Our climate is changing. What can I do?

Australian Red Cross, in partnership with councils in South Australia, are coordinating an exciting project to help communities prepare for intensified extreme events and a changing climate.

The Climate Ready Communities Program is empowering people to understand the risks they currently face, the way these are changing, and what they can do to build their resilience.

Red Cross has developed Climate-Ready Communities: A Guide to Getting Started to support communities to have their own conversation about how the things they value will be impacted by climate change, and what they can do to continue to thrive. Our training sessions are based around this guide, with additional activities and information to help people take action.

The program is calling for Climate Ready Champions. These community champions will be supported by Red Cross through a 2-part training session about how you can support others take action to become ‘climate ready’, practical guidance to plan and deliver activities and events in their communities across South Australia, and the opportunity to get involved in Red Cross’ emergency response and preparedness activities.

If you’re in South Australia and you think your community needs to get ready as a community for changes in our climate, you can join the group of Climate Ready Champions.

Climate Ready Champions are trained to help people understand how the things we value may be affected by our changing climate, and explore what we can do to take action.

The 2-part training sessions cover:

• local climate impacts and ways to avoid them
• adaptation & mitigation
• values based messaging & motivation
• strategic community action planning

We’ve partnered with a great cohort of councils (below) to offer face-to-face and online training. While most of our trainings have been metro based, we’re hoping to expand to more of regional South Australia soon.

For more information on our upcoming trainings, head to our event page.

AdaptWest
Cities of Charles Sturt, West Torrens & Port Adelaide Enfield

Resilient Hills & Coasts
Mt Barker, Adelaide Hills, Kangaroo Island, Alexandrina, Victor Harbor & Yankalilla Councils

Resilient East
Cities of Adelaide, Burnside, Campbelltown, Norwood Payneham and St Peters, Prospect, Tea Tree Gully, Unley, the Town of Walkerville.

Resilient South 
Cities of Holdfast Bay, Marion, Mitcham, Onkaparinga

For more information, to register, or to have us come along to your group to talk about becoming climate ready, please contact: Cristel Chambers: cchambers@redcross.org.au and 0415 695 836.