![\"Burbidge](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/e4acb58617d318445645b05ef831384d74d8c046.jpeg\")
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Burbidge at home in Hobart.Credit: Matthew Newton<\/p>\n
Hamilton found that people who live in NSW, Brisbane, and regional Queensland are more likely than others to be driven to leave due to climate, and that 41 per cent named Tasmania as the state they thought would be safest in a warming climate, far ahead of other states.<\/p>\n
Their views are consistent with the federal government\u2019s own climate risk assessment of Australia,<\/a> which finds the nation\u2019s south-east to be safer as temperatures rise.<\/p>\n Hamilton believes his new research highlights a blind spot in the government\u2019s response to climate change. When our leaders do address the climate crisis their focus is on mitigation \u2013 reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help slow global climate change. This is crucial, says Hamilton, but it ignores the fact that much warming is already locked in, and that Australia cannot protect itself with its own carbon pollution reductions.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are not talking about the change that is already coming down the highway,\u201d he says. He believes the government should be making climate adaptation more central to the national debate. Absent government leadership, he says, some people \u2013 those with means and climate education \u2013 are beginning to adapt their own way.<\/p>\n Some, Hamilton\u2019s research shows, are already on the move, seeking refuge in parts of the country that are cooler, and in which they hope to be safer. (He admits he is among those who have bought land in Tasmania out of concern for the changing climate.)<\/p>\n It is a process Hamilton expects will only accelerate, with profound demographic implications for Australia. The data illustrates striking differences in attitudes towards climate change in the community, he says.<\/p>\n Loading<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s half the population who are very worried about climate change, that is starting to take action in response, then you\u2019ve got perhaps a quarter of the population who don\u2019t think it\u2019s real and are therefore not going to do anything about it, you start to think about the implications.<\/p>\n \u201cWe might see Australians sorting themselves into different kinds of communities, ones that take climate change much more seriously, that build resilience in how they live in their homes, in their town planning, in their infrastructure, in their communities, and others where climate change is not taken seriously and which are therefore more severely buffeted by the extreme events that will increase in the coming decades.<\/p>\n \u201cWe may well see a kind of reshuffling of the Australian population where people who are more alert and more aware move towards climate-safe areas whereas others remain in places that are far more prone to the stress of climate change.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the exodus from the mainland to Tasmania comes, it will be led by people who are most worried about climate change, well-educated and left-wing.\u201d<\/p>\n Jessie Bodor worked for a big law firm and lived on Sydney\u2019s lower north shore in 2019. She didn\u2019t feel any immediate threat when she saw singed leaves floating down on her from a sepia sky, but a terrible disquiet. When the following summers grew hotter she decided to move to Tasmania.<\/p>\n Jessie Bodor, pictured with her dog George at Nutgrove Beach, Sandy Bay, in Hobart, moved south as Sydney\u2019s summers grew hotter. \u201cI think [a climate reshuffling] is already happening here. People are building highly connected communities where they share their experiences and their knowledge about climate,\u201d says Bodor, who now works for the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, a charity that buys and manages land for environmental protection.<\/p>\n She says she has no regrets about leaving a lucrative job in a big law firm. In Tasmania, she says, she has not only escaped more intense heat, but with the TLC has found work relevant to climate action.<\/p>\n Launceston Mayor Matthew Garwood says the phenomenon of climate refugees, from what he cheerfully calls Tasmania\u2019s north island, is both well known and welcomed. \u201cIt started as a movement of grey nomads coming down here for the climate that they felt would be more comfortable than Brisbane or Sydney, but it is now young professionals and families too.<\/p>\n Ellen Burbidge\u2019s nephew during the family\u2019s evacuation from Narooma.Credit: Ellen Burbidge<\/p>\n \u201cWe find that once people have decided they want to come here they also want to contribute to the community; it is beneficial. They are bringing their skills, bringing their families.\u201d<\/p>\n Peter George, a former journalist who is now an independent MP in the Tasmanian state parliament, is not surprised by Hamilton\u2019s findings. George, who moved to Tasmania from Sydney in 2011 to escape ever-hotter summers, counts among his friends climate refugees from Western Australia and South Australia as well as the east-coast states.<\/p>\n He says the influx will benefit Tasmania because climate refugees not only bring new wealth and new demand for services, but also new ideas to a political culture he believes has been stunted by closed networks holding power in the state\u2019s parliament and bureaucracy.<\/p>\n But George also sees evidence of tension. \u201cLike any change it will be uncomfortable, and at times confrontational.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018When you have run as far south as you can, you are brought face to face in the end with what is destroying our world.\u2019<\/p>\n Richard Flanagan<\/p>\n Island communities can be resistant to changes driven by outsiders, says George, and like other Australian capitals, Hobart is in the grip of a housing crisis. In Cygnet, the town south-west of Hobart where he lives, he knows families who have cashed in, selling off sections of farmland to mainlanders seeking refuge in cooler air as property prices surge, but who still feel discomfited by the social changes caused by the influx of newcomers.<\/p>\n Burbidge, an actor who now works with Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action<\/a>, is glad to have settled in Hobart, but confesses she does not feel entirely safe from climate change. The waters around Tasmania are warming faster than those to the north. The great kelp forests that once famously fringed the state\u2019s coast are largely dead, and as the sea warms Tasmania is growing dryer and hotter. In 2016, trees that had survived a thousand summers were lost to fires that incinerated ancient rainforests<\/a>.<\/p>\n Loading<\/p>\n![\"Jessie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/dc3ee52bfa3930cf22b646a35b840534ff9d452c.jpeg\")
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\nCredit: Matthew Newton.<\/p>\n![\"Ellen](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/cfcf939f0dcf746b67bbca28d6bbfb73ee173252.jpeg\")
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