Environmental Humanities for Public Advocacy and Policy: Leveraging Stories of Climate, Displacement, Migration

To date, the majority of public global humanitarian advocacy campaigns rely on distressing imagery through brief, often superficial visuals on social media which is leading to disengagement and empathy overload. In addition, public policy and advocacy neglect to take into consideration the potential of humanistic methods, research and approaches. Therefore, this pilot will focus on applying scholarship on how using sustained engagement with fiction and the current trend of using fiction to build durable community engagement may offer novel and more effective ways to engage target audiences on climate impacts.

Preliminary results from a prior study to understand action-engagement from which novels and short stories with themes of displacement and migration read collectively created durable engagement with issues of displacement and were strong motivators to engagement and action among the participants, a global audience would read three displacement novels simultaneously, each over the course of a month.

The team designed an evidence-based pilot and run a 3-month book club focusing on fictional stories of environmental impacts and climate displacement. The book club will not only focus on reading, but also engage audiences on current policy, research and evidence, and will include humanitarian practitioners, authors, climate experts, and environmental humanists, and be launched together with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) at COP 27.