The climate crisis is already having a devastating impact on our communities across the planet, ecologies, and climates we are part of. People are experiencing first-hand the catastrophic impacts of floods, fires, heatwaves, cyclones, food, and water shortages, making homelands uninhabitable and contributing to war, disease, poverty, mass migration, and widespread cultural loss for people, plants, and animals [1]. We are beginning to live through what is being called the 6th mass extinction on our planet [2].

There is no longer any debate about if climate change is real. It is a question of how we collectively create a just transition away from extractive and life-destroying cultures towards caring, regenerative and thriving ones – putting people and the planet before profit.

The Climate Council has said to mitigate the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis, Australia needs to transition to 75% renewables by 2030 and net zero by 2035 to keep under 1.5°C warming from pre-industrial levels [3] – and yet since 2016, the ‘Big 4’ banks have collectively lent more than $57.5 billion to fossil fuel projects [4].

We have a small window of opportunity to avoid setting off a series of cascading feedback loops making global weather systems irrevocably unstable and devastating the lifeworlds that depend on them. From the melting of mountain glaciers and permafrost to the collapse of the North Atlantic current, to the death of the Amazon Rainforest and Great Barrier Reef – we depend on these interconnected systems for life on our planet to survive and thrive.

This has been described as a health crisis of unimaginable proportions, impacting individual, collective, and planetary health in unevenly distributed ways. It will and already has disproportionately impacted those who are made most vulnerable, marginalised and contributing the least to its creation. The UN found in the past half a century that extreme weather has caused the death of 2 million people, 90% of which were from ‘developing countries’ [5]. We have recently lived through the impacts of a global pandemic, a type of event that is predicted to increase with rising temperatures.

To navigate the most effective course of action to treat this health crisis, it is important to diagnose the root causes. To simply name this a ‘manmade’ crisis does not go far enough to identify that it is a product of specific values, beliefs and practices that have emerged from cultures of domination, exploitation, and estrangement. There are a myriad of examples of thriving cultures around the world that long have resilient, place-based ways of living and working, whose expertise could benefit us all – and yet who continue to be erased, devalued, or destroyed.

The climate crisis is a direct result of the ongoing world-building-and-destroying project of colonisation, whose extractive industries continue to decimate the traditional sacred lands of First Peoples. Through living and working on unceded lands, non-Indigenous Australians have a responsibility and opportunity to walk together with First Nations people supporting sovereignty and self-determination towards a thriving future for all.

We can’t stand back and leave these problems to our leaders who continue to fund deadly new fossil fuel projects, despite their promises otherwise. We have to contribute to empowering grassroots movements, to collaborate across difference, and harness our collective power in service to each other and a livable world.