Note: This transcript is auto generated and lightly edited.
DAN: I wrote something recently for a talk that I gave and it roughly goes along the lines of when everything is on fire, the climate crisis no longer leads the news, it just blends into the chaos. And I think that's the situation of the position that we find ourselves in at the moment, certainly in Trump land, where you guys live. But even here, we see the Trump agenda dominating the news to the point the climate is diminished. in a panel recently, I raised this, what I found when I kind of reflected on it, I thought was quite disturbing is that in the last six months, the climate stakes have got lower.
MONICA: Welcome to Policy for the Planet, a podcast exploring the global response to the climate crisis. We'll unravel the complex tradeoffs of different policy choices to steer us toward sustainable solutions and public well-being.
I'm Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Welcome to the conversation.
Climate storytelling is under crisis. More often, climate stories in media outlets are being sidelined for other breaking news, even as major news stories, from power blackouts to wildfires aren't linked in the public's mind to climate change.
Joining me today is Dan McDougall, a multiple award-winning International Film Director and Writer with a background in investigative journalism and groundbreaking human storytelling. He's a former Africa correspondent of The Sunday Times of London, South Asia Correspondent for The Observer and BBC Panorama Journalist and was named British Foreign Correspondent of the Year.
He has also won four Amnesty International Awards for Human Rights Reporting – covering issues as diverse as child rape in South Africa, LGBT persecution in Syria, the plight of Europe's Roma and Zimbabwe's deadly trade in Blood Diamonds. He sits on the foundation board of the Climate Crisis Storytelling platform Waterbear.
Well, hello, Dan. Thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you with us on the show discussing narratives for climate policy, which are absolutely critical. So before we jump into that conversation, would you please tell us a bit about your work covering the climate crisis, what the problems are that you see and how climate is covered by the media and the whole issue around this idea of a storytelling crisis when it comes to climate issues. Thank you.
DAN: Gosh, that's a lot of questions. Okay, thank you, Monica. Thank you for inviting me to talk about climate storytelling. Yeah, I began reporting on the climate crisis several decades ago. I was one of the first foreign correspondents, certainly, to report on climate as an emergency or a crisis, you know, back in the days of global warming and greenhouse effect when we were trying to diminish what it actually represented.
I guess the best example of that was my early reporting in Tuvalu in the Pacific where we documented climate refugees, which hadn't really been documented at that level before. I suppose one of the most extraordinary things about that story was the amount of denial that the story elicited in the, not just, you know, from policymakers, but other media. There's a lot well they're not climate refugees or economic refugees, but you know despite us actually photographing their homes underwater and then photographing them in New Zealand in Auckland where they had fled their sinking communities. And that was a very early indication I guess that with my coverage of the Sundarbans [in Bangladesh] and people literally trying to build mud walls and banks to keep their islands from sinking was a very early indication of not just climate denial, but this kind of really strange dynamic in terms of convincing people that it's real, right? Even though the evidence is overwhelming. then this, you know, it kind of grew and over the years, I've covered everything from glacial retreat in Tibet, right? You know, the collapse of fisheries in West Africa and changes in temperature in the Sahel drought that exacerbates the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, climate grief in the Arctic as well, how glacial melt and changing weather patterns in the Arctic are creating psychological challenges for the Inuit and Eskimo populations there. The list goes on and on and on and how climate intersects with war in places like Yemen and Somalia and elsewhere.
MONICA: Can you give us some examples of this failure of the storytelling when it comes to climate and climate reporting and talking about climate? What is it that makes people have a hard time connecting, as you said, the overwhelming evidence with the idea that, there is actual causality going on. I mean, there are things that humans are doing to the planet which are causing the climate to change.
Why is that message so hard for people to understand?
DAN: I wrote something recently for a talk that I gave and it roughly goes along the lines of when everything is in fire, the climate crisis no longer leads the news, it just blends into the chaos. And I think that's the situation of the position that we find ourselves in at the moment, certainly in Trump land, where you guys live. But even here, we see the Trump agenda dominating the news to the point the climate is diminished.
In a panel recently, I raised this, what I found when I kind of reflected on it, I thought was quite disturbing is that in the last six months, the climate stakes have got lower. And that's actually terrifying and deeply concerning in so many different levels. And I think that climate action increasingly seems like unaffordable idealism. know, it's being it's being pegged to wokeism. It's become a culture war which is where climate shouldn't exist.
Climate is an existential crisis at the center of our world. The red line that goes through conflict, goes through how we live our lives, goes through weather patterns, goes through everything. Climate has its pause on everything and yet at the moment it's become a kind sidelined issue. And I think that that's the...
