Story Ark sets sail…

Story Ark is a year-long journalistic storytelling project. Internationally acclaimed climate science journalist and author Leonie Joubert will spend a year on the road, visiting remote and often ‘invisible’ locations around South Africa, to document the untold stories of the region’s climate crisis.

The name Story Ark draws on the importance of storytelling, and the idea of using stories to draw our attention to the need for a Noah’s ark in ecological, cultural and social conservation.

It is a collaboration with the School for Climate Studies, Stellenbosch University, and kicks off in October 2024.

The climate emergency: every second counts

In the two decades that science journalist and author Leonie has been reporting from the frontline of the climate emergency in Africa, the carbon pollution driving the climate crisis has increased and the rate of global average temperature rise accelerated. Earth’s climate is becoming rapidly more unstable, and the rate of change is happening far faster than scientific models foretold.

The potential of climate collapse to bring about social disruption and widespread extinction isn’t like the single-impact event depicted by an asteroid collision with Earth in the satirical film Don’t Look Up. A better metaphor is that the planet is hurtling into the path of a field of space debris. The deeper the planet gets into the cloud, the more it will have meteors hitting the atmosphere and hurtling towards the ground like firebombs.

Each meteor will have its own impact site, each its own blast radius. Unlike the asteroid, scientists can’t predict exactly when each space bomb will hit, where it will land, or what the detonation zone will be.

Earth is already spinning into the path these space rocks. Day Zero, when Cape Town nearly ran out of municipal water, was a meteor strike. The devastation to the Mozambican city of Beira, which lost 90 percent of its infrastructure to Cyclone Idai in 2019, was another meteor strike. The drought that parched much of southern Africa from 2016 to 2019. Australia’s Black Summer fires in 2020, and the three billion animals believed to be burned alive or killed in the wake of the fires, was another meteor strike.

All the fires and floods and heatwaves and droughts — some days-long events, some spanning years — are all meteor strikes, each with their own localised devastation. Many of these events in the Global South go unreported, existing in the negative spaces left in between the headline events of the Global North-dominated news headlines.

Storytelling to leverage change

Journalism is a load-bearing wall in a healthy democracy. It is essential to inform the public, stoke an active citizenry, and hold government to account. But journalism is in a state of crisis. Climate reporting has never been needed more urgently, at a time when it has never been more challenging to get these stories into the public domain.

Storytelling is also one of the most powerful technologies we have to bring about the social, political and economic disruption that we need as a society in order to retain a liveable planet.

About the Story Ark project

After two decades of covering the climate crisis from a Global South and African perspective, Leonie will embark on a year-long immersive storytelling trip where she will travel around the country to revisit places, stories, people, species, and ecosystems that she wrote about in her first books. These include Scorched: South Africa’s changing climate; Boiling Point: People in a changing climate; and Invaded: The biological invasion of South Africa, amongst many others.

The name Story Ark draws on the importance of storytelling, and the idea of using stories to bring our attention to the need for a Noah’s ark in ecological, cultural and social conservation. Our species and ecosystems, and the people living in and off them, are already facing unprecedented changes.

Finding the ‘invisible’ stories: reporting from the field

Sometimes journalists report from their desks. A tight deadline, or a lack of budget to travel to the location of a story might result in information-gathering happening telephonically.

But this can result in many critical elements of a story remaining invisible.

Story Ark is mobile, agile, and immersive. It will allow in-depth reporting from in the field in a way that no newsroom-bound journalist can.