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[title]There’s rain, and then there are the brutal downpours that have inundated Sydney in recent weeks, torrential squalls that would make Michael Bay blush, turning roads into rivers in seconds. Which is a problem, not just because Sydney is a city that loses its shine when the sun doesn’t, but also because this recent battering from above is summoning some disturbingly familiar feelings for many Sydneysiders who lived through a similarly extreme natural disaster a little over two years ago.
History will remember 2020 as the year everything changed, the year words like “lockdown” and “pivot” and “livestream” became second nature, the year the world was brought to a standstill by a once-in-a-century pandemic. But had you asked someone just before the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2019, they would likely have told you that 2020 was sure to be the year that the global community got serious about the climate crisis. And that Australia was the reason why.
In late 2019, while the world watched our continent burn, Australia was cast as the canary in the climate emergency coal mine. The bushfire disaster was a sobering vision of what our warming climate would eventually inflict on the rest of the planet, and the sheer scale of the destruction made that truth unignorable. Images of skies stained an otherworldly orange by vast drifts of smoke and countless hectares of bush reduced to ash proved as galvanising as they were horrifying. People around the world were spurred into action. Celebrities championed donation drives and benefit performances, climate protests in cities all over the globe demanded immediate action, and international media devoted countless articles to the unfolding catastrophe as photos of burned wildlife and razed homes went viral. The political embarrassment of prime minister Scott Morrison’s ill-timed getaway to Hawaii, compounded by bungled photo ops with desperate people in ruined communities, also seemed to escalate the urgency of the issue in Australia’s corridors of power.
And not a moment too soon, it seemed. Multiple climate models suggested that a decade was all the time the world had left to change its ways, lessen its dependency on fossil fuels and reduce its carbon emissions to avoid the worst-case scenarios. However, whatever momentum was building in early 2020 would soon stall, as news of a novel respiratory illness spreading around the world began to draw the spotlight away from the climate crisis, pushing it back into the shadows, out of sight and out of mind.
It is understandable that whatever dread the bushfires stirred would be overshadowed by the more intimate terrors of the pandemic. Few of us were prepared to face down one existential threat, let alone two at the same time. But looking back, it’s hard not to feel that we missed our shot, squandering the chance to unite behind a crisis that isn’t going away, no matter how distracted we may be.
The pandemic has stolen a lot from all of us, not least the impetus to act on climate change, but it has also revealed some unexpected silver linings. Before the emergence of the virus, it was all too easy to feel stunned into paralysis by the scale of the climate crisis. Faced with a problem so monumental, it’s easier to surrender to the defeatist thinking that nothing we do could possibly make a dent. However, the international efforts to rapidly enact change over the past two years – to our everyday behaviours and mentalities – while innovating cutting-edge solutions to global crises is evidence that given the will and the funding, we could make a difference on climate, and in a relatively short amount of time.
It’s a realisation that we should hold onto as we begin to process yet another traumatic disaster. The megafloods that have inundated multiple communities along the east coast have been described as a ‘once-in-a-thousand-year’ event, but they are no freak occurrence. Indeed, it feels like self-serving cynicism to view the relentless downpours that have burst riverbanks, breached dams and set new flood records as a ‘natural disaster’.
Extreme flooding is a direct result of manmade climate change, every bit as destructive as the fires that consumed comparable swathes of the country to those currently underwater in NSW and Queensland. As a recent statement by Australia’s Climate Council put it: “Climate change isn’t a footnote to the story of these floods. It is the story.”
Dark clouds have been a familiar sight in the skies over Sydney in recent weeks, but it’s the silver linings that we need to focus on if we're to regain the collective will the world shared with us as we faced the flames. Once again, Australia is the canary in the coal mine. Once again, the world has a preview of what a destabilised climate looks like. We have a second chance to meet the moment, this time with the tenacity, endurance and innovation that prior to the pandemic, we never knew we had.