Climate change touches everyone's lives in various ways depending on the local context. This initiative aims to build a “ground up” understanding of how climate change is experienced and how climate risk is perceived based on the stories from different sectors and across all ages, expressed through different media — essays, poems, visual art, music and other creative work.

We believe that we are all storytellers and scientists, and if you have a story, we're interested in reading and sharing it!

Unsure of what to write? Why not take inspiration from some of the following guide questions?

1. How have you or your community experienced climate change impacts? Why do you think this happened?
2. What makes you or your community vulnerable to climate change impacts? How are you exposed to these?
3. What did key stakeholders do before, during, and after a specific climate or weather-related event (ie, typhoon, drought, flooding)?
4. Are there any questions that climate change impacts have raised?
5. Is there information you wish you had in order to make better decisions — be it personal lifestyle decisions or public policy?
6. How are you and other relevant stakeholders responding to the changes around you?
7. Where do you think we are heading? What are our projections and visions of the future?
8. How have climate change impacts changed our understanding of our surroundings?

These are just some of the questions we can explore through storytelling. These voices give a human face to the issue of climate change and serve as a rich source of insights for how we can move forward as a community, and craft climate action “as if people mattered."

As humans who share an existence on our planet at a precarious moment in history, we interface with the climate crisis, whether we are aware of it or not. We believe that we are all storytellers and scientists, curious bipeds making sense of the world we live in and sharing our experiences with each other. The Climate Stories: Voices from the Ground initiative is an opportunity to bring these understandings and experiences together, and to add our voices to the diverse movement seeking to understand and address the greatest crisis our species has faced.

My Climate Risk (MCR) is a Lighthouse Activity of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). This MCR regional hub hosted by Ateneo de Manila University aims to understand how stakeholders make sense of and articulate their experiences of climate impacts and risks, including the potential drivers of these risks. As such, we are seeking works from fellow Southeast Asian storytellers, and anyone who has experienced the consequences of climate change. However, the Climate Stories initiative’s doors are always open beyond that, and we welcome submissions from everyone, no matter where they are or where they come from, as these represent our unique experiences of climate change. If you have a story, we’re interested in reading and sharing it.

We are also exploring partnerships with other institutions from Southeast Asia, and hopefully that will allow for the translation of your submitted works in the future.

We do not share works that encourage ecofascism, or works that suggest the repression of marginalized groups to achieve climate solutions. While our understanding and experience of climate change is unique from individual to individual, not all groups are equally responsible for the climate crisis, and environmental justice goes hand in hand with climate action. We also discourage works that are prejudiced, which includes sexism and racism, among other forms of harmful language and themes.

If you would like to submit your work, please use our submission form below! Along with your work, we will ask for the following information:

• Name and pseudonym
• Age
• Occupation or affiliation
• Gender identity
• Contact details
• Location
• Title of your work
• Short biography
• Questions about the climate impact in your submission

Please submit your work as a Google Drive link. We accept text-, image-, and video-based work.

A member of the My Climate Risk – Ateneo de Manila University Regional Hub will review your work. Your work may be edited for brevity and clarity before publishing on the website, but we will endeavor to stick as close to your vision as possible. As with any repository, we reserve the right to not accept stories at our discretion, or to publish a submission at a later time. We will reach out to you through the contact details you provide in the submission form once your story has been published, so please feel free to share the work with your networks! We will also reach out to you if another institution outside of our partner institutions wishes to republish your work.

To submit your climate story, please fill in the form by clicking this link or accessing it below, which also contains our Terms and Submission Agreement. For further information, you may also read our Privacy Policy.