What you won’t hear at Cop29

Dear reader,

We often talk, on the Guardian’s environment desk, about the growing number of people living through the daily impact of climate breakdown. Part of our job is to tell their stories – of grief and resilience – but it’s easier to say than do.

In March, we began collaborating on a project that we hope will give voice to some of these people. We spoke to them to find out what it was like to live through record heatwaves, floods and fires, and to get their reflections on how we can better cope with extreme weather. As the world’s attention focuses on Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, we are publishing this work in a special series entitled: This is climate breakdown.

We are only able to do this kind of reporting thanks to the generous support of readers like you. To help support our powerful and distinctive reporting about the climate crisis, please consider backing us today.

Our journalists have worked alongside researchers and humanitarian workers at the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) in Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross to compile a series of global testimonies from survivors of recent extreme weather events.

CDP is an international teaching newsroom run out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia that collaborates with disaster survivors. The teams spent hours speaking with people, sitting with them, really hearing their story and then telling it 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.

“We are entering a new era of disaster, where our seasons will become increasingly defined by the traumatic events they bring, and we need to learn how journalism can help us survive those traumas together,” says Professor Sean Holman, who founded the project in 2021.

The Red Cross, meanwhile, worked with Guardian environment editor Damian Carrington to collect further survivor testimonies. “The climate crisis is already here, taking lives, destroying homes, wiping out livelihoods,” says Damian. “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.”

The stories we are publishing in this series are beautiful, powerful, human. Some are profoundly sad, some are uplifting, some are both at the same time.

They are the stories of people just like us, whose lives have been changed forever by the forces unleashed by climate breakdown, and who wanted to share their experiences so that the world could listen and, maybe, learn. We’re incredibly grateful to both organisations for collaborating with us.

When the Guardian first started reporting on the environment, we wrote stories about the extreme weather that might come if we didn’t take action on ending our dependence on fossil fuels and halting the destruction of the natural world. I don't think any of us realised then that we would be seeing the impacts so clearly and strongly already - that all of us would be living through this.

As the world’s leaders meet yet again to try to agree how to tackle the climate crisis, we’ll continue to tell these stories, to document this history and honour people’s experiences as carefully and closely as we can - with your help.

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Thank you
Bibi

Bibi van der Zee is an editor on the Guardian’s environment desk

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