Our Mission

Learn more about the Climate Disaster Project’s mission, vision, and values.

A close-up of a burnt, blackened tree trunk amidst poppies and other flora sprouting up from the ground.

Story. Community. Hope.

Climate change is already causing untold lives and livelihoods to be lost around the world. But too often there has been a failure to individualize and humanize the consequences of these disasters.

As a result, we can feel like climate change is something that’s happening somewhere else, to someone else, or to no one else but us – compromising our ability to form community and take action on the most pressing problem of our age.

The Climate Disaster Project is a solution to that problem. Based at the University of Victoria and led by faculty and students at post-secondary institutions around the world, our international teaching newsroom works with climate disaster survivors to share and investigate their stories.

We can survive this new age of disaster if we build empathy and solidarity around the experience of climate change. Because story creates community, and community creates hope.

Dian and Danie Brooks’s home was flooded during the 2021 atmospheric rivers that drenched the Pacific Northwest. (CDP/Jen Osborne)

How will we build a better future?

Your Stories

Your climate disaster story, no matter how big or small, can help others who have lived through similar disasters.

Share Your Story

In Partnership

Our trauma-informed process recognizes this is your story not ours and gives you a voice over how it’s told.

Our Method

Our Dedication

Our students and faculty are committed to sharing your story — and investigating the problems and solutions identified by disaster-affected communities.

Our Team

Project Manifesto

Climate change is destroying lives and livelihoods.

That means we are all climate disaster survivors.

By the end of this century, climate change could cause at least 83 million premature deaths. At the same time, by 2050, up to three billion could be exposed to temperatures outside the conditions that have let humanity flourish. And, 50 years later, rising sea levels could result in up to two billion refugees. That means climate change will become the defining experience of our lives, both dividing and potentially uniting us.

But we don’t always see ourselves or others that way.

Instead, climate change can seem like it’s happening somewhere else or to someone else. In part, that’s because the coverage of climate change has focused on its political, economic, and environmental impacts. But we talk less about its human impacts, because there has been a failure to personalize the experience of climate change, beyond anecdotal and statistical accounts of the ongoing disaster we are living through.

So we feel alone in our climate change experiences.

Sharing our experiences can help us feel less alone and bring us hope.

The most powerful social movements of the now have been born from survivors who transformed their private experiences into public ones. In making those stories public, these survivors knew they weren’t alone. They knew they were part of a community. They knew they could make change together. Because, in the sharing of story, we can create community. And in creating community, we can find hope. Hope that we can create a more equitable society against the backdrop of climate change. Hope that we can create a more resilient society against the backdrop of climate change. And hope that we can, together, take the actions needed to survive climate change. This is the work of the Climate Disaster Project.

Stories Archive

2009 Tropical Storm Ondoy

testimony

“We are not being told these stories that are happening right now — the people whose lives are being lost and whose livelihoods are being taken away — we don’t realize they exist. Even if we are told, we feel as if they are too far away.”

- Greta Thunberg, Fridays for the Future founder, 2020