CAN’T FIND OUR WAY HOME:
A preview of ITV ‘On Assignment’, on Florida’s climate nightmare, Tuesday 26 Nov., 10.45pm
I’ve had the unusual good fortune to be able to watch already the next episode of ITV’s ‘On assignment’ programme, which airs on the night of Tuesday November 26th on terrestrial TV. This programme was shown to me in advance because the first item is powerful, and directly relevant to my work: it’s a 10 minute package on the aftereffects of the recent back-to-back hurricanes in Florida.
This programme is definitely worth tuning in for.
Expect to watch a young couple talk about how they regret moving to Florida; the Mum tears up as she recounts (her son’s having noticed how she has been ground down by) the repeated storm-trashing of their home. A moving clip. They want to…move house; but it is proving impossible. They literally can’t get their house into a good enough condition to sell it. And if they did, who would buy? Their home kind-of isn’t any more; and so they can’t find their way to a new one.
Then there’s the local ongoing running programme of stress management and mental health support, much needed by disaster-fatigued residents. This really makes the case for the kind of thing we are doing in the Climate Majority Project under the heading of our ‘Climate Courage campaign’: people need resourcing to cope with what is increasingly coming at them (at us, all of us in due course), to be able to face it.
And not forgetting the revealing sequence about the carefully-designed ‘disaster-proof’ hurricane-proofed new homes which survived Milton much better: but that come with a cool £1-£1.5million price tag…
‘On assignment’ makes clear that all this is of course the tragic and predictable result of a rising tide of climatedisasters. Which will go on and on growing until we arrest its underlying cause. But actually that clarity is mostly left to sub-text: it is just obvious, viewing this film, what is happening.
And obvious too that we cannot avoid taking much more seriously now the great task of seeking to adapt as best we can to our increasing climate-vulnerability. Florida is a warning to us all; it is one of many canaries in the climate coalmine.
This is why in the Climate Majority Project we are launching the SAFER campaign: www.ClimatemajorityProject.com/SAFER . The way we can all become safer in the face of the coming storms crucially includes centring adaptation that is strategic, as an emergency response, to build our collective resilience.
It’s also why I’ve this week co-published what is basically the first book ever on ‘Transformative Adaptation’.
Do tune in to ‘On assignment’. And, perhaps more important, encourage your friends/relatives/neighbours to do so. This programme this week is helping us to see the future. Our future. And to guard against it.