Ahead of COP31, health leaders have issued a joint statement calling on the Australian Government to act in line with the legal obligation to limit warming to 1.5°C for current and future generations, and to phase out fossil fuels urgently, including though ending subsidies to the sector.
The statement, making 10 calls for action, was issued by 56 health leaders who attended a meeting in Canberra yesterday where new resources were launched to help the Australian health system manage climate risks and adaptation planning.
Dr Amy Coopes attended the Leaders’ Summit at Parliament House and reports below for the Croakey Conference News Service.
Amy Coopes writes:
As Australian negotiators prepare to take the lead role in global climate negotiations in Türkiye next month, climate advocates and health leaders from across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific came together in Parliament House this week, urging action on what was described as “a crisis of connection, belonging and collective purpose”.
Delegates to the Climate and Health Alliance’s 2026 Leaders’ Summit gathered in Canberra on Tuesday to call on the Australian Government, in its role as COP31 lead negotiator in Antalya, to drive an agenda that elevates the voices, experiences and needs of Pacific nations, where the climate crisis is now a threat to survival.
The Summit had representatives from groups including the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, pharmacy, nursing, allied health, public health and health promotion peak bodies, as well as organisations working in psychology and mental health, First Nations housing and international relief and development.
Medical specialties, including women’s and children’s healthcare, gerontology and infectious diseases were represented, as were health consumers, health systems sustainability experts and Indigenous workforce groups.
The Summit fell just days after official pre-COP meetings in Fiji, including a Pacific Climate and Health Talanoa co-hosted by CAHA and the Alliance for Future Generations Fiji, where 85 delegates from across Pacific nations came together to shape a common vision for urgent climate action.
While climate advocacy in more advanced economies centred on threats to health and wellbeing, CAHA CEO Michelle Isles said the lived experiences shared by activists in the Pacific last week was a stark reminder that it was also, for too many, a threat to survival.
At the Summit, delegates from nations including Fiji and Papua New Guinea who had attended the Talanoa in Nadi shared some of the key advocacy messages and policy priorities those gathered had wanted to send to those in power, including Australia as the lead negotiator next month.
“We are not just vulnerable, we are knowledge-holders and we have solutions,” said Litiana Lagibalavu, Pacific Partnerships Coordinator at CAHA.
“We are asking that you recognise us as rights-holders, knowledge-holders and decision makers. Stop seeing us as victims or consultees, but as leaders to stand behind and alongside.”
Losses
Berthshiba Bade-Pena, a nurse from Port Moresby and member of CAHA’s Youth Leaders Council, detailed the intrepid improvisations of health workers in PNG where, on the frontlines of climate extremes, they have to travel by foot “carrying vaccines up mountain ranges to give an injection to one small baby who needs it in a village in a jungle”.
When storms and other disasters struck, Bade-Pena said a request for help such as clean water or food supplies would take six months to a year to arrive.
Lagibalavu told the Summit that Pacific nations wanted recognition that social, cultural and environmental determinants were under siege from climate change, including food sovereignty, water security, safe housing, social and cultural connection.
“It’s about our land and belonging,” she said. “Loss of place is also loss of memory, identity, and of course, a loss of our health, when we put at risk the connection between generations.”
Land, language burial grounds and totemic species were intrinsic cultural resources whose protection she deemed a “condition of justice”, and the loss of which “cannot be priced”.
“We are losing culture, identity,” she said. “These things are priceless to us. We can’t just ask the world to give reparations, we need them to stop.”
Intergenerational impacts were a prominent theme of discussions, shared by First Nations and youth delegates alike.
Vicktoria Blake, principal advisor on climate risk and resilience to Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand and descendant of Tauranga Moana, shared a whakatuki (proverb) – ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata – if the natural world is well, so too are our people.
Blake is working on Health New Zealand’s first climate response plan and shared her first-hand experiences of a rockfall sweeping her car away. This was, she said, “on the scale of things that are happening, a pinprick” but illustrative of the fact that, already, and every day, climate disasters were unfolding in people’s backyards.
“The real barrier that we are facing, following finance, is the lack of intergenerational and long-term thinking,” said Blake. “Climate change and health should not be political issues.”
Pasifika academic Dr Inez Fainga’a-Manu Sione, who has connections to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Australia’s Arnhem Land, highlighted the importance of an intergenerational vision of climate and health, where young people could be drawn back from online spaces and artificial intelligence to the “ancient ancestral intelligence” of their elders.
“We want to hold that before we lose our elders,” she told the Summit. “Our elders are passing, how do we quickly capture that knowledge?”
Youth voices
Centring the voices and experiences of the next generation was among key messages from last week’s Talanoa, where Lagibalavu said Pacific representatives had called for COP31 and its governments to recognise young people “not just as the future, but as the present” and have them “in every room and every conversation”.
A coalition of groups working in youth mental health, including Orygen, the Black Dog Institute and charity ECOMIND, is due to unveil Australia’s first national youth climate mental health policy framework at the COP31 Children and Youth Pavilion next month.
