Meet The Next Generation Of Women Leading Australia’s Grassroots Climate Activism

Despite being born into climate disaster, the responsibility to take action on climate change weighs heavily on young people. Around the world, many of them are leading the charge to reverse apathy and protect our futures.

We know that women will be disproportionately impacted by climate change; a phenomenon the UN refers to as a "threat multiplier". When disasters hit, "women are less likely to survive and more likely to be injured due to long-standing gender inequalities that have created disparities in information, mobility, decision-making, and access to resources and training."

In episode two of The Burning Issue, we meet the next generation of Australian climate activists, including Anjali Sharma, who, at age 16, was the lead litigant in the Sharma v.s. The Environment Minister case. A group of teenagers took a class action lawsuit to the Australian High Court in 2020, which sought to prove that the government has a duty of care for young Australians to make tangible efforts to prevent climate change.

“I’ve seen the impact of climate change on some of the people I love, and I want to do whatever I can to fight it,” says Anjali. “I was 16 when the case was filed. So it wasn’t a matter of confidence. It was a matter of responsibility.”

In the video below, we follow her and other resilient young women spearheading climate activism in Australia, as they discuss what it's like to try and make a change in the face of sexism, racism and institutional stagnation.

You can revisit Episode One of The Burning Issue here, where we met the women spearheading the Northern Rivers flood recovery.