Climate as the center of every conversation
There is no more important story to tell than the story about how the climate changes and how we must change with it.
The weather is wilder, warmer, windier and wetter. And we know it will continue in that direction for the next many years. We also know that we will have to change the way we use the ressources on earth if we want our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren to be liveable. But we don’t know how to have the conversation about our future without dividing us in a polarized debate where we look at the counterpart and think there are uninformed or even stupid.
For the next year I will spend my time trying to find a way for us to come together in a solutions oriented and engaging public conversation about the future we must create in order to live in, according to and with the nature.
As fellow at University of Southern Denmark I will be exploring how to move from thinking about the climate to acting on it, and how the media can help.
From thinking to acting
Last week I was part of the amazing Danish public meeting about the climate in Middelfart, Denmark; Klimafolkemødet. More than 20.000 people attended the many interesting debates and people to meet and talk to about how to move on in a more constructive direction. The meeting were filled with ordinary citizens, politicians, CEOs, musicians, writers and curious bystanders.
That way of gathering and debating looking for solutions is meaningful and helpful, and I brought with me a lot of knowledge to use in my work forward.
But we also need to figure out how to come together in the climate-debates when we don’t agree on the solutions or maybe even on the gravity of the problem.
The political debate can improve
In Denmark we are having a general election within the next year, and the debates have already begun. Last week the three candidates for the role as prime minister met in a tv-debate. They discussed the future for Denmark and all in all the spend NINE minutes (in a debate of more than an hour) talking about the climate and the climate — change. That is a clear indication of how much the climate is prioritized. In my opinion that is a terrible mistake. We must find a way to focus on the solutions to the future the climate is creating for us in a way that it is obvious that it is the most important subject for the future of politics in Denmark and in any other country. To do that we need new insights, we need to learn from the best and we need to share the best solutions.
That is what I will be focusing on for the next year as a fellow — and probably forever after — or at least until we have found a way to fix it.
I will be using my journalistic method STEP as a framework for the project.
STEP is a journalistic model, that helps the journalist to make the journalism more relevant to the audience. It is solutionsoriented by looking for solutions to the problems we are working with. The model helps create trust in you as a journalist, your journalism and gives the recipient trust in their own democratic voice. It engages people in the research, the choice of topics to focus on and in finding the problems and solutions to research on. And it broadens the perspective on the story you work with.
STEP is a model the journalist can use to create an audience-first — strategy on a single story or a series of stories or even the strategy for a entire media outlet.
You can read about the STEP-model here:
Join me
To find the best solutions, examples and research about how to create an engaging and solutions-oriented climate debate, that will help people come together and act on the problems in front of us, I will need a lot of help.
So please reach out if you have good examples, if you have tried something new that seems to work or if you have great ideas I should know about.
You can reach me here: gerdmay@gmail.com or on my social media-accounts.
You can read more about my plan with the project here:
https://gerdmay.medium.com/from-climate-attitude-to-climate-action-ec3ecb5d30f
