Climate Change Activists

"It is easy to say that everyone is in favor of nuclear disarmament and that nobody wants nuclear war."

"I want to get more people in the water. Manado is a coastal city and people need to see how beautiful it is. If they can see it, they will appreciate it and people protect what they care about and what they are interested in."

"A very important concept escapes many Australians, including some politicians. It is that our country, knowingly or unknowingly, is engaged in preparations for fighting a nuclear war. There can be no mistake, no delusions and no cover-up about this very disturbing fact."

"Here lie the remnants of myriad prehistoric marine animals, including placoderms, a prehistoric class of fish that represents some of our earliest jawed ancestors."

"In the limestone ranges of Western Australia’s Kimberley region, near the town of Fitzroy Crossing, you’ll find one of the world’s best-preserved ancient reef complexes."

"If all jawed vertebrates, including humans, are nothing more than highly evolved placoderms, then key features of ourselves should be traceable to structures that first appeared in our fishy placoderm ancestors. This would include particular jaw and skull bones and the proportions of our face and brain."

"“I used to deal with so much climate anxiety and fear, thinking, ‘Wow, we are one day closer to that deadline’.”"

"“These are real experiences and this is a very real issue that affects people on a very personal level. Not being afraid to show that vulnerability has been really, really instrumental in getting the coverage that we did.”"

"“Growing up in Australia I consider myself really fortunate,” she says. “I got an education that helped me make sense of what was happening.”"

"Imagine trying to identify and compare equivalent bits of anatomy shared between an oyster, a beetle and a blue whale. That is essentially the problem we face with early vertebrate fossils."

"“Some people say that your parents shape your political views, but it’s been much of the opposite [for me].”"

"I think our children and children everywhere deserve a more positive view of the future and their place in it."

"“My first and biggest role model is my Mum,”"

"“I never felt like it was an option [to not be interested], to be honest,”"

"“The magical experience of diving in a kelp forest is like flying through a jungle surrounded by an amazing diversity of life,”"

"“Those forests are now effectively gone because of climate change. It makes me sad when I think my kids won’t have that same experience and get to see those environments the way I did.”"

"“These awards reflect the times, and nowadays hopefully recognise how important science has been, and continues to be, not only in understanding what’s changing but also how we can respond to those changes,”"

"Human activities are the highest contributors to climate change."

"The magnitude and rate of climate change together with associated risks, depends strongly on the near-term mitigation and adaptation actions."

"Clean energy is the cheapest source of new power and in the Australian context, electricity prices have been rising because our electricity system is aging. It's inefficient. It's polluting. So, replacing that energy system with clean technology, with renewables, with storage, is absolutely a critical part of the recovery puzzle."

"“I’ve come from being interested in understanding the fundamentals of ecology to thinking more about how humans interact with ecosystems and how we can better connect knowledge to decision making,”"

"“You are always striving. That’s something I’ve found in my life; I’m always trying to push for something to be different, for things to change in the world. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just not try and change anything, to just sit with it, but that’s not in my personality. I’m always interested in how things can be better.”"

"“The ideas around circular economy and so forth are a major philosophical change in that previously we have thought there is an outside to the environment that we live in, that there is always ‘somewhere else’ that we can put our waste. The truth is that there is only one environment, and we all have to live here. So anything that is ‘waste’ must be an input to some other process that is useful.”"

"My parents both have a very strong ethos around social justice and were very passionate about helping in the community. It was never something they talked about, but my parents, both in their work and in the way that they showed up in the world, contributed to the community."

"The world has learned just how problematic the disruption that the Covid-19 pandemic has been, but the mother of all disruptions remains climate change"

"At school I was very passionate about music, drama and sport. We had a big kayaking focus at our school, and I was kayaking captain. I was also music captain and played the clarinet. In fact, I almost applied to do music at university. I was debating between music and science and then I had this moment when I was at schoolies in Byron Bay."

"“We have this traditional model where scientists go off and do their work, write a paper and publish it in a journal and hope that somebody who needs it picks it up and is able to make some kind of decision based on the information. But it doesn’t work anymore because so many of the problems we have now are very urgent, and we need more efficient ways to connect science to policy.”"

"“I took myself off one morning and sat on the beach, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ It seems very naïve now, but I wrote down, ‘I want to save the world from environmental pollution.’”"

"Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years."

"Even as people change the climate by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, variability will continue to play a large role in Australia’s climate."

"Trees and corals are sensitive to their environments. For example, trees grow less in dry years and more in wet years."

"“The national finalists are an extraordinary group of people whose impact ranges from medical and scientific endeavours to volunteering, human rights advocacy, education, sustainability action and more,”"

"Climate change is a risk management issue and putting in place good measures to mitigate it is a prudent course of action and one which has shown to be very worthwhile in the past"

"So maybe the one biggest thing you can do is to get politically engaged, because behavioral change is really slow. Too slow to stop runaway climate change."

"We can be pushing all these individual change things on people, but unless the government steps up, we won't be able to reach the target."

"If we let climate change continue unabated, it will affect the most vulnerable first."

"I'm kind of approaching my carbon footprint like I approach my weight, going to the gym regularly, watching what I eat, and realizing I'm not going to lose that 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) all at once, like I want."

"Far from it! The sooner we tackle climate change, the less extreme the measures need to be to solve it. In fact, most of the things we need to do to solve climate change are things we would want to do anyway for health, economic and social reasons. There are a lot of great reasons to move to a transport system that’s dominated by cycling and public transport options over traffic-inducing, isolating and dirty cars."

"If we only listened! few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go inti the making of our climate and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence on phenomena of so vast a scale. In the following paper i hope to show that such an influence is not only possible but us actually occurring at the present time."

"We know that global climate is changing due to human actions, climate has changed in the past but not at the current rate and with present human population and heavily impacted global temperatures."

"At the start of southern summer it was predicted that bleaching would be largely restricted to central and southern parts of the GBR."

"While bleaching surveys are ongoing, a distinct pattern is emerging, whereby the severity of bleaching declines from north to south."

"In my experience and that of my colleagues, public interest in climate change has actually increased over the past few years - We’re witnessing the effects of climate change with far more frequency than we used to due to increased storms, flooding, and generally wacky weather."

"The greenhouse gases are causing the global surface temperatures to rise, and we need to build the adaptation and mitigation measures."

"At the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. “Performative” speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality."

"We need to take into account the human actions that contribute to the adverse impacts of climate change together with the losses and damages that escalates with each and every effect of these issues."

"Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us."

"I really believe that energy is like the blood of society. It's something that we don't really talk about. But it's the veins that keep everything operating. As non-renewable resources run out, we really need to think about what is the best way that we can still keep pumping our blood and keep existing."

"I think having community owned projects and generating our energy, bringing that back to being near us, so we know that we are connected to our energy source is coming from. That's an empowering process for communities on so many levels."

"Inspired to act by the global efforts to reduce nonrenewable fuel dependence and to uncouple their essential infrastructure from fossil fuels, communities have taken it upon themselves to do their part to transition towards a sustainable future even if governments at the national level have been lagging behind."