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“Open your eyes. We failed. The climate crisis is now.”
Thus begins the video introduction “Postcards from a Burning WorldAn ambitious multimedia project reported and developed by over 40 writers, photographers, editors and designers at The Opinion desk. Times. The project, featured in today’s issue and released online last month, documents how climate change is changing lives in 193 countries.
“We need to change the debate on climate change,” Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in an interview. “We talk like we’re in the future, but it’s already changing the way we live.”
Inspired by the upcoming United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in July, Ms. Kingsbury launched a desk initiative that will immerse readers in the disastrous consequences of a warming world—not as an abstract, apocalyptic future threat, but as the present. and the personal one. The package would present the facts, while also advocating for prioritizing a topic that has irreversible effects on the planet, qualifying “Postcards” as an Idea project.
He commissioned Meeta Agrawal, Opinion’s Special Projects editor, and Kate Elazegui, Opinion design director, to create teams to compile files on the most pressing climate issues in 193 countries, and then figure out how to illustrate an issue for each country. a simplified format.
After the groups finished their research, the design team came up with a few display ideas. The team decided on a mobile-friendly experience similar to the TikTok app. in the country.
The cards show various global problems. A team of staff and freelance photographers, sound experts, and videographers around the world have documented or collected existing recordings that show changes such as the sounds of healthy (squeaky and popping) and dying (quiet) coral reefs in Fiji, a passing through cliffs. caught the skater. He recorded the deep eruption of ice in the Netherlands and a calving glacier in Greenland. There is the flood that swept through Austria; Forest fires scorching Tanzania. There are elephants, cargo ships and cricketers.
The project also includes testimonials from people in different countries, including a migrant worker working outdoors in temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius in Qatar, and a 12-year-old climate activist in Barbados, a Caribbean country that has been alternately battered by hurricanes and drought.
Ms Kingsbury said the biggest challenge was to make sure that the topics they chose to highlight were real representations of people from these countries.
“We wanted someone in the country to definitely be able to relate to this card,” he said.
Ms Kingsbury said the goal is to tell the story of a person directly affected by the problem whenever possible.
“We wanted to have as many human voices as we could to try to attract readers who could see their own experiences being mirrored,” he said.
Ms Kingsbury said the team was conscious of how to do this, especially for the United States, where the majority of Times readers live. One card allows readers to name any of the 3,143 counties in the country and see the biggest climate change threat there.
“We wanted to do something interactive that would allow people to see how the problem was affecting them,” he said.
Ms Agrawal said that after working on the project for five months, she has a deeper understanding of how different parts of the world are being destroyed by climate change. It points to how everything from cultural traditions such as practicing Kuomboka in Zimbabwe and climbing Mount Triglav in Slovenia to people’s livelihoods has been affected.
While the title of the project doesn’t exactly inspire optimism, Ms. Agrawal said the team was confident adding examples of the creative ways nations are using to tackle climate change. Norway’s card, for example, includes a photo of a wooden skyscraper, a construction method that is part of the country’s effort to avoid concrete’s massive carbon footprint. Spain highlights the country’s return to pre-industrial farming methods to revive almond farms that have dried up amid desertification.
More than 1.5 million people have read the article, which was shared on social media by influential climate activists such as the former Vice President. Al Gore and John Kerry, former senator and secretary of state and current US presidential climate special envoy. The project has gained ground as well: a high school teacher in Lagos, Nigeria, emailed Ms. Kingsbury to say she used it as a teaching tool for her students whose lives had been turned upside down by the flooding, and that’s what happened. It allowed them to see that they were not alone, and hopefully instilled in them political will.
Ms. Agrawal said she hopes the project will highlight the deep havoc of climate change and serve as a warning. “The takeaway is that it comes for you wherever you are, and we need to do everything we can to limit the damage.”
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