Earth Day is tomorrow, and every year during this time, I see lists of things you can do to help the environment, even just in your backyard. Things like planting more native plants to attract pollinators, tearing apart or all of your lawn to cut down on water use. Now, don't get me wrong, these are good things. The bees need all the help they can get. If it helps ease your climate anxiety, go with God. But global heat records are being smashed just about every month. Experts say these kinds of personal actions are just not going to make a dent in a meaningful way. Until we get to a place where the biggest emitters actually cut down on fossil fuels, we're going to be left to watch how climate change is already impacting some of the world's most beautiful places. And spoiler alert, it's not pretty. My guest this week is CNN Senior International Correspondent, Ivan Watson. He recently went to Australia to figure out what fires, floods, and bleached coral can tell us about all of our climate futures. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David mind. So, Ivan, when we talk about climate change, it's obviously a global problem, but I realized that it is currently hitting some areas harder than others.

So what did you find in Australia?

We got a view of a country that's wrestling and a continent that's wrestling with these enormous disasters that seem to come one after another. And they range from epic forest fires or bushfires and epic floods and coral bleaching. So it runs the gamut.

So let's break down some of these one by one. What do the fires look like there?

Right. So the Most epic bushfires that Australia has dealt with is the 2020 Black Summer fires. Right now, more than 100 fires are burning across Australia. Tens of thousands of residents and vacationers in Southeastern Australia are being told to evacuate. At least 28 people have died nationwide. More than 3,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged. As a firefighter described to me, it was like something they'd never seen before, the duration of it, the intensity of it. In Windjilow, Australia, nobody imagined the fire could move so quickly. We saw the sky go red. We go, That's not normal.

Then we heard the sound of the fire It was like a furnace, like a freight train right next to you.

Our case study was a really stunning island called Kangoo Island.I'm Ivan.Ivan.How are you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting here. Where among the victims were the father and brother of a man I met named Justin Lange. And this father and brother had been out there helping put out fires on a friend's farm, and they were driving home, and they were caught in this inferno that basically killed both of them on a highway, on a road. Who thinks you could get burned to death driving on a road? Yeah, exactly.

They pulled over off the road, so they're out of the way. But yeah, the car combusted. The whole car was on fire.Meaning.

That the fire would have jumped from trees and the vegetation into the middle of a highway.Ember attack. That's not even talking about just the mass amount, the acreage of vegetation, and the millions of animals. More than 50% of the koala population on Kangoo Island was killed in those fires. Those are the estimates right now.

We had local people showing up here with 30, 40 animals in their car that they'd picked up on the way here or that they'd gone back out to check their farm, and they'd found a kangoo with its legs melted off, essentially.

Did you and the staff here have to euthanize 300 koalas?

Yeah, that was on us.

That's the fire situation. But what about floods?

The case study that we looked at was a town called Lismore. It's not a coastal town. It's in a river district that is prone to flooding. But in 2022, the levels that the waters reached broke every record. We're talking about water heights in February 2022 of 14.4 meters. That's more than 47 feet of water.

Good Lord.

I mean, it turned a city into a lake, really.

Look at these.

This is blood sending to our house. So the many residents, thousands of them, were trapped on their roofs for hours. Or in the case of one woman that I spoke with, she basically had to crawl up into the small attic crawl space of her house.

So once we were rescued from our kitchen window by the gentleman on the jet ski. We were on top of the water.

She was rescued by a volunteer on a jet ski and described riding out to dry land, ducking under power lines. That's how high the water was, and literally seeing cows on the roofs of buildings that they went past, cows that had been swept downstream. What was the state of your home when you saw it again?

Completely covered in a thick sludge of river mud and silt.

Now, to rub salt into the wound, a month later, the same town, it was hit by another flood a month later.

And this is something we're seeing that these extreme weather events are not only becoming more severe, they're becoming more frequent, and the time that you have to rebuild anything, it's just nonexistent.

Yeah, and that's a reality that is sinking in. So it's leading some communities and members of some communities to start to say, Is this too much? Do we have to abandon a place? Southern Cross University is not a long drive outside of Lismore. It's up in the hills from there. I have, over the years, interviewed marine biologists there who study coral bleaching. That's a phenomenon where rising ocean temperatures, ocean heatwaves, can cook the world's coral to death. These scientists, based at Southern Cross University, have been going out to the ocean to see the impacts of climate change, and suddenly there was a once in a hundred year flood in their backyard. And it's an example of climate change is not necessarily something that's happening out far away from us. It's hitting your community in your backyard. And that's what some of these marine biologists saw with the Lismore Floods. The climate change was hitting bedroom communities that the marine biologists might have considered safe.

So, Ivan, you mentioned this coral bleaching, and this is something I've heard about that scientists are like, This is a big deal. But I don't see coral reefs all that much. Most of us don't. So why does this matter for the planet?

