Tigray, Ethiopia, 2018: Whose climate knowledge counts?
Saron* walks us through the crops she grows. Tomatoes in the shade of thin trees; cereals tracing irregular lines across the hillside. "We built gabion check dams to prevent erosion and manage water flows."
The Horn of Africa is often portrayed through crisis, leaving little room for the knowledge and decisions of the people who live there. Her reality as a farmer, tracking data in a notebook or using a portable device connected to a satellite-monitored programme, is unlike anything I had understood from reports.
Cacti and flowers surround her farm. We sit by the watershed.
"Caroline, you live in Paris; you work at a big organisation. They will believe you. I report on my harvest. I report on the weather. The programme partners in Europe don't believe me when I tell them the harvest is thin. They look at their weather forecast and see rain. When it rains in the sky, it doesn't mean rain has reached the valley."
I think about it a lot.
Saron tells her own story. She holds an expertise I know almost nothing about. Still, she believes my account may carry more weight than hers.
Her words capture something deeply uncomfortable about climate communication: whose experience counts, who gets believed, and who has the authority to tell the story?
This question became one of the starting points for Understories.
Climate communication: representation is not redistribution
Climate organisations increasingly recognise the importance of grassroots voices and local knowledge; community co-construction is considered a ‘gold standard ’, while events showed that “messengers who are ‘not the usual suspects’ can be some of the most powerful messengers of all”. [1]. Yet including someone in a story does not necessarily give them influence over how that story is told and what narrative it serves.
In the organisations I've encountered, in France, across Europe and globally, policy priorities, institutional credibility and seniority often set the agenda and determine whose judgement carries the most weight.
Consider a conventional communications workflow: the page is open, you are 'Anonymous Cat'. 'Anonymous Dragon' appears in red; 'Anonymous Ibex' comments in purple. The message passes from writer to editor to final approver. Each brings their own criteria for what makes a good message: credibility, clarity, relevance, actionability, and so on. But while edits are tracked, the assumptions and biases behind editorial decisions rarely receive the same scrutiny.
Who decides that a message is credible? Who decides that emotional resonance makes it weaker? Why should the final approver's judgement automatically outweigh that of someone with great communication expertise or deeper contextual knowledge?
These editorial decisions reflect a 'social hierarchy of expertise' and the distribution of authority [2]. The same hierarchy operates beyond the page, in a cloudy NGO Paris office or a loud board meeting in Geneva, and helps explain why Saron can be doubted when she reports that "It didn't rain today". At the same time, an institutional weather forecast is treated as authoritative in Brussels, New York, or San Francisco.
The challenge is not simply to include more perspectives or replace a hierarchy with a new one. It is to make the process of assigning credibility, weighing evidence, and making editorial decisions more transparent, contestable, and open to different forms of expertise.
From hierarchy to heterarchy: rethinking Climate Communication
The answer isn't to choose between institutional credibility and lived experience, between facts and stories, or between cat, dragon, or ibex. All belong in climate communication. But what if we changed the way we bring them together?
Drawing inspiration from cybernetics and Warren McCulloch's 1945 concept of a heterarchy of values [3], heterarchy offers an alternative way of organising judgement. It does not require abandoning hierarchy altogether or replacing it with horizontality. Rather, it recognises that different criteria and perspectives can coexist, interact and challenge one another, without necessarily being reducible to a single order of priority.
The inspiration is also visual. Cubist artists depicted subjects from several angles simultaneously because neither perspective alone could capture the whole.
What if climate communication worked in the same way, allowing different criteria to take precedence depending on the context, rather than letting some permanently dominate others? A message can be scientifically accurate but emotionally distant, or be compelling but lacking credibility. It can be clear to an institutional audience but fail to connect with the people most affected.
Rather than flattening these tensions into a single score or judgement, they should become visible and available for discussion.
Making Climate Communication Expertise More Accessible
Understories explores this approach through an AI-assisted framework that bridges research and practice, examining messages against eight evidence-informed criteria:
Accessibility
Actionability
Clarity
Credibility
Emotional relevance
Hope–doom balance
Personal relevance
Solution focus
The framework examines each dimension independently, avoiding a single, reductive judgement.
You share a draft, its intended audience, and the action you hope to enable. The system helps identify tensions and assumptions that might otherwise remain invisible: a scientifically accurate message that fails to connect with its audience; an emotionally compelling story that lacks supporting evidence; or a hopeful narrative that overlooks structural barriers to action. Sometimes, the improvement is surprisingly simple.
See it here: “A climate message evaluation: Alisa’s story explained”.
The purpose is not to produce a definitive score or let an algorithm decide what makes a good story. Human judgement remains essential.
Understories is a framework to think more critically about climate communication; it aims to make decades of research, specialist knowledge, and editorial expertise more accessible to grassroots organisations, smaller initiatives, and communicators who cannot afford external consultants.
It aims to support the people closest to climate issues to write the story on their own terms, rather than simply accelerating content production.
Under the Sun: new voices, new climate narratives
A group of women in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts turning their struggle for drinking water into a collective climate action initiative [4]; an IPCC member dismissing the COP30 final text as “rubbish” [5]; 91% of new renewable energy projects now cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives [6]. Local knowledge, institutional credibility and technology shape the narratives through which climate change is understood and acted upon.
Yet the power to determine how these forces come together remains unevenly distributed, despite efforts to address this imbalance. Being quoted in a report is not the same as having the resources to produce evidence, shape its interpretation, and influence the decisions that follow.
Democratising climate communication means moving beyond representation towards influence, beyond consultation towards participation in shaping narratives, and beyond access to communication channels towards access to the knowledge and resources that make communication possible.
It means questioning not only the stories we tell, but the structures that determine who gets to tell them.
The climate story is being written every day: in communities and families, around dining tables and in newsrooms, through feeds and notifications. And under the sun, in Ethiopia, as Octavia E. Butler reminds us: “There is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns”.
Caroline Prak • Founder, Understories.io
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*The farmer's real name has been changed to Saron. The partners she refers to were not Oxfam partners. This scene illustrates a systemic issue, not the actions of particular individuals or organisations. I warmly thank colleagues from Oxfam France, Oxfam in Ethiopia and Oxfam East Africa, who organised the visit and welcomed me to Ethiopia. It was a privilege.
My thoughts remain with the farming communities we met, everyone affected by the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Tigray, and all those working to save lives and restore peace.
Picture: View from the Agence France-Presse offices, Place de la Bourse, Paris 2nd arrondissement. January 2020. © Caroline Prak
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References
Dupar, M., McNamara, L. and Pacha, M. (2019). Communicating Climate Change: A Practitioners’ Guide. CDKN.
Karunungan, R. (2022). Decolonising Climate Communication Narratives. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
McCulloch, W. S. (1945). A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 7, 89–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478457
‘Bangladeshi initiative wins COP27 award’. The Daily Star, 13 November 2022.
François Gemenne: ‘COP30: “C'est naze, archi nul ! C'est l'un des plus mauvais textes de toutes les COP”’. Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS).
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) (2025). Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2024. Abu Dhabi: IRENA