We Must Recognise Women’s Work on Climate Action: Bushfire Survivor Jo Dodds

Aug 11, 2022 | Brianna Boecker
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Jo Dodds watched a bushfire burn through her south coast NSW township and impact her own home on March 18, 2018. It was an event that made her realise the most critical issue she could address as a human and as a community representative was climate destruction. 

Since then, Dodds has worked tirelessly as the President of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action (BSCA), a group of bushfire survivors, firefighters and local councillors working together to demand the Australian government take action on climate change. 

She was named the Emerging Leader in Climate Action at the 2021 Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards for her efforts to change the conversation around climate, through powerful stories from individual Australians that remove the distraction of political disputes. 

Dodds is optimistic that climate change is becoming a cross-partisan issue and now being seen more widely as an urgent concern. Most of her focus with BSCA over the past year has been on the federal election and working in key bushfire-affected seats to make climate action a top three issue in the minds of voters. BSCA is a politically agnostic group and Dodds believes the outcome of the election speaks for itself, but she notes that conservative candidates who spoke out strongly on the need for climate action were in many cases able to buck the trend away from the Liberal National Party.