That's the reality of where we are at the moment. And if you want to ask me why we're in that position, I think there's a number of issues. Obviously, in Trump land, we see this space where...There's a lot of climate denial. There's a lot of economic policy that's rolling back. The removal from the Paris climate summit, removal from, there's changes in legislation that's impacting. There's a reduction, for example, in even USAID climate programs, how America helps people that are enduring the climate crisis abroad.
And this intersection now between environmentalism and wokeism is really, really disturbing, right? But then you have broken activism. So in the midst of this political turmoil around the climate story, you have organizations like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, even Greenpeace, facing either litigation or changing the way that they communicate the climate crisis because they are no longer wanted, right?
At events, you know, they've been targeting sports events, targeting motorways, commuters, anything they can to raise awareness. But now they're being arrested or they've been intimidated or they realize that their storytelling is no longer working. And I think that's a that's a really serious problem, right?
So think in this, so against this backdrop of Trump plan, the broken activism, we also have the economic reality in a post COVID world where, and recession and even tariffs, right? Everything somehow feeds back into the sustainable option being unaffordable. And I think we're seeing a real change in language around climate, which is concerning a lot of climate activists, a lot of climate journalists and policy makers like yourself as well.
But then obviously we have a crisis of storytelling, which we're here to talk about, is probably the most fundamental challenge, I would say. I was in Ukraine at the end of last year and someone was describing the Ukraine conflict to me as a crisis of storytelling. Everything is a crisis of storytelling. If people can't communicate, if people can't solve problems, there is a crisis of communication and a crisis of storytelling.
And that's where we are in the climate space. But the most disturbing thing for me is the challenge of the audience. And I talk a lot about Twilight knowing how the public or the global audience when it comes to climate can't grasp it. They can't fathom it. And this is something we'll talk about later, I think about in terms of how the media covers it. But Twilight knowing is the mind's refusal to engage in what the eye is seeing. So we almost with climate, it's so vast and so incomprehensible that we become childlike in our understanding and therefore go into a state of denial and look at the implausibility of climate because we can't face the reality of it, which is, you know, a Frankenstein story, right?
That is probably of our making. Yeah, exactly. And that's a hard thing to take in. So there's your storytelling crisis right there. Your audience doesn't want to face it, doesn't want to listen. And newsrooms know that, right? Because it doesn't work on social media. It's a nightmare story to tell.
MONICA: It's existential, right?
So on that note, thinking about the crisis in climate storytelling, the fact that when you look at climate and the news that we see or that we get from major news outlets, we see, and I think you've mentioned this before, we see that climate isn't really being sort of the key piece in a lot of these stories. When it really is, you know, when it really is the thing or the cause that is behind some of that. So even though there may be a connection, oftentimes that climate connection gets lost in these major news pieces. Can you give us some examples of how that has happened in things that you've seen and in the work that you've done?
DAN: Well, I think it's important to divide that scenario into two kind of spaces. The first space is where media are not correctly identifying climate's role in certain disasters or stories or breaking narratives in the world, but then also disinformation, how disinformation in the world is actually also having a negative effect in climate storytelling. So if we're to take storytelling. So I was in a panel at the Edinburgh Television Festival a few years ago and it was why are we getting climate storytelling so wrong, right? Which is my idea. I thought it'd be good for drama, TV executives.
I mean, I'm a documentary maker as well as a writer to talk about how drama is getting it right and wrong. Everyone talks about don't look up is the perfect example of the intersection between satire and climate, powerful climate storytelling. And I agree with that, but there's not many other examples that are that successful. And could ask Adam McKay for that, but I do think that the conversation was dominated by this idea that we're not really identifying climate.
This is one of my talks I give at Cambridge, I lecture at Cambridge and talk about the red line through our lives, right? And I started the panel by talking about COVID, COVID-19. So everyone's focused on COVID. It's been made in a lab in China. It's a conspiracy, because that's an easy story to swallow, right? That it's basically turned our lives and our world's upside down. You know, we're trapped in our homes, people are dying in extraordinary numbers. COVID was just an extraordinary moment in our lives, which we're still recovering from.
No one ever talked about COVID as a climate story, right? Where does the pandemic come from? You shake the tree, you demolish the forest, you live cheek by jowl with nature, and then there's viral leap, a pandemic's grow. And we saw, I covered the Ebola crisis. You see Ebola in the DRC and in parts of Uganda and in Sierra Leone. And then COVID, we're never thinking about it as climate.
