When 20 of the best climate storytellers from around the world present their ideas at the international My Climate Story project on April 10, UVic will be in the room as well: Writing professor Sean Holman was selected out of nearly 100 submissions to share a lightning talk about the ongoing impact of his Climate Disaster Project. Hosted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media and the Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute, My Climate Story is a live, online, two-hour climate storytellers’ summit which you can watch for free.
About the Climate Disaster Project
Founded at UVic in 2021, the Climate Disaster Project is an international teaching newsroom that has trained hundreds of students at 13 post-secondary institutions to work on the frontlines of this ongoing humanitarian crisis by creating an extensive archive of eyewitness accounts.
“Educators at post-secondary institutions across Canada and around the world have spent hundreds of hours teaching students how to compassionately help survivors share their stories,” says Holman, UVic’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental & Climate Journalism. “Our students then take that knowledge into the community to co-create a people’s history of climate change that honours the human dignity of their experiences.”
To date, over 300 testimonies have been collected from disaster survivors and shared in local, national and international publications, as well as national radio and television broadcasts.
About the Climate Storytellers Summit
Over 20 speakers will present at the Climate Storytellers’ Summit on April 10. Join them live online to hear from people harnessing the power of climate storytelling across ages and stages, topics and time zones. The diverse lineup of speakers includes a journalist, poet, data analyst, healthcare executive, dancer, author, anthropologist, photographer, professor, oral historian, indigenous rights advocate, high school and college students, retired park rangers, and documentary filmmakers, among others.
Each will share a lively five-minute presentation about the ways that climate stories can disrupt business as usual, grapple with history and inspire hope. The summit and its companion documentation and resource hub will offer a platform to present climate storytelling work and to learn and connect with others working in this important space.
Stream the Climate Storytellers’ Summit live on Thursday, April 10. Full details and free registration here.
New exhibit & partnership
In other Climate Disaster Project news, Kamloops-based independent community news outlet The Wren has published a series of testimonies from climate disaster survivors around the city and as far away as Bolivia, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka.
Thompson Rivers University journalism professor Jennifer Chrumka has led the co-creation of these 24 testimonies with her students, and also arranged for short text excerpts to be presented as an art exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery in April: Fragments from the Frontlines: Voices and Portraits of Survival, featuring photographs from Jess Beaudin.
This is just the latest effort by the Climate Disaster Project to raise the voices of climate impacted communities to make sure their experiences aren’t forgotten and their knowledge is shared locally, regionally, and globally.
“I don’t think that this is something that anybody can prepare for”, says TRU student Reagan Wilkinson, who shares her experience of 2024 hurricanes Helene and Milton with Climate Disaster Project contributor Hamida Marufu.