms in the climate sphere. 

Perhaps most obviously, climate change threatens the stability of developing countries that are deeply involved in global supply chains and will, therefore, drive up prices at the pump and at the grocery store. In the longer term, of course, much more fundamental global systems are at stake, particularly if a number anywhere near Shor’s 4 degrees Celsius of warming is reached. One article in the Royal Society’s journal by Philip Thornton and other scientists predicts the complete or near-complete collapse of farming in sub-Saharan Africa if this scenario were reached. If that were to occur, it would not be only Africans who starve.

The critic Fredric Jameson once argued in an article called The Aesthetics of Singularity that “in our time, all politics is about real estate…from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty local maneuvering around advantage”. The climate crisis is no exception. Our pathologically short-sighted rulers are interested in nationalist squabbles about exactly which real estate belongs to whom. We share the responsibility to know better, to initiate a politics that rises above questions of who owns the land to answer questions of how to defend our lands and ecosystems against the external threat of climate change, which affects us all. 

This task is not an easy one. It will evolve as the situation and the science evolve — as the climate crisis continues unabated, the focus of the climate change movement may shift from emissions reduction to climate adaptation. It seems obvious that the global climate movement should demand that governments spend substantial proportions of their national budgets on both causes. But the fundamentally political task of overcoming the chronic short-sightedness of governments, warmongers, and profiteers precedes any prosaic matters of detailed policy.

Being part of local groups like the Environment Collective is, at the very least, a declaration of intent that the climate movement will not lie down and die. I encourage you to follow our Instagram page, @anuenviro, and attend our regular meetings.

Sarah Strange is the elected Environment Officer of ANUSA, the ANU student union. She is also a member of the ACT Greens and a National Conference Delegate with the Greens.