As flood waters rose in Brisbane’s West End in February 2022, Brendon Donohue was trapped alone in his second-storey apartment for 10 days. The 33-year-old is legally blind and his movement is limited by Peters plus syndrome. He received evacuation alerts on his phone in the middle of the night. But with the lift, intercom and front entrance shut down he had no safe way out of the building.
“It was terrifying,” he says. “The whole street was badly impacted with water. The power went out, which made me not able to contact anyone. I ran out of food but couldn’t get any into the building.”
Four years on, Donohue has joined a unique legal complaint, along with nine other Australians. Each has a specific story, but they say they see a through-line – that they have each been hurt by the climate crisis in a way that can be directly linked to the Australian government’s continuing support for fossil fuel developments for export.
Jack Egan lost his house in Batemans Bay on the New South Wales south coast to bushfires on New Year’s Eve 2019. He says he remembers flames consuming his front deck and licking into his home through the windows. He remembers giving up trying to save his property and running through raining embers to escape.
He remembers the hours that followed, when he could not find his partner, Cath, and feared she had joined 33 others who lost their lives to fire that season before they were reunited on a nearby beach. “I thought for some time that she was dead,” he says.
Mel Fisher stayed in her home as Adelaide suffered through a heatwave last summer, but feared it was a mistake. As the South Australian capital faced multiple days above 40C, her small, brick public housing home in suburban Elizabeth Vale captured the heat and clung on to it for days. She says the exposure to high temperatures – including a night when the minimum was 34C – exacerbated a painful auto-inflammatory skin condition, and at times left her bedridden.
“I have poor insulation, the interior walls are all concrete and I have a tin roof. I genuinely thought I might die from the heat,” Fisher says. “Sometimes the pain gets so bad that it can feel like my skin is ripping and tearing.”
Elsewhere in Adelaide, Latisha Francis, a 25-year-old Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Narungga woman who is studying marine and wildlife conservation, spent last year coping with an unprecedented toxic algal bloom linked to a spike in sea temperatures that killed wildlife and drove her family away from using a coastline which has been their home for millennia.
“It was so distressing, from an Indigenous perspective,” she says. “So much of our culture was being shared by the ocean. A lot of people just distance themselves from the water now because they are too scared to go near it.”
Donohue, Egan, Fisher and Francis and six others have told their stories as part of a complaint against the Australian government with the UN human rights committee. They are backed and organised by the Human Rights Law Centre, Environmental Justice Australia and the US-based Earthjustice.
They say what they call the “hard truths case” is the first legal claim in an international court or body against a state for climate harm since the International Court of Justice released an advisory opinion that found states had a legal obligation to take measures to prevent it. Australia was one of 140 countries to pass a UN resolution backing the legal ruling last month.
The complaint is exploratory. It argues the government is violating the claimants human rights by continuing to support coal and gas developments that fuel climate extremes.
If the UN committee finds in their favour it could recommend actions the government should take. The claimants say the government, as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, would be bound to consider the committee’s findings in good faith. But the recommendations would not be enforceable.
Scientists supporting the claim say the first argument that must be established – that the 10 have been harmed by extreme events fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels – is clear. David Karoly, an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and now a member of the Climate Council, says international and Australian agencies have repeatedly demonstrated that emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are significantly increasing the risk of damage from bushfires, floods and land and marine heatwaves.
Karoly says the federal government should be accountable. “Australia has to take responsibility for its emissions, whether it is domestic emissions or the larger emissions overseas after it exports coal and gas,” he says.
He acknowledges that Australian courts haven’t agreed. The federal court last year found the government did not have a legal responsibility to protect the Torres Strait Islands from climate change, despite agreeing in forceful language that they faced a bleak future if urgent action was not taken. But that case, which is being appealed, faced a different test to the UN claim.
The complaint is supported by some crossbench MPs. Independent Zali Steggall says it highlights a “glaring inconsistency” in climate policy: that the country is taking steps to cut domestic emissions as it expands support for fossil fuel exports. “The stories of these claimants show climate change is not an abstract future threat,” she says.
Could the complaint succeed? The government is expected to argue that it is backing renewable energy and cutting emissions at home, aiming to develop clean export industries to replace fossil fuels, and that there is little point in damaging trade relationships by cutting off coal and gas when there is still demand and other countries are selling them.
Harj Narulla, a London-based barrister with Doughty Street Chambers and Oxford University who specialises in climate litigation and is not party to the complaint, says Australia has a “huge amount of liability and exposure” given the scale of its fossil fuel exports.
“I think Australia has a very, very challenging case to answer,” he says. “It’s the first complaint of its kind we’ve seen against Australia, but I don’t think it will be the last.”
Source:
www.theguardian.com