So we had this huge debate on the panel and we agreed at the end, some success, that COVID was a climate adjacent story. And I was kind of satisfied with that. I thought, okay, great. Okay, we're somewhere now, right? We're actually seeing that COVID and climate intersect. And I think that one of the, I did an investigation into the persecution of LGBTQ citizens by ISIS. And when I wrote that story, I investigated that story, it never really struck me that this had anything to do with climate. This was a kind of death cult militia that had emerged in power vacuum in the north of Syria, spread into Iraq. But then Pew did a really in-depth study in 2020 that directly attributed the collapse of the Assad regime in certain parts of Syria to drought.
And this is a familiar story to me having covered the conflict, the war in Somalia and in Yemen. The drought is a huge factor. It's always been water and drought, massive factors in conflict. So then we start to look at the Syrian war being potentially a climate story. And I think, well, the LGBTQ. Yeah, then I also think about the LGBTQ story and ISIS targeting LGBTQ citizens and throwing them off of rooftops and murdering them and thinking, what's that got to do with climate?
But it's not really a leap of faith to draw that red line. And there are so many examples, so many examples, the spike in child marriage in the Sahel, why are more girls getting married? Well, it's because of the climate crisis, because families can't afford to have three or four daughters. the, you know, one daughter has to be effectively married off to another family. So the necessities of survival and the drama that that creates the stories are often linked to climate.
MONICA: So Dan, that is really very interesting because when we tease this out a little more, we can really see how the backdrop to much of what we read and to many of the things that get reported on ends up being climate. think that is quite evident when the stories are about viruses, whether it be COVID or anything else. So for example, last year there were lots of stories about how, you know, dengue virus, Zika virus and these mosquito-borne viruses have been spreading much, much further and into areas where they were not previously, you know, endemic, they were not previously in circulation simply because of the change, the shifting temperatures, the change in weather patterns and weather conditions and so on. That is always there at the background.
But it isn't often connected to the fact that you see these patterns of viral migration and that's on viruses alone. But there are a bunch of other stories as you've just highlighted, even conflict and other things that happen in different places that are also climate connected. Why do you think it is that that connection gets lost? Do you think it's a blame issue, the fact that people are put off by being pointed to climate as a cause? Is that what's underlying this or how do you see it? Why is it that we're not making these connections when they should be made?
DAN: Well, I think what I'll do is just quickly, if you don't mind, Monica, because I said this is in two parts in terms of the storytelling. So I'll say the second part first, because that might fit into what I said. So a really good example recently, and this is super topical. So a really good example recently of how climate storytelling is being hijacked, right? Which, you know, we live in an age of disinformation, right? Which is, for me, is the single most concerning issue now. know, you know, activists are called eco zealots. You know, it's very useful to attack anyone that is that is trying to raise climate as an issue, but then you've got nefarious interference by state party, state agencies.
You have think tanks that have very, you know, strange names that are that putting out disinformation. And I live in here in Barcelona and we had recently the huge power cut, which was the Iberian blackout, covered the whole of Barcelona, the whole of the Iberian blackout, which covered the whole of Spain and Portugal. And it was such a blackout, there was no electricity in two countries, two sovereign countries, one of the biggest power cuts in history.
So this is the fascinating part of the Iberian blackout was the fact we were getting our information from radio when the radio was coming from France or coming from neighboring countries, the BBC were very behind. So we were relying on the radio stations in Spain who were communicating with radio in France to try and work out why there was a blackout.
So the first story that came out was it was the Russians that did it, right? So the Russians had severed an underground cable that had somehow cut the whole of Spain and Portugal off. But then after about an hour, it became a story about renewables. So the blackout that had crippled the of Spain and Portugal within an hour, with no one knowing why there's a blackout, became a story about Spain's over-reliance on renewables, on solar, on wind. And Spain have made this huge commitment to renewable energy and to their credit.
So how did they know that? Did that story get out? And then you start to look at Twitter feeds, you start to look at social media and you analyze it and you realize that it was pure opportunism by fossil fuel lobby groups, by vested interest groups to hijack the energy transition and turn it into a disaster.
It was a perfect moment, but what was most terrifying about it was how quickly they reacted. They reacted in real time on social media and disinformation that got out and then eventually was picked up by mainstream media who were just desperate for a story or an angle on it. And then it became a story and then renewables is still being discussed in the context. Of course, it's ridiculous. And I think that's a really good example of where the story has been hijacked.
