Climate Conversations
Elders and Youth from the Climate Conversations Project at LUFASI Park, Lagos.
In partnership with the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University, we engaged in the development, execution, and evaluation of a pilot for a novel intervention that supports people with ‘eco-distress’. The project was tested in three locations: Lagos, Nigeria, New Orleans, LA, US, and London, UK. In each location, youth and elders participated in small group conversations that employed evidence-based methods for understanding and coping with eco-distress. These small group conversations were facilitated by community facilitators in partnership with the research team. We used Local Voices Network (LVN) technology, a speech-processing platform that enables partners to bring communities together for listening, understanding, and sharing. We are very pleased to have implemented the Lagos arm of the project.
Local Voices Network (LVN) is a platform for small-group conversations that record people’s lived experiences to promote constructive communication. LVN is created by the media technology non-profit Cortico in cooperation with MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. Through a combination of deep human listening and artificial intelligence, LVN enables us to make sense of the conversations about eco-anxiety we collect to amplify typically underheard voices, inform public understanding, and ultimately, drive better policy and decisions that take this data into account.
The project explored key themes that resonated with residents in Lagos, London, and New Orleans about their lived experience of the climate crisis, emotional response to climate reality, and sense of what’s needed from here. Community facilitators in these locations led 18 conversations with 3 dozen residents to surface stories of how the climate crisis is making them feel and what they can do about it.