Women’s Agenda will spend the next six weeks exploring the role of care, kindness and connection in Australia’s response to climate change. All aspects that are typically overlooked and undervalued—and often led by women. They’re factors too that are fast proving critical to preparing, responding and recovering.
A “Tinnie Army” famously stepped in when the 2022 floods hit Lismore. This army featured ordinary locals – as well as some that were far better known – who put their small aluminium boats in the water and went house to house, with hundreds of registered boaties rescuing thousands of people.
The Tinnie Army stepped in to fill the gap left by the formal system of rescue and outreach. Ultimately, it was the ties between neighbours and communities, and people working together, that showed up and got the work done.
And behind it all were women coordinating flood relief, managing donation hubs, organising volunteers and providing emotional support to strangers and neighbours, as Dr Rebecca McNaught noted when researching the recovery efforts in 2025.
Another researcher, Loriana Bethune from Gender and Disaster Australia, noted that the example reflects how women’s contributions are so often undervalued: “women step up in times of crisis, but their leadership is unpaid, unsupported and unacknowledged.”
Bethune and McNaught used the research to push for something else: noting that resilient communities depend on recognising and resourcing the people who are already doing the work, typically local women.
This undervalued work of women – indeed it’s often also the kindness of women and how their community connections are leveraged – is why we want to focus on the role of care and kindness – in their many forms, including both formal and informal care – in this series on women and climate change in Australia.
Because so often it’s women who don’t hold standard positions of power and certainly don’t hold anything like most of the power – who step in.
As psychologist Beth Hill tells Women’s Agenda for this series, “Climate is a social and emotional issue, not just an infrastructural, technological one. And I think women quite naturally understand that.”
Indeed, it’s the kind of work that is too often sidelined, something that’ll just happen in the background (and a huge aspect of The Climate Load that is heavily carried by women, that Women’s Agenda outlined in a major 2023 report).
Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Sydney argued that climate change is also a social crisis, with Dr Marlee Bower writing in the piece published in Nature Human Behaviour that, “if we ignore social health, we miss a major driver in who survives climate events and who doesn’t.”
Their core finding was that those with weak social ties are more consistently likely to die in disasters, while those with stronger support networks are more likely to survive.
But social health remains largely absent from climate policy, with investments typically focusing on infrastructure and emergency response rather than on the social systems that best ensure such help is received. Dr Bower argues that social connection is an essential tool for climate infrastructure.
Indeed, research dating back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans has found that disaster-affected communities thrive when they have strong community leaders, local services, and pre-existing relationships, rather than external support. Following the Black Summer fires, Kangaroo Valley provided a great case study on this. Community-run recovery drop-in centres, as well as neighbourhood bushfire-ready groups and a locally created “Resilient KV” group all played significant roles before, during and after the Currowan fire. It was a case study in how communities that can mobilise and integrate local capacity, resources and knowledge fare better.
And we know women are essential to these networks. Last year, a study of the Lismore-region flood found that women drew on their extensive professional skills and networks to run disaster operations, using their own awareness of the gaps in the formal response to create, from the ground up, collaborative efforts to step in. The report also found that women were still working to repair, connect and support the recovery process two years on, long after the emergency programs had stepped in.
The tinnies of Lismore show what can be done. But it’s important to consider the risk of disconnection, too.
The risk of dying during a heatwave in Australia rises with age, with socioeconomic disadvantage, disability, remoteness, as well as social isolation. Heat doesn’t just kill people randomly; there are key factors that contribute, including the people we’ve stopped checking in on.
Over the next six weeks, we’re bringing a conversation on care and kindness to how we think about climate change in Australia.
We’ll be examining both how care is being impacted, and how kindness interacts. We’ll be spotlighting the campaigners fighting for change, including doctors, midwives, biologists, parliamentarians and more. We’ll examine the role of care and connection in protecting women’s health during disasters, including the retention of critical family planning services. We’ll look into the “climate solutionists” who are building and implementing proactive responses to climate impacts on systems of care. And we’ll look into the new women-led leadership frameworks that are enabling collaboration and resilience.
Finally, we’ll examine how Australia’s critical care infrastructure can be protected through climate change, across hospitals, schools, aged care, childcare, and community services – noting the women leading policy reforms at the community level, with the view that the first line of defence is in connection.
This series comes as last year was Australia’s fourth-hottest since records began, while Australia remains among the world’s most climate-exposed countries facing escalating floods, fires and extreme heat. Now in the depths of a not-so-cold Winter, there are warnings about what’s coming over the next 12 months, including the forecast hottest year on record.
In September last year, the National Climate Risk Assessment (Australia’s first) noted current and future climate risks across 63 major risks and three warming models: 1.5, 2, and 3 degrees. Presenting stark findings regarding what’s ahead, these risks were framed as “cascading, compounding and concurrent” across health, infrastructure, the economy and ecosystems.
This government report also highlighted how the burden is shared unequally, with disadvantaged households the most vulnerable, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples.
Alarmingly, this government report has barely rated a mention since.
Australia is well used to climate action being a political football. It’s an issue that divides voters, has brought down prime ministers, split parties, and even stoked division in communities, among family members and friends.
But the reality is that climate change is here.
And our response will only succeed if we centre the people, communities and systems most vulnerable to its impacts.
Climate action is about more than political will – although that is certainly still necessary – it is also an act of care and an act of kindness that starts hyper-local and moves across states and territories, to our neighbours across the Pacific, and beyond.
This series on Care, Connection, Kindness and Climate Change is editorially independent but made possible thanks to the support of Wendy McCarthy AC. You can learn more about this support here.