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Our first Climate Mission is live 🐟
Published 3 days ago • 4 min read
In this entry: Our first collaboration, what to expect from our climate missions and the blueprint that's coming next.
For this first mission, we explore the VISTools project. A Belgian initiative where scientists and fishers are asking a big question: can we build a regenerative fishery?
I want to take you behind the scenes, to not only share the story, but also how we created the narrative. All made possible with support from the UN Ocean Decade, VLIZandILVO.
🌊 What's a Climate Mission 🌲
After spending the past years in the climate action space, I think I can safely say: we nailed the awareness part.
Whenever I scroll online, there seems to be no shortage of climate content.We got documentaries, public scientific reports, social media campaigns, short form videos,… and a lot of it is really good at what it needs to be.
A lot of it is necessary.
But… awareness is not the same as adoption. And the projects that are actually having an impact (meaning: the ones turning that awareness from a concept into action) rarely have the communication infrastructure to show it.
That's the gap the Climate Missions format is trying to close. Each mission is a blueprint and a story at the same time.
With these missions we look for projects that are doing transition work in the real world. Then we take a peek behind the curtain to not only share WHAT they're doing, but also the HOW, so our community can learn from it too.
For every mission we produce 3 things:
An explainer video: Short enough to actually watch, no prior knowledge needed. It introduces you to the story and gives you enough information to understand why it matters.
A podcast episode: This is the deep dive for people who want to immerse themselves into the project. A full conversation with someone inside the initiative.
A blueprint: Once the videos are published, we will share the blueprint through the newsletter and the toolkit.
Here comes the first mission 👇
🎣 The project
The United Nations designated 2020 to 2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for sustainable development. It’s a global commitment to reduce the negative impact we have on the ocean and to build the science we need to support better decisions.
Part of that is showcasing local science-based solutions, so they can be replicated globally. VISTools is one of those solutions.
VISTools is a Belgian project where scientists and fishers are building a better data solution to improve how we manage what we catch at sea. Their goal: make Belgian fisheries truly sustainable.
They are doing that by turning the existing fleet into a smart fleet.
How? By equipping the current fishing boats with sensors, in and around the vessel. That gives them real-time data on fish catches, fuel, traction, location (and a bunch of other things), all collected automatically on every trip.
However, you might ask yourself a very solid question 👇
⚓️ Can industry be part of the solution?
Many of you know I studied marine science in university (somewhere in a previous life). The course “Fisheries” was a big part of that curriculum. So when I started looking at what VISTools was actually solving, something clicked personally.
Before, I carried the same narrative a lot of people have about the fishing industry:
Documentaries and NGOs have done important work showing the destructive side of industrial fishing. You know, those factory fleets genuinely fishing down the food web. And that framing stuck with me more than I realized. I’d been putting everyone in the same box.
What this project made me see is how big that box actually is. There’s a real difference between those large-scale industrial operations and the smaller coastal fleets trying to do things differently.
The fishers in this project are firmly in the second group. They didn’t wait to be regulated into sustainability. They signed up and started collaborating with the scientists and local government. They wanted to be part of a solution. As Dr. Hans Polet put it in our interview:
The real change is the social innovation. If you have an issue, people talk to each other, no?
That shift in dynamic, from pointing fingers to sitting at the same table, is what really took my interest in this project. And I truly believe this is the basis for solid transition work.
But what intrigued me even more was where the project was stuck 👇
🎥 Where Creators For Climate came in
A big obstacle for many projects like this is, even though the technical knowhow is definitely there, they usually miss a good story to get them into the next room.
A narrative infrastructure and a plan of attack. A clear way to communicate to all the different audiences outside the sector. So, we sat down and started asking the basic questions:
Who is this for
What do you want someone to do after watching
What does success look like
The answers weren’t as straightforward as we would’ve hoped (which tends to happen a lot when you are in the midst of system transitions).
So instead of jumping straight into production, we workshopped what was really needed. Not one promotional video, but a small media kit. Multiple pieces of content for different audiences, different entry points and different goals.
So what started as a filmmaker coming in to help with a video became something more.
A collaboration With Creators For Climate as narrative support. A 3rd party voice, outside the institution, that could bring the story to people who had never heard of it.
A first mission
Tell the story.
Build the tools around it.
Document the process to share with others.
It’s exactly the kind of situation the Climate Missions format was built for.
📺 Watch (or listen)
If you made it this far into the newsletter, you're a legend! It also means you are curious about transition work. Below you can have a look at our first mission.
Not that much time? → Explainer Want that deep dive? → Podcast
In the next entry: the blueprint. What we made, why we made it, and what you can take from it if you're ever trying to communicate a project that's deep inside a transition with no narrative infrastructure and no obvious entry point yet.
Building a knowledge hub for climate changers... and creating content about our 🌍
Stay up to date with the Creators For Climate project through the newsletter. We’ll send you new in depth discussions on climate outreach, highlights from new podcast episodes, new tools and resources when they drop and showcase the work of other creators. *No bs, pinky promise.
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