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STORY ARK

tales from Southern Africa’s climate tipping points

Welcome to Story Ark, where investigative journalism meets immersive storytelling in a voyage around Southern Africa that is documenting how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime.

Seasoned science journalist and author Leonie Joubert is on the road in search of the invisible and untold stories that unfold far from newsrooms. She is also unearthing possible solutions to the pressing social and environmental justice issues that surface along the way. Story Ark aims to inform our public conversation and stoke active citizens in a way that supports more resilient and responsive communities in these disquieting times.

The name Story Ark draws on the importance of storytelling and how we can use it to create a Noah’s ark for ecological, cultural and social conservation.

20 May 2025

A small wasp, a natural predator to the silver wattle tree, has been released in the Free State as part of a way to control the spread of the thirsty invasive plant in the grass.ands of South Africa.

Gov kills funding for best weapon against thirsty invasive trees

Water-greedy alien trees – especially pine, eucalyptus and wattles – are among the biggest threats to South Africa’s precarious water future. Infecting them with insects or diseases from their home countries is the most effective and affordable way to slow this form of pollution. But state funding disruptions have put a stop to any new research into novel biocontrol agents.

Photo credit: Grant Martin

First published in the Daily Maverick.

14 May 2025

Heavy grazing has left parts of Lesotho and South Africa badly scarred with soil erosion.

PHOTO ESSAY: Agent Orange

Are the notoriously overgrazed Lesotho mountains a case of the tragedy of the commons, where too many people selfishly plunder the commonage, taking more than their fair share? Or is the tragedy in the capturing of the commons, where the powerful elite in a society are able to claim large parts of the commonage for themselves, pressing more and more commoners onto smaller parcels of land?

First published in the Daily Maverick.

11 May 2025

Erosion donga on communal land on the South Africa-Lesotho border

Cross-boundary cooperation is key to reversing the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in grasslands

Lives depend on keeping SA’s old-growth grasslands healthy. They feed our herds, they’re water factories and they mop up carbon pollution, which stabilises the climate. Protecting them from overuse, invasive trees and increasingly volatile weather extremes calls for collaborations that straddle national borders, private fence lines and the boundaries of overburdened commonages.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

4 May 2025

Grasslands restoration efforts are central to water and climate resilience in Africa.

A tale of two dams

In his State of the Nation Address, President Ramaphosa boasted of the preparations to build the Ntabelanga Dam in the Eastern Cape. However, this R10-billion construction will quickly go to waste if the grasslands above it aren’t repaired, and catchment restoration is dead in the water after government funding cuts and stagnant tendering processes.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

21 April 2025

Lesotho herder with cattle in a grassy field with mountains.

New African zeitgeist

Citizens across Africa want climate action. Internet connectivity, which plugs people into novel media forms, can bridge the climate literacy gap and mobilise citizens to demand more from their governments in North-South negotiations. It can also boost ground-up participation in developmental decision-making as the continent’s climate becomes increasingly unstable.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

30 April 2025

Over grazing from sheep in southern Africa's desert leads to dust bowl conditions.

PHOTO ESSAY: Wind-blown

A nasty wind rips across Cornell’s Kop one afternoon in October 2024, driving professor emeritus Timm Hoffman and his team to abandon the hilly study site a few clicks west of |Ai-|Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park.

First published in Mongabay.

Quiver trees on a rocky desert slope with a distant mountain range under a blue sky.

20 March 2025

Bleak future for Karoo succulents

Sometimes words fall hopelessly short. This might explain the silences between the two botanists as their vehicle crunches over a gravelly Richtersveld moonscape, a desert that straddles the South African and Namibian border along the Orange River.

First published in Mongabay..

16 February 2025

Desert landscape with a rock-covered terrain and a dry, leafless tree in the foreground under a clear blue sky.