Known as the Future Minds Declaration and Policy Roadmap, this document, still in draft form, will make policy recommendations across four key domains – Enabling Systems, Health and Mental Health, Education, and Adaptation, Resilience and Renewal.
Wednesday’s CAHA summit featured a breakout think-table session facilitated by some of the young people driving the Future Minds project, including UNICEF Australia Young Ambassador Zali Fisher.
Fisher said young people had spent more of their lives preoccupied by and anticipating the effects of the climate crisis than they had dreaming about possibilities for their future, describing the climate crisis as “at its heart, a crisis of connection, belonging and collective purpose”.
“We just want our governments to act on its cause,” said Fisher. “We don’t want our distress treated, we just want climate action.”
Sunny Nguyen, who is Intergenerational Justice Stream lead at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Climate and Health in Melbourne, said the responses of young people to the climate crisis were too often pathologised and siloed into a clinical concern rather than understood as a rational, relational response to loss of a sense of place.
“If you think about it, that the world is dying and that we’re going to die along with it, it’s normal to be worried, in fact I’d be concerned if you weren’t,” Nguyen told the Summit.
Georgia Monaghan, a sustainability lawyer who grew up in the shadow of the world’s largest coal port, said the Future Minds roadmap was a response to “brewing misinformation around climate anxiety and the curriculum” stoked by conservative thinktanks and certain media outlets.
Monaghan, co-founder of youth mental health and wellbeing charity ECOMIND, said the destruction of built and natural environments by climate disasters coloured the way young people felt and thought about their lives and futures, driving some to breaking point without the ability to afford support.
The Future Minds Roadmap was a bid to “bridge the gap between the future we want to build and what we currently have”, she said, adding that it was also a riposte to the claim that young people had lofty and intangible aspirations.
“We have very practical ambitions, and here is our roadmap of how to do it.”
Resources for health and aged care
Crafted to coincide with a parliamentary sitting week, the Summit drew interest from across the political spectrum.
Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care, Women and Indigenous Health Rebecca White was in attendance to launch a long-awaited suite of climate risk and resilience resources for use by Australian healthcare organisations including hospitals, residential aged care facilities, Primary Health Networks and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations.
The resources include a technical guidance manual and templates on how to conduct a risk assessment, along with detailed state and territory risk analyses and an interactive dashboard exploring climate hazards across 53 Australian health districts in the domains of heat and humidity, fire, drought, storm, rainfall and flood, and coastal inundation.
Data is available for ‘middle of the road’ and ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ climate modelling, and over a time horizon to 2050 and 2085.
White said the package, which was driven by the new Australian Centre for Disease Control, was “designed to provide a practical framework to help health services prepare for the challenges of climate change”.
She told the Summit it was a “really important step in supporting the Australian health system”.
“Climate change is having an impact on health, there is no doubt in my mind or in the mind of this Government about that,” White told delegates. “We have to take this incredibly seriously.”
White said the new materials would empower health services to “take steps now, because we are seeing the outcomes now”.
“Our goal in all of this is to strengthen Australia’s collective resilience to climate change – to minimise disruption and enhance health outcomes.”
New Greens leader Senator David Shoebridge also took to the Summit podium to voice his support for the new resources, and said that, as Australia faces the prospect of a punishing El Nino weather system this summer, the release could not be more timely.
Shoebridge expressed hope that the guidance and associated data could be widely and swiftly disseminated “over the next few urgent weeks and months” and that, in the face of a protracted heat emergency, mitigation planning efforts would not remain siloed to health organisations but involve cross-government and civil society commitments to provide refuge to the elderly and other vulnerable populations.
“This is complex and hard,” Shoebridge said. “What are we going to do to make sure people aren’t going home at 7pm to a stifling box?”
In a later statement, CAHA’s Michelle Isles welcomed the new guidance but said adaptation must be accompanied by action to address the causes of climate change.
On the sidelines of the Summit, a delegation of leaders met with crossbenchers, including independent Senator David Pocock and Allegra Spender, the independent MP for Wentworth, to discuss issues including federal clean air legislation and climate impacts on youth mental health.
Delegates drafted a 10-point statement calling on the Australian Government to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and commit to no new or expanded oil, gas and coal projects and to uphold their legal obligation to the 1.5 degrees warming limit.
The statement calls for First Nations, Pacific people, women, youth and people with disabilities to be front and centre of ongoing efforts, to amplify traditional knowledge and lived experience, invest in mental health support and sexual and reproductive health, and deliver debt-free climate finance directly to Pacific-led solutions including via boosting Australia’s commitment to the Pacific Resilience Facility.
These priorities will be taken to a Parliamentary climate change roundtable hosted by independent MP Zali Steggall today in Canberra, where Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen is expected to be in attendance. They will then be incorporated into an extended policy brief aimed at informing Australian negotiations at COP31in November.
CAHA President Dr Catherine Pendrey urged those at the Leaders’ Summit to draw strength and hope from the voices of the Pacific.
“It’s not for us to look down and walk away despondent,” said Pendrey, who is a GP by training. “It’s for us to stand beside them and behind them and to amplify their voices, to continue to call for action.”
See Croakey’s archive of articles on #COP31
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