Fires rage, floods devastate, storms surge: every day we hear about the impacts of climate change, with ever-increasing casualty counts and infrastructure damage tipping into the billions. But all too often, climate politics and media reporting favour the voices of experts over victims, resulting in a lost opportunity to act on the first-person experiences of climate-change survivors.

Now, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has awarded a $2.5 million grant to close that critical gap in narrative and knowledge. From Catastrophe to Community: A People’s History of Climate Change will train 500 post-secondary students and professional journalists to document the experience of 1,000 survivors around the world and share their wisdom.

“Making the universal challenge of climate change personal is the first step towards meaningful outcomes,” says Dr. Neil Ever Osborne, communications professor at Trent University and a co-director of the project. “We need a map to chart the course forward, and these first-person accounts of living with climate change do just that because they’re not only about impacts, but also resiliency, and the truly transformative acts survivors have already taken.”

Why Personal Climate Stories Matter
The project will result in the creation of documentaries with APTN Investigates, news features, an anthology and a travelling museum exhibition that will launch at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Museum of Vancouver. In the process, the From Catastrophe to Community team will develop new trauma-informed, human-rights-based storytelling practices that can support the recovery of communities impacted by climate change and other humanitarian crises.

“In a warming world we need stories about the impacts today, but also solution stories we can act on tomorrow,” says Professor Osborne. “Compelling stories create a ‘what-is’ scenario that’s happening now, but also a ‘what-could-be’ scenario that unfolds in the future. The project roots storytelling as a key facet of climate communication, now made possible because of the grant provided by SSHRC.”

Training the Next Generation of Climate Communicators
While the project aims to create a people’s history of climate change, an account written by the survivors whose lived experiences become the fabric of the narrative, it also aims to improve climate communication, making it personal and more empathetic. At Trent, the new Climate Communication Option will be a key component of training students involved in the project to use storytelling as a tool and tell the right stories.

“Climate change is tough to talk about. It’s an abstract, complex problem that only becomes tangible when it’s knocking on your door, say as a flood in your basement,” says Prof. Osborne. “While the craft of storytelling might be intuitive for some, it doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and not enough storytellers are focused on telling the transformative stories society needs to hear. I’m interested in showing what these solution stories look like and Trent will be proactive in this research.”

Global Collaboration, Local Leadership
From Catastrophe to Community: A People’s History of Climate Change was awarded to Trent University Prof. Osborne, as well a team of researchers, curators, journalists, and artists including co-directors at the Museum of Vancouver, University of Victoria (UVic), Simon Fraser University, the University of Denver Colorado, the University of Stirling, the Université du Québec à Montréal, and York University.

From Catastrophe to Community builds on the Climate Disaster Project created by UVic professor Dr. Sean Holman. To date, the Climate Disaster Project has trained over 250 students in trauma-informed journalism techniques and — with the assistance of post-secondary partners in Canada and around the world — co-created more than 320 testimonies with climate survivors worldwide.