MONICA: That is a very good example. And as you said, it is a really frightening one because this is a very recent story. You would think that by now people would realize that, you know, if there's a blackout, there are many potential causes, but you always need to have climate at the back of your mind. And then somebody makes up, you know, this connection with it's the fact that we're using too many renewables. then, you know, and then it just, they turn it into something that becomes appealing to people and no one stops to think, right? Whether or not that makes sense. How do we get out of that?
DAN: I think one of the most extraordinary things about the climate narrative is that it is deeply personal. And I think that there are ways that we can tackle it, can engage audiences, that we can get them out of this twilight knowing space. And we can also perhaps... challenge the disinformation that's in the public domain in such enormous quantities now. And I think we begin with looking at how climate affects people in different ways. And recently I talked about around the kind of key areas that I saw climate being an incredible story. And so one of them was justice.
We're going into an era where ecocide could be a reality in courtrooms. We're already seeing the International Criminal Court exploring how ecocide could be pursued through the international courts. So a possible example of that would be the war in Ukraine and the damage of dam systems to flood valleys to help the war effort for one side or another. We could see corporate malpractice becoming a potential ecocide prosecution scenario in national courts, in state courts. there's nothing like, like Erin Brokovich is probably one of successful films ever made that shows that, you know, David and Goliath narrative, right?
I think that's, and people, people really react to that, fight back, and it, because it gives some hope, you know, why do we protest? Why do, why do investigative journalists, you know, or human rights journalists, like me, why do we write? Because we do, we, or we make films, we do it because it gives us hope and I think justice is an interesting space, because there we see retribution, we see, we see, payback for people who are destroying the Amazon or wetlands in Indonesia or putting animals in harm's way. And I think that's a really interesting space, the relationship between justice and climate, because that actually gives accountability. So I would be really interested in that space being developed much more from a storytelling perspective.
MONICA: Yes. That is a great story, by the way. Yeah.
DAN: But then I also look at faith issues like faith and how climate is affecting faith. This summer we have the Hajj, for example, we're going to have temperatures probably going up to 50 degrees. I'm not sure what that is in American money, but it's very hot. And you have, you know, millions of pilgrims descending on Saudi Arabia. And how do they cope in extreme heat?
And we see that with the Kumb Mela in India, where we have, you know, 50 million Hindus going into the Ganges and the water there is in retreat. The water has become, you know, there's no life left in the Ganges and parts of the Ganges because of the pollution. And the relationship between faith and the climate, how the environment being destroyed gets in the way of God. It's a really interesting area.
And I think Pope Francis, and I was a huge fan of Pope Francis in many ways, Pope Francis' attitudes through Laudato Si, through his climate policies really try to shift the dialogue amongst Catholics. And I think that faith is the best audience, right? So if you have faith leaders that are talking about the climate crisis, that's an extraordinary space to develop stories in.
But then sport was the other one that I don't think that we're talking about enough how climate is. We saw with the World Cup in Qatar, which is a great example, which was held in the winter. So all of these Europeans are watching the World Cup, a summer tournament in the winter, very confused, know, snowing outside. That was shifted because of the heat, the extreme heat in Qatar and Doha. So climate is increasingly impacting sport. see it in America, we see games being called off more often, doing snowmaggedons, we see, and these are issues that are close to people's hearts. And I think that we need to look for proximity, you know, because these big thinking stories, and I've told a lot of those stories, right? We have to look at proximity, what hits people in the heart. And what's gonna affect their lives directly. That's why COVID's a lost opportunity.
MONICA: I fully agree and I think this is a fascinating way to think about it. Making the stories more local, making it more about the people affected because those people know what it is that's impacting them and then their stories kind of go out to the world and others may see similarities. I like the way by which you brought Erin Brockovich into this conversation because for our audience, I'm not sure if people have seen the film, but the film is from the 90s.
It's an incredible film and it's about, you know, it is climate injustice very much in that space because it's about a class action suit and this woman's story who pursued this because of her in her community, the water was being, it was being polluted by very heavy chemicals and causing a lot of really, really serious health issues. And these are the kinds of stories that are out there every day. And I think, you know, you hit the nail right on the head in terms of This is how we get people to care, you because if it's just a broad story about climate, then you run into the sort of existential denial, right, that people kind of fall back on.
DAN: And health is I mean, I think in America health is you know, there's this incredible Yale study called the six Americas that examines the different attitudes towards climate and it takes, you know, sample groups of six Americans. I think it's like it goes from alarmed to, you know, to dismissive, you know, everything in between, right? It's a fascinating study worth reading. But I do think that the one story that intersects all of this is health because, you know, and you definitely have health indicators that are looking at huge increases in asthma in cities like London, New Delhi, and even in Paris, you know, when it starts to impact to health, the intersection between diabetes and climate and other health indicators in America. I I read a study that said one third of Americans have health problems that can be related to the climate crisis. And that's a rich scene of storytelling right there, you know, because you're hitting people literally saying the climate crisis is making you ill. That is extraordinary dynamic.
