VANCOUVER.- Fires rage, floods devastate, storms surge: every day we hear about the impacts of climate change, with ever-increasing casualty counts and infrastructure damage tipping into the billions. But all too often, climate politics and media reporting favour the voices of experts over victims, resulting in a lost opportunity to act on the first-person experiences of climate-change survivors.

Now, a new collaboration with Museum of Vancouver and the University of Victoria will close that critical gap in narrative and knowledge, thanks to a six-year $2.5-million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant.

From Catastrophe to Community: A People’s History of Climate Change will train 500 post-secondary students and professional journalists to document the experiences of 1,000 survivors around the world and share their wisdom.

The project will result in the creation of documentaries with APTN Investigates, news features, an anthology and a travelling museum exhibition that will launch at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Museum of Vancouver. In the process, the From Catastrophe to Community team will develop new trauma-informed, human-rights-based storytelling practices that can support the recovery of communities impacted by climate change and other humanitarian crises.

From Catastrophe to Community: A People’s History of Climate Change was awarded to University of Victoria writing professor and project director Sean Holman and a team of researchers, curators, journalists, and artists including Museum of Vancouver.

“We’re thrilled to be co-producing a highly collaborative exhibition with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Together, we’re redefining what it means for museums to act as cultural first responders to climate change—spaces for healing, knowledge-sharing, and collective action rooted in lived experience,” said Viviane Gosselin, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Culture at the Museum of Vancouver.

“As Co-director of this ambitious and timely research initiative, I’m looking forward to working closely with Dr. Jennifer Carter (UQAM) to elevate climate disaster survivor stories in and through museums in ways that inspire meaningful change.”

The Museum of Vancouver is partnering with a distinguished group of museums and galleries on this initiative, including:

– BC Museums Association

– John & Maggie Mitchell Art Gallery

– National Museum of Scotland

– Royal BC Museum

– Royal Ontario Museum

– The Reach Gallery Museum

– University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries

This list will continue to expand as more museums join the collaboration over the next six years, contributing new perspectives and helping shape the project as it evolves.

“Each part of our society needs to work together to confront the traumatic impacts of our warming world,” says Holman. “And that’s exactly what From Catastrophe to Community is doing: bringing museums, news outlets, theatre companies, post-secondary institutions, research agencies, and survivors together to help us to realize a more just and equitable future that honours the human dignity of disaster communities,” said Holman.

Organizations from Brazil, Malawi, Africa, the UK, the US and other countries to be selected by project partners at Covering Climate Now and Journalists for Human Rights are part of From Catastrophe to Community. Collectively, these 27 partners have committed more than $4 million in matching contributions to the project. From Catastrophe to Community builds on the success of the award-winning Climate Disaster Project — a teaching newsroom founded at UVic by Holman in 2021 in their role as the Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental & Climate Journalism, funded by visionary Vancouver business leader, humanitarian, and philanthropist Wayne Crookes.

To date, the Climate Disaster Project has trained over 250 students in trauma-informed journalism techniques and — with the assistance of post-secondary partners in Canada and around the world — co-created more than 320 verbatim narrative packages of climate survivors worldwide. Highlights in the past year alone include a series of survivor narratives published in The Guardian during 2024’s COP29 UN Climate Change Summit, the creation of the award-winning verbatim play Eyes of the Beast: Climate Disaster Survivor Stories with Neworld Theatre (which ran in Victoria and Vancouver), and the presentation of survivor narratives at cultural institutions including UCLA’s Sci Art Gallery, the Royal BC Museum and the Kamloops Art Gallery.