In March 2024, the Guardian’s environment desk began collaborating on a project that we hope will give voice to the growing number of people around the world living through the daily impact of climate breakdown. Our journalists have worked alongside researchers and humanitarian workers at the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) in Canada and the International Red Cross to compile a series of testimonies from survivors of recent extreme weather events.
CDP is an international teaching newsroom coordinated out of the University of Victoria in Canada that collaborates with disaster survivors. The teams are trained in trauma-informed interview skills, and spent hours speaking with people, listening to their stories and then relaying them in a way that takes us all through the experience. In publishing these testimonies and sharing them with you, we were able to help fulfil the project’s aim of creating “a people’s history of climate change” that would honour the dignity of the survivors.
The Red Cross worked with the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, to collect further survivor testimonies. “The climate crisis is already here, taking lives, destroying homes, wiping out livelihoods,” says Carrington. “That human suffering must be recognised now to get as much help to climate victims as possible. The harrowing testimony of these witnesses is also vital as evidence that every delay in climate action causes terrible harm, which will only increase until fossil fuel burning is ended.”