PHOTO ESSAY: Tending the dead

The maiden’s quiver tree is the Cinderella of three tree aloe sister species that grace the Richtersveld’s gravelly moonscape. Maybe it’s outshone by the towering charisma of the giant and common quiver trees— it’s stocky and stout — but its future is as uncertain as its siblings’, as the desert’s climate ratchets up from hellishly hot to unbearable.

29 Jan 2025

Desert landscape with wooden fence, dry grass, and distant hills under clear blue sky.

Farmers fight reckless mining practices

Farmers are holding the line against a surge in new mining prospectors, but are overwhelmed by the volume, and are challenging the state’s ability to manage the region’s development as the climate emergency escalates.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

28 Jan 2025

Desert landscape with "Rednax Trading Mining Site" sign, dirt mounds, and a distant 40 km/h speed limit sign.

Richtersveld farmers fear destructive creep of mining

Farming remains the most viable livelihood. But as the region’s climate tips towards hotter, drier conditions, Karoo researchers fear this sparsely-populated region will become a sacrifice zone for the rest of the country’s development, and that only a powerful few will benefit.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

28 Jan 2025

Person hiking on rocky desert landscape with mountains in the distance.

Here come the dunes

As Earth’s average temperature slips beyond 1.5°C of average warming and threatens to lurch the climate outside of its safe zone, a visit to the Richtersveld shows what happens locally when a region crosses a tipping point, threatening conservation and livelihoods.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

20 Dec 2024

Red tubular flowers and green leaves surrounded by various plants and foliage.

Poachers target SA’s ‘miracle’ plant with impunity

SA has faced a surge in poaching of rare succulents by criminal syndicates since 2019. A recent spike in prices paid for a different kind of plant, a drylands-adapted lily, the miracle clivia (Clivia mirabilis), has drawn the attention of plant-trafficking syndicates to the lone reserve where it grows.

First published in Mongabay.

Family jewels: the Richtersveld's many endemic dwarf succulents

More wordsmithery…

Introducing Invisible Ink, the ‘most brilliant climate crisis memoir the world has never heard of, and no one wants to read’, according to the entirely unbiased author.

Leonie’s most recent book is a rollicking, white-knuckled ride through 20 years of misadventures on the frontline of climate reporting in Africa.

It is sometimes dark, sometimes funny, often furious. It's also 'too much', according to one critic. Way too much.

A self-inflicted injury this big — turning a planet’s climate system into chaos — is too much.

Join our intrepid misanthropic memoirist — a competent writer who is not a man, if you can believe it — as she goes utterly mad in the face of climate collapse, and is absolutely sane as she watches herself do so.

Warning: includes at least one irate witch hunter, a few insurgents with hand-me-down Kalashnikovs and murderous intent, some predatory capitalists, a sexist or two, and a deity in the shape of a cat.

Because no adventure is complete without a cat. Even dog people know this to be true.

Invisible Ink is available in ebook or audio book.

Retro-futuristic illustration of Earth seen from space with floral and cosmic elements, including a robot, planets, and abstract shapes, in red, black, and white colors.

“... no adventure is complete without a cat.
Even dog people know this to be true.”

— Leo Joubert

Person with curly hair wearing a dark shirt standing with arms crossed against a yellowish wall.

Leonie Joubert has a pretty gnarly beat. She writes about pollution: carbon pollution of the atmosphere that’s driving climate collapse; how highly-processed food-like products pollute the nutritional landscape, leading to the ‘oil spill’ of hunger, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and the so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases; and plastics pollution in our bodies and the environment.

Mostly, she’s interested in who profits from being able to pollute, and who pays the price.

Through this unusual journalistic beat, Leonie critiques the limitless-growth economic model through the lens of climate change and food security, and how this is driving systems collapse.

She has spent the better part of 20 years exploring these topics through books, journalism, communication support to academics and civil society organisations, non-fiction creative writing, podcasting, and public speaking.

Using long-form journalism, her storytelling weaves ‘person’ and ‘place’ into the complex science of the issue at hand.

Story Ark is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative reporting, and the Daily Maverick. Stories are also being published by Mongabay and Nature Africa.