The fight for climate justice

It would be hard to recall a worse summer than the summer of 2019–20: whole swathes of the country choked in noxious smoke, a tourism season turned desolate and image after image of fires ripping through land, homes and wildlife with ruthless efficiency.

While city dwellers cancelled summer road trips and piled outside to the sound of tripping office fire alarms, while they ushered their children indoors to escape the hazardous air quality, rural communities on the front line of the fires lost everything: their homes and spaces, their wildlife, their livelihoods, their safety and peace of mind. The fires arrived after unprecedented back-to-back droughts, which themselves had plagued rural towns and villages for years, resulting in crop failures, ravaging ecosystems, laying waste to farms and cutting water supplies completely.

What became undeniably clear to anyone who saw the piles of ash that were once homes was this: it is -vulnerable communities who feel the brunt of climate-based disasters. Rural populations and Indigenous communities are