AUSTRALIAN coal and gas exports have violated human rights, a group has told the United Nations.

A group of Australians asked the world body on Monday to take action, saying that their lives have been harmed by extreme weather, including bushfires, floods, heatwaves, rising sea levels and toxic algal blooms.

They say the government’s support for fossil fuel companies is to blame for the crisis.

This is the first legal claim taken to an international body or court since last year’s ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that countries can be sued over climate change.

Any UN decision is not legally binding on Australia, one of the world’s largest coal and gas exporters, and the government has not yet commented on the case.

One of the 10 litigants in the case is wildlife ecologist and volunteer firefighter Dr Barry Traill.

Several of his friends were killed in 2009 during bushfires in Victoria, despite being prepared and experienced.

Dr Traill said: “That deeply changed me and it became clear that the old rules around fires and survival no longer applied.”

In 2019, he was on the front lines battling severe blazes in Queensland where he saw that climate change was not just a problem for the future.

“It is already killing people and hurting lives, landscapes and communities across Australia,” Dr Traill said.

“Continuing to allow coal and gas companies to increase pollution, while people face worsening disasters, is a profound failure of responsibility.”

Professor Anne Poelina, an indigenous woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, has also joined the case.

She describes being displaced by catastrophic flooding around the Fitzroy river, one of the state’s most important waterways.

“What concerns me most is the intergenerational loss of cultural knowledge,” Prof Poelina said.

“So much of our knowledge is not written down,” she added, being passed on only by being physically present on the land.