Storytelling can make a better world

Urgency to act

With the environmental clock ticking amidst a global pandemic, Mañosa Nyblon said it became clear that the health of our planet is inextricably linked to our own health. It took the pandemic for people around the world to finally connect those two dots. “Essentially, there’s no health without planetary health,” she said. “It’s driven by hope and the urgency to act for a greener, healthier and socially just future.” In 2020, while everyone was stuck at home, Mañosa Nyblon, Education and Skills Partnership Development Manager at the University of Exeter, established a team at the interface of climate science, health, and the arts to intervene in the planetary health crisis.

From stories to action

When trying to persuade people to do something important you can present statistics and spreadsheets, but without a story that paints a picture of what’s at stake, pulls heartstrings and sparks imagination to envision possibilities it’s difficult to move people to take action. Storytelling is one way to do that, explained Mañosa Nyblon, because it’s the way we make sense of our world and ourselves. “It heals us, helps us empathise, and helps us understand each other,” she said. “The stories we tell shape how we see ourselves and how we see the world around us. When we start to see the world differently, we begin to behave differently.”

In addition to being an environmental issue, Mañosa Nyblon said the climate crisis is a crisis of language, communication, translation, and empathy. With the goal of inspiring people to act, the international interdisciplinary team that she leads pioneered a new way of communicating climate narratives that engages people both intellectually and emotionally. “Our objectives are to connect science, health, education, and the arts to help us understand these global issues and empathise with our planetary health emergency,” she said, “To see the role of humans as responsible beings with personal agency and stakes in a changing world.”

Bringing stories to life

The team’s first project coincided with COP 26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in 2021. They started by connecting people, a group of climate scientists and health professionals from the University of Exeter, who came together through a series of creative writing workshops led by poet Dr. Sally Flint. These collaborative workshops gave participants space to explore their own ideas around topics linked with COP themes like energy, transport, water, and biodiversity. They then wrote short stories and at the end that body of writing was edited into 12 poems or stories. “None of the stories are the voice of one person,” said Mañosa Nyblon. “It’s a weaving together of many voices so they are authentic, they are trusted and speak to different perspectives.”

The stories were then published in a book called One Chance Left, and were brought to life in a variety of ways including songs and readings recorded with sounds of nature.  But one of the most important things that happened was bringing poetry to the science pavilion at COP 26. “We took poetry to the negotiating space at COP,” said Mañosa Nyblon. “At first they were very sceptical, but when we presented this project people were moved on an emotional level so we knew we were on to something.”

Local & global reach

This work succeeded in connecting the local with the global and created what Mañosa Nyblon described as a corridor and a climate conversation that inspired them to be bolder for the next project.  The team grew, became more diverse and formed partnerships with organisations on both a regional and international level. For COP 27, hosted in Egypt in 2022, they created We Still Have a Chance with inputs from climate scientists, health professionals, storytellers, writers, artists, educators and youth leaders from the UK and Egypt. Themes centred around water, food, and adaptation resulted in 12 short stories, written in both English and Arabic, to represent everyone who took part. And the stories have inspired a range of creative outputs – from digital recordings to theatrical performances in Cairo, Alexandria, Sharm El-Sheikh and Exeter.

Giving this work a platform at COP enables interesting conversations with people at different levels, including policy makers and prime ministers. But at the community level in Exeter, the team also invited the entire congregation of a local mosque to have a conversation with scientists. “They appreciated participating, especially listening to the stories in Arabic, and having a dialogue with the scientists,” said Mañosa Nyblon. “Those people went back and had conversations with their families and friends so you can see the impact of a positive action multiplying effect.”

The team has received funding from the British Embassy to implement a project turning poetry into music for COP 28. This time the work will connect marine science, words, and a climate literacy toolkit to bring teachers and children together.

The future is collective

According to Mañosa Nyblon, the projects have reached about 28 million people so far, but there is still much to be done. “We’re planting seeds. Some seeds are germinating while others are growing fast,” she said. “But we’re running out of time so we need to be strategic about what areas of our work we can take to a bigger level.” COP is an opportunity to connect with large numbers of people that might not otherwise be accessible, but she noted that it will take a multitude of approaches to create the change that is needed.

“This work is showing us that we all have power, we all have influence. We work within a system and it’s about how we can generate influence within the system and structures we have, how we can help shift the narrative,” Mañosa Nyblon said. “But it has to be a collective effort and how we choose to use that power is really important. We want to launch new climate narratives because the current narratives are not working. These narratives are to help us imagine new possibilities to forge a sustainable, healthier, and socially just world through diverse artwork and languages underpinned by science. We want to inspire children, youth, policy makers, international organisations, universities, NGOs, the public, everyone, to work at local and global levels to feel the drive to act now.”

Read more about their work in the article ‘New narratives for a healthy planet: creative writing and projects reveal We Still Have a Chance’ that has been published this summer in the Lancet Planetary Health and the University of Exeter press release.