The South Australian Council of Social Service (SACOSS) and Red Cross will be travelling to Port Lincoln on Monday to deliver an important workshop for the health and community sector, aimed at urgently helping organisations in these sectors to reduce and manage climate risk and emergencies.
This free workshop, taking place on September 20, will assist in building the community sector’s understanding of climate change and its impacts while also exploring how to adapt to and mitigate growing climate risks. These include risks posed to organisations’ assets, staff and the people and communities they support.
The effects of climate change are already being experienced across regional South Australia. However, these impacts are likely to be most significant for people living with compounding vulnerabilities such as poverty, poor health and disability. Experiences of violence and trauma, language and communication barriers, and access to information, also clearly impact on people’s ability to manage climate risk.
“Thinking about climate change might be uncomfortable, but we can actually empower ourselves by taking action in our workplaces to plan for the climate events that will be happening in our near future” said SACOSS CEO Ross Womersley.
“These workshops are vital for helping to ensure everyone doesn’t just survive, but ideally gets to thrive, in our increasingly changing climate. One way to do this is to make sure people who need more support are getting help from organisations that have been thinking carefully about this issue of climate resilience.”
“Like much of South Australia, the Eyre Peninsula is becoming warmer and drier, with lessened rainfall impacting on crop yields and making droughts and fires more likely. Coastal communities may also be at risk from rising sea levels, and changing temperatures in the Great Southern Ocean and in Spencer Gulf may impact on the local fishing industry. Heatwaves are also becoming more intense and frequent, and we know they cause more deaths in Australia than all other disasters put together.”
“These events not only impact on the physical and mental health of individuals, but they also have significant implications for organisations with staff who spend a lot of time on the road and work with people potentially more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Mr Womersley stated.
Additional workshops for regional SA will also be delivered in the Riverland Region on November 16th, and on November 11th for the Limestone Coast.