People power as locals lobby on climate action

"People who are not interested in thinking about climate change, or don't think it's relevant to them, won't have that option for much longer," said Val Lehmann-Monck, a retired occupational therapist. "I think more and more people will start seeing, yes, this does affect me."

Ms Lehmann-Monck meets with a group of like-minded neighbours each week to strategise how they can lobby local representatives to take more effective action on climate change.

With no background in environmentalism, Ms Lehmann-Monck became invested in the issue after her street was smashed by flash flooding in 2015.

"The storm wrote off a number of cars on our street, they were flooded up to the seats and the water came into the houses and damaged them.

"Shortly after that, we all got a letter from the council saying our street was now formally considered a flood zone," she said. "I met with someone from council, he showed me all the documentation around the reason for the flooding. In those, it said it was linked to climate change and there was not much the council could do to remediate it and to expect it to get worse."

Ms Lehmann-Monck said issues with flooding have gotten worse since she moved into her home in 1993. She and her neighbours avoided being hit with the full brunt of the floods earlier this year by cleaning out the storm water drains on their streets themselves and moving their cars further uphill - measures they now take whenever a storm is brewing.

"That's just not sustainable long term. And seeing the big floods in Lismore and Brisbane it reminded me that the issue is going to get worse - and it's a universal problem."

The Enmore group - part of the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby, which has nearly 600 chapters around the world and came to Australia in 2014 - have only been meeting for three months but are already reaching out to local representatives armed with the knowledge they've gained through the network.

"At first I felt very inadequate because I'm not an expert, there's people at universities and in the government who do this day in and day out, but that's not me or anyone in my group. I felt like - 'who are we to go and talk about the climate'," she said. "Then I realised we're citizens with valid concerns and we've got elected representatives and leaders who are employed to support us as citizens.

"And we have real lived experiences we can share - the images of the flooding tell a story themselves, of what climate change looks like in the inner west."

Have something to say? Send a letter to the editor at: editor@innerwestreview.com.au

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content: