Volunteers are a crucial part of Australia’s Environmental and Climate Change action and response. Every year hundreds of thousands of volunteers work directly in the environmental and climate change space from conservation, rehabilitation, and adaption to tree planting, threatened species protection, land management, clean-up, wildlife rescue, recycling, education and citizen science to name a few.
Volunteers are also the backbone of Australia’s disaster response networks, particularly in climate generated disasters due to extreme weather events such as fires, floods, droughts and heat waves. They play a vital role in community resilience and recovery from these increasingly common events.
Volunteering Australia is raising the profile of environmental and climate change volunteers and advocating for their representation and consideration in key policies that affect them and their communities, with the aim of strengthening environmental causes and participation.
Status of environmental volunteering
The opportunity to better align and grow this segment of Australian volunteering is significant. There are more than six million formal volunteers in Australia and further work is needed to better understand the motivations, needs and barriers to environmental and climate change volunteering.
As the world grapples with the challenges of climate change, volunteers can and will play a leading role in this effort. The 2022 ANU poll found that 7.0 per cent of volunteers (around 475,000 people) are engaged in ‘Environment’ organisations in Australia. However, interest in volunteering for environmental organisations was very high among non-volunteers, with 23.0 per cent of those who did not volunteer indicating that they would be interested in doing so for such organisations in the future.
The gap between action and interest presents a timely opportunity to engage and support not only current environmental volunteers, but to galvanise those with intent or interest in participating.
How is Volunteering Australia engaging on and progressing this work?
Policy Position
Our Pre-Budget Submission 2024-25 seeks to establish a foundation program that builds environmental and climate change volunteering capacity. This national program would amplify and accelerate participation in environmental volunteering specifically, with the aim of directly benefiting the environment and contributing to efforts to mitigate the global environmental threat of climate change.
Climate Action and COP31
Volunteering plays a vital role in climate resilience, community preparedness and recovery across Australia. Volunteers and volunteer involving organisations are central to how communities respond, adapt and rebuild in the face of climate change.
Volunteering Australia has engaged in national and regional collaboration connected to the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP31.
Australia’s original bid to co-host COP31 with Pacific partners has evolved into a unique partnership model within the UNFCCC process. Türkiye will hold the COP31 Presidency, Australia will serve as President of Negotiations, and the UNFCCC pre-COP will be hosted in the Pacific.
This partnership represents an unprecedented collaboration in UNFCCC history. Working alongside Pacific partners, Australia will help set the agenda and preside over pre-COP discussions, creating opportunities to elevate regional priorities and strengthen global climate ambition.
Volunteering Australia was a member of the COP31 Collaboration Group, which brought together leaders from environmental and community-focused not-for-profit and non-government organisations. The group worked to ensure that community voices, including those of volunteers and volunteer involving organisations, were part of the broader national conversation on climate mitigation, adaptation, resilience and transition.
In 2023, Volunteering Australia attended and facilitated a session at COP31 Basecamp in Sydney. The Basecamp brought together delegates from diverse sectors to explore how climate action can be inclusive, community-led and accessible. The insights from this work continue to inform our understanding of volunteering’s role in strengthening climate resilience.
As COP31 progresses under this new partnership model, the need for whole-of-society engagement remains clear. Climate resilience is not built in negotiation rooms alone. It is built in communities, through volunteers, local organisations and civil society working every day to respond, adapt and lead.
Volunteering Australia will continue to advocate for the recognition of volunteering within climate policy, disaster preparedness, resilience and transition frameworks. Ensuring that community perspectives are recognised in national and international discussions remains central to our role as the national peak body for volunteering.
Fair, Fast and Inclusive Climate Change
We also recently signed on to and contributed to ACOSS’s Fair, Fast and Inclusive Climate Change Action Blueprint, ensuring that volunteers and their roles are visible and are acknowledged as key to mitigation and response. The blueprint highlights that vulnerable and disadvantaged communities are affected first and the most by climate change and that it disproportionately affects low-income, vulnerable and minority groups and regional and remote communities, including First Nations’ communities.
Volunteering Australia will continue to raise the profile of environmental and climate change volunteers and advocate for their representation and consideration in key policies, with the aim of strengthening environmental causes and participation.
