大象传媒

From Catastrophe to Community: A People's History of Climate Change (C2C) will train 500 post-secondary students and professional journalists to record the experiences of 1,000 survivors globally and share their wisdom over the next six years.

鈥淭here is no more important matter of public concern today and for generations to come than the climate crisis,鈥� says Stuart Poyntz, CERi Scientific Director and C2C co-director. 鈥淭hose who have experienced climate emergencies, including fires, floods, oppressive smoke and devastating storms can help us to learn how to communicate, understand and respond to the crisis. Their voices and experiences will help us to build resilient communities and to take action to change the darkness now before us.鈥�

I became involved with this work when CERi first collaborated with the Climate Disaster Project, an international teaching newsroom that works with climate disaster survivors to share and investigate their stories. Following my time as a journalist in newsrooms in Washington, D.C., and Anchorage, Alaska, I鈥檓 completing my master鈥檚 research on climate journalism in the 大象传媒 School of Communication, and have been working at CERi alongside that work.

Over the past year of research, interrogating how these stories inspire climate action and support for disaster survivors has deepened my understanding of the power of listening and the need for continued human-focused storytelling.

This project marks an expansion of the partnership with CERi and will further develop the Climate Disaster Project鈥檚 unique method of trauma-informed storytelling, which, unlike traditional journalism, gives control over the process to the survivor. CERi will be responsible for focus groups with survivors and trainees that will improve this methodology, as well as focus groups with audiences to understand how personal stories can incite climate action.

鈥淔rom Catastrophe to Community will help to lead this work, and CERi is very grateful to play our part in leading community-engaged research in the project, to work with survivors of climate emergencies and others to unearth the stories and wisdom that will help us all to imagine and build more hopeful futures,鈥� says Poyntz. 

This endeavor also builds from a project that has been at the center of my work at 312 Main: our recent theatre production, . We invited the public to join the play鈥檚 several showings of Neworld Theatre鈥檚 productions in Victoria in 2024 and Vancouver in 2025 to hear these verbatim accounts of British Columbians who lived through the extreme fire, flood, and heat in 2021. 

And, we didn鈥檛 just ask audiences to listen. We asked them to participate in a community conversation after the show. Audience members and policy listeners 鈥� from mayors and MLAs to public health professionals 鈥� shared thoughtful perspectives after each production. Together, we imagined better community-based responses, shared emotional experiences of disasters, and called on each other to better support our neighbors and survivors. 

We鈥檝e only just begun to understand the impact of these stories through our theatre production, after which audiences indicated they were moved to support disaster survivors and understood climate disasters in a more personal way. 

As the project develops, I will be coordinating the creation of a global archive of climate disaster oral histories, where these stories will live. We intend for this living and growing archive to be accessible for years to come, exemplifying a truly human-focused approach to climate research.

This work will also produce documentaries, news features, an anthology of testimonies, and a travelling museum exhibition that will launch at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Museum of Vancouver. I cannot wait to continue working on this project and see how the various interdisciplinary works unfold in the future.