This massive marine ecosystem, they're living organisms and habitats for bajillions of different life forms, and they also protect coastlines from huge storm systems and things like that. They are dying off in increasing frequency with the rising of ocean temperatures. This is bath water up here. Right.

Yeah, we're in a lower to mid-90 Fahrenheit.

In February of this year, the Australian summer, my team and I, we traveled to, I believe, at least five different coral reefs. And we saw that coral was turning bone white in front of our very eyes because of high water temperature.

A lot of corals had already been overrun with algae. Dead. Dead. Yeah, dead.

And weeks after we visited Australia, the Australian government announced that they were in the midst of a mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef. This is not the first time it's happened. But I think more concerning is that what was happening to the coral reefs in Australia, off the Coast of Australia, in February of 2024, was an echo of mass coral bleaching seen in the Caribbean in the fall of 2023. So this is a global event that's happening.

Just made its way around.

It's just making its way around the globe. And no that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said that now we're in the midst of a fourth major global coral bleaching event, the fourth that's been documented. And Every time this happens, more and more the coral dies off.

And it doesn't come back.

It can take a thousand years to come back.

Oh, wow.

So the choral that I'm lucky enough to go on assignment for CNN to witness and marvel at and say, Wow, this is like a once in a lifetime experience, my two-year-old daughter will not get to see it. It won't be alive anymore. And that is rather sobering and sad to have to admit to myself.

So I guess this is what I ask every time I talk about climate change on the show. What is the fix? Are there lessons the rest of the world can take to try to put a dent in this problem?

Australia is an interesting case study. It's a relatively wealthy country that has made commitments to try to reduce its carbon emissions. And yet Australia is the world's second largest exporter of coal.

Oh, wow.

Australia is also one of the globe's biggest producers of natural gas. So Australia is a victim of climate change, but it's also contributing to the carbon emissions that are driving up temperatures around the globe. And that's this almost Gordian knot. What are you supposed to do to stop cooking the planet's corals and reduce the warming temperatures? Well, burn less stuff.

Right. Shut down the coal plants.

Australia is not ready to do that yet. It's making a lot of money. You have a coal ship steaming in behind you here.

Rather perfectly timed.

That's right. So we are the world's largest export in coal port.

I interviewed the CEO of the Port of New Castle. As I'm interviewing them, quite literally, there are coal ships steaming in and being loaded up and going out. They're selling coal to countries like Japan and South Korea and China. Do you want this shut down?

Not immediately, not overnight. That's not going to help anyone in New Castle or in Australia. But what we do need is no new fossil fuel projects to be approved because that's just going to make the problem worse.

It's not illegal for Australia to sell coal. It's not as legal for it to export or mine the coal. It's not illegal for these other economies to purchase this coal and burn it to provide electricity. Diversity. But everybody knows it's not good for the planet. Who's going to take the first step and reduce this consumption? You got it? Got it. Wow. Welcome. Thank you. That was incredible. Peter Gash is a very charismatic, frankly somewhat inspiring man. And I met him because he flew me in a propeller plane from Brisbane to Lady Elliott Island, which is this tiny island. His family operates an eco-resort on this island that he leases from the Australian government.

I couldn't walk here 15 or 20 years ago because it was so rough. Here now, we've got natural soil.

Magnificent. Is this from your car? It had been an island that since the 19th century, miners had been raking it for phosphates, basically bird trap, bird guana. Though, to use for fertilizer, and I believe also for gunpowder. And it was almost completely denuted, this island in the middle of the ocean.

This is a manmade for us. Everything you see here, we plant it.

And Peter has helped replant trees on the island. And what he's found is that there are manmade forests that are growing there. They brought bird life back.

At its peak, it's in excess of 200,000 birds.

And it was a tiny island.

And this tiny little island It's crazy to think that.

But he argues that the island is growing by, I believe, about a centimeter a year, naturally, with this animal life. Not only that, but the lagoon and the coral reefs around it are teeming with life.

What we do see is more and more bleaching, more and more stress on the corals.

At the same time, we saw evidence of coral bleaching in these very waters.

It's just like an example of no matter how much you do in your own little personal space to clean up the environment and be as ecofriendly as you can be, there are still greater forces around the world, and that can come right back to your backyard no matter what.

I think you put it really well. And there was this gleaming a little bit of hope on this island, but a much bigger planetary phenomenon. It's now part of our everyday lives.

Well, it's great reporting, Ivan. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Great to talk to you.

And if you want to see more of Ivan's reporting, you can catch it next month on the whole story with Anderson Cooper. Catch it on CNN on May fifth, and stream it later on Max. One thing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producer is Fez Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamie Sandrace, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Bex Wright, Desmond Chung, and Katie Hinman. We'll be back next week. Talk to you then.