Mesures prises:
Australian Red Cross signed the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organisations in June 2021 and has published targets on the Charter website.
A small cross-disciplinary team have been tasked with developing and socialising an organisational climate adaptation strategy to scale up align effort in the climate space, leverage existing skills/knowledge and scale up community-based climate adaptation projects. To this end, we are:
- ensuring our volunteers and employees are prepared and ready to support communities at every stage of the disaster preparedness and recovery process.
- working in partnership with communities to implement community climate adaptation programs in more than 100 Local Government Areas that are vulnerable to droughts, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, and bushfires. This work is guided by the activities of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre, which supports the Movement and its partners to reduce the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on vulnerable people.
- strengthening mechanisms for disaster risk reduction and enhance anticipatory action in the Asia Pacific region.
We are increasing our efforts to strengthen the resilience of livelihoods and essential service systems, preventing and addressing health impacts, reducing the risk of climate-related displacement and developing adequate responses when people are displaced (including if they need to be relocated due to climate change impacts). We have:
- Contributed to development national climate resilience frameworks including the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy and the National Adaptation Plan.
- Advocated for prioritisation of resilience building as part of numerous domestic parliamentary inquiries.
- Embedded climate change into the development and implementation of our National Emergency Services Theory of Change.
- Developed and delivered key services and programs to help people and communities build resilience to climate driven disasters, including Climate Redi-Communities, which was integrated with other similar programs and nationalised into Redi-Communities, a community based resilience building program that addresses the humanitarian and psychosocial impacts of disasters.
- Established a national presence as a thought leader, bringing together the climate sector and the disasters sector with representation on numerous academic and sector-based fora linking climate change adaptation to disaster risk reduction and resilience.
Through Humanitech, Australian Red Cross is supporting and leveraging technology partner Climasens, which uses AI-driven, actionable climate risk intelligence and insights to help plan, prepare and respond to climate extremes.
Australian Red Cross strives to reduce the environmental impacts of our day-to-day work. We invest in renewable energy and fleet efficiency; conduct regular supply chain reviews; and engage with waste avoidance, reduction and recycling initiatives in our workplaces.
To this end, we have made a range of changes to our operations and programs. These include:
- upgrading to newer vehicles, including electric and hybrid
- using recycled furniture and materials
- using video conferencing as a viable method to reduce unnecessary travel
- increasing the efficiency of our physical workplaces, including through heating, ventilation and air-conditioning efficiency upgrades and installing solar panels and LED lighting.
In addition, in 12 months our Australian Red Cross shops have also diverted 2,750 tonnes of quality clothing that may otherwise been prematurely sent to landfill, resulting in environmental savings equivalent to 9,150 tonnes of carbon emissions and 917 megalitres of water.
As a member of the Climate Leaders Coalition, Australian Red Cross reports on our progress in reducing scope 1 and 2 emissions of carbon. Australian Red Cross has already exceeded its 2025 target of a 20% reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions compared to 2019 levels.