MONICA: Yeah, that should be a very powerful line, right? The climate crisis is affecting your health. And I think if we were able perhaps to sort of bring that more into a lot of the stories, that may shift a bit, at least the perceptions that people have.
So Dan, I understand how bringing this closer to people in their communities will likely make them more aware or more connected to the climate problem and to the climate issues that we want them to care about. But how do we then jump to policymakers? How do we make policymakers care about this more than they currently seem to care, at least broadly speaking. Of course, there are policymakers that care about this a lot, in terms of making it broader.
DAN: I think that one of the, so one of my bug bears, something that I talk about a lot is science communication. now science communication, I find incredibly frustrating.
I once spent a few weeks in an ice station in Greenland with a large group of climate scientists. I'm not entirely sure what the collective noun is for climate scientists, but every night we would have these quite heated debates about...the failures of climate communication from the scientific perspective, that includes think tanks as well, right? It includes, you know, as policy positions and how their obsession with peer review, which I understand because one of the main issues is that any reports are put out in the climate crisis are instantly ripped apart or denied or, you know, disinformation we're discussing is used to undermine their positions. So they have to be robust.
But we were in Greenland looking at the proliferation of algae in the glacier and how algae had effectively developed sunscreen because the weather was changing, the summers were longer, but that sunscreen, which is pink, was actually exacerbating ice melt in the glaciers.
MONICA: That is so interesting.
DAN: Yeah, it's fascinating. I wrote this piece for The Guardian for the launch of the Age of Extinction series. And Algae could be the author of our doom, right? Algae in sunscreen, which is quite terrifying. And the last thing we'll see on Earth is pink snow at top of a glacier.
But I guess what the debate was focused on was this issue of how scientists are not good at telling stories. That's not their job. know, probably more people like me, more people like us to tell their stories to communicate climate from that perspective.
In another trip to Greenland, I actually worked with a think tank in Denmark to find the perfect correlation between data science and think tank, group-think and storytelling. And I wanted to prove that the climate crisis in Greenland was causing mental health issues. I'm very interested in the concept of solistalgia, which is effectively feeling homesick in your own home.
And it's directly linked to climate, you know, it's almost like you're discombobulated by the environment that, you know, the weather's changing. It's raining. It shouldn't be raining at this time of year or in Greenland or in Canada. The glaciers are treating the landscapes physically changing. It's hotter in the Sahel. So solistalgia is something we're seeing all over the world. And I'm interested in this idea of proving that the climate crisis is making us sad. And so I spoke to this think tank in Copenhagen, who I knew had been doing a survey in Greenland. And they'd been asking Greenlanders really boring questions. How many televisions do you have? What languages can your children speak? How, you know, do you go to church? You know, it's kind of broad senses questions. Two questions in there. Do you believe the climate crisis is real? And the second one, is the climate crisis making you sad?
And the sample for that study was, I think, like a third of all adults, maybe even two thirds of all adults in Greenland. The sample was, you couldn't refute it, right? It was such a huge sample. And I was thinking, my gosh, this think tank has this extraordinary, extraordinary data. And then I can go to Greenland and interview people about how they feel. And then I can prove that there's sadness linked to the climate crisis. And we did this huge story about eco grief in the front page of the Guardian, we made a film about it, a beautiful documentary called Open Water. And the fascinating thing about this was that it was a perfect marriage between policy and journalism. And I think that there's a disconnect here. I don't think that they work hard enough. think, you know, policymakers, as you guys know, that's what you guys do, right? You your pointy heads, right? And you always think of things in a very academic way.
But what's going to connect, what's going to resonate? Where's the emotion in the story? Where's the emotion in the data? Where's the emotion in the policy paper? I never see it, I very rarely see it.
MONICA: It's never there.
DAN: It's never there. But in a crisis of information, it needs to be there.
MONICA: Absolutely. No, I completely agree with you. Well, this is fascinating, Dan, and I would have had so many more questions to ask you and so many more sort of probing into your own stories because you have many, many of them. And they cover the gambit of things that are of interest, I think to all of us, but certainly to this podcast. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your knowledge with us. It was very enriching for me. Thank you so much.
DAN: No, thank you. Thank you very much. I do appreciate the time. Thank you.
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