Anjali Sharma, the youth climate activist leading a fight she shouldn’t have to

Anjali Sharma says that her interest in climate change is, in many ways, inextricable from her cultural and family background. “I have kind of always been around the effects of climate change because India is a country that has been hit really, really terribly by climate impacts, especially in recent years,” she tells Missing Perspectives. While she says she received only a cursory education in climate change in high school – largely focused on topics around individual sustainability, like recycling, or taking two-minute showers – Sharma says that she was able to fill the gaps by educating herself on the internet. 

It seems miraculous, then, that from these relatively humble beginnings watching YouTube videos, Sharma would enter the national spotlight only a few years later, after launching a class action against the Federal Environment Minister with a group of seven other teenagers. The group was attempting to prevent the expansion of the Whitehaven coal mine in NSW by arguing that the Federal Environment Minister had a duty of care to protect Australia’s young people against future harm caused by climate change. 

They enjoyed a stunning victory when a landmark decision was handed down in May of 2021 that found the Minister had a duty of care and that Australian children are vulnerable to a real risk of harm from ‘climatic hazards’. However, any hope offered by that decision was quickly extinguished when then-Environment Minister, Sussan Ley successfully appealed the decision in federal court a year later. The raw disappointment that rang out from environmental advocacy groups, researchers, and the broader public following this decision was palpable, and the story made headlines around the world.  

Sharma, who is about to start her second year of university, says that the case is, and will continue to be, a formative part of her life as an activist. While she still recalls the devastation following the federal court’s decision, she is also buoyed by what the group ultimately managed to achieve. “[The justices] accepted that climate change is anthropogenic and that it’s going to have a significant, disproportionate burden on currently future generations. That’s now evidence that future cases can build on when they take similar cases to court, which hopefully will succeed.” 

The decision to overturn the duty of care in federal court also raised a point that has clearly defined Sharma’s next venture. Part of the reasoning behind the decision to overturn Ley’s duty of care was that it was not the court’s place to set policies on climate change and instead, this responsibility should lie with the elected representatives in the federal government. So, that’s where Sharma went. 

In what she describes as a lengthy process, Sharma reached out to environment lawyers, policy experts, and strategists to try and describe what a legislated duty of care could look like. After approaching some independent MPs in the House of Representatives, she decided to target the MP currently dubbed the Senate’s ‘kingmaker’ for holding the balance of power in the Senate: David Pocock.

“I reached out to his office at the start of 2023 and I had my first call with them on Zoom while David Pocock was driving home from some parliamentary commitment. And it all kind of started from there – and they were really, really instrumental in taking the process forward and getting the campaign to where it is today,” she explains. 

Pocock introduced his Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity Bill to Parliament late last year. The bill proposes two conditions are added to the government’s decision-making processes on fossil fuel project applications that will, in essence, enforce the health and wellbeing of current and future Australian children as a primary consideration and reject anything that poses “material risk” to those children by way of climate change. The bill is currently before a Senate inquiry to gauge its impact, but Sharma says she feels hopeful about the support it’s received so far, with around 400 (overwhelmingly positive) public submissions made to the inquiry (most bills receive 15 to 20). 

Sharma, alongside her friends and fellow activists, Jess Travers-Wolf, Daisy Jeffrey, and Hannah Vardy, have continued to help drive the duty of care campaign and they’ve been instrumental in rallying support for it within parliament. Sharma says that the group spent 14 hours straight in the last sitting week of 2023 meeting with MPs to shore up support for the duty of care bill. “We took a pledge around to every MP’s office and we asked them to sign it. It said ‘I support a duty of care’ and 25 MPs signed that and put it in their window, including Greens, independents, Labor MPs, as well as a Liberal MP. So, now if you walk through the halls of Parliament, you’ll see all these pledges up in people’s windows” Sharma says. (For the curious, the Liberal MP was Bridget Archer). 

As for the Albanese government’s response, Sharma says that no news, for the moment, is likely good news. “If you look at the track record of other private members’ bills, such as the ones put up recently by the independents for integrity or banning junk food advertising, the Government the next day will put out a statement saying that they won’t be supporting the bill. That hasn’t been done with the Duty of Care bill,” she says. 

Sharma and the group of activists working alongside her will continue to work doggedly to try and build as much momentum as possible in the leadup to a vote on the Duty of Care Bill. The Senate inquiry is expected to deliver its report on the 1st of March and Sharma says the group are planning widespread action in the weeks surrounding that date. While she acknowledges the uphill battle, she says that there are a lot of reasons to remain optimistic. 

“I’m very proud of our strategy and I hope that even if the bill doesn’t pass in its current form, that the Government is then able to turn it around and implement it into their own policy platform if they want to draft the duty of care themselves.” 

Meanwhile, as Sharma looks down the barrel of another year in the spotlight campaigning for climate action, she says she’s also aware of the possibility of burning out and wants to try and ensure that she still has some semblance of balance in her personal life. She’s currently studying in Canberra at the Australian National University – a campus that gives her the convenience of proximity to her work at Parliament, but also means it’s difficult to escape it fully. 

Sharma says that, between the hours of emails and campaigning, she prioritises dinners with friends and doing all of the things that she loves to do – the things that somebody in their first years of university is entitled to do, without the weight of the world on their shoulders.

“I love doing this work because it’s very fulfilling and I know the purpose of why I’m doing it, which is obviously coming back to my family and cultural heritage. But at the same time, it’s not lost on me that this isn’t work that should be done by young people. 

“I can guarantee you that activism isn’t a passion project. It’s not something that young people want to be doing with their time, but it’s something that’s doing out of responsibility, out of fear, out of a wish for a future that is safe and liveable.”