Climates in Conflict

Sep 132017

archive : 2017

From Afghanistan to Colombia and Somalia, environmental changes have dire implications for security and are harbingers of global risks to come. What’s being done to address these concerns? What more can be done? How can visual storytelling help?

Presenters: Laura Heaton Nichole Sobecki Charles M. Sennott

Location: St. Ann’s Warehouse

Presented by:

Global warming no longer feels like a threat just for future generations. Extreme weather and rising temperatures are destabilizing communities across the globe and pushing people from their homes. This panel of artists, writers and experts will explore how the major challenges of our time — migration, extremism, conflict over dwindling natural resources — have roots in climate change. From Afghanistan to Colombia and Somalia, environmental changes have dire implications for security and are harbingers of global risks to come. What’s being done to address these concerns? What more can be done? How can visual storytelling help?

Presenter Bios

Laura Heaton

Laura Heaton is a writer and journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her writing in East Africa over the past decade has focused primarily on conflict, human rights and women’s experiences in war. “The Watson Files,” her feature story for Foreign Policy Magazine (May/June 2017), retraces the steps of a British scientist working in Somalia in the 1980s, to see how the environment has changed after a quarter century of war. Laura’s reporting has appeared in The New York Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek and National Geographic. She is a Climate Change Reporting Fellow with the GroundTruth Project.
Nichole Sobecki

Nichole Sobecki brings attention to humanity’s fraught, intimate, and ultimately unbreakable connection to the natural world through her documentary photography.

Born in New York, she has lived in Nairobi for the past decade. In 2016, Sobecki began her body of work Where Our Land Was, which investigates the human consequences of significant environmental change in Somalia.

Sobecki’s photography has been recognized by the ASME Award, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights prize, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, Pictures of the Year, the One World Media Awards, and the Alexandra Boulat Award for Photojournalism, among others.

Her photography has been exhibited at the United Nations Headquarters and Photoville in New York City, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco, the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, the Nikola Rukaj Gallery in Toronto, and beyond.

Sobecki is represented internationally by the photo agency VII, and is a member of Women Photograph and Everyday Africa. She is currently exploring the vital role the Congo Basin plays in the ecological balance of our planet as a National Geographic Explorer.
Charles M. Sennott

Charles M. Sennott is the Founder and Executive Director of The GroundTruth Project. An award-winning foreign correspondent, author, editor and entrepreneur, Sennott has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 15 countries, including the 2011 revolution in Cairo and the Arab Spring. Throughout a career that spans 30 years, Sennott has consistently broken new ground in building award-winning teams that report across platforms in print, video, and audio.

Sennott’s deep experience reporting internationally led him to launch The GroundTruth Project in 2014 and to dedicate himself to training the next generation of journalists. GroundTruth is a non-profit based at the PBS flagship, WGBH in Boston. Sennott is also the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of GlobalPost, an award-winning news website which merged with Public Radio International’s The World in 2015. Sennott recently completed the one-year Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Organizations

The GroundTruth Project

The GroundTruth Project is an independent, nonprofit media organization supporting a new generation of journalists to tell the most important stories of their generation. GroundTruth fellowships center on issues of social justice that matter for an increasingly interconnected world, including human rights, freedom of expression, emerging democracies, the environment, religious affairs and global health. “A Climate for Conflict” is part of GroundTruth’s immersive series “Living Proof: The Human Toll of Climate Change” that explores how the price of global warming is rising in unexpected, human ways. In the past year, GroundTruth has been recognized with a National Edward R. Murrow Award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Colombia University Award and an Overseas Press Club Award.
Prospekt Mira

Prospekt Mira is a nonprofit organization comprised of creative academics and communications professionals who are passionate about sustainable development. Using research, we help organizations communicate what their projects are doing to help communities and individuals adapt to climate change around the world.