Press

The impacts of climate change have displaced us from our home—where we used to enjoy life, where we lived, a place that kept us together as a community. What made the island special was the closeness. Wherever you go, there was always somebody around. Wherever you look, you are surrounded by the sea. Only we could have built an island like that.

The first time I put on the headset, I felt like I was spending time with this community, not just learning about it. These families are deeply connected to their land, and seeing them forced to leave it because of climate change is heartbreaking. This is a global issue, and many of us don’t know how it’s impacting the communities living on the front lines. They are usually remote and usually outside our media and storytelling. Solwata brings audiences closer to people whose lives have already been transformed by climate change.

For years, Human Rights Watch has documented how climate change is forcing communities to make impossible choices about their homes, livelihoods, and futures. The planned relocation of an entire community as featured in Solwata is a complex adaptation measure with serious human rights implications that the world urgently needs to understand and prepare for. Immersive storytelling gives us a new way to engage audiences with these realities and strengthen support for communities already facing the human rights consequences of climate relocation.

I’ve spent nearly three decades in climate journalism, and one thing I learned is that information alone doesn’t always move people. Most people will never travel to Solomon Islands and witness these changes firsthand. Solwata uses immersive storytelling to bring audiences closer to the people living through this crisis, and that's exactly the kind of work we founded Agog to support.