Have you seen that climate film yet? You know, the one you read about on the Guardian website and then a friend of a friend emailed you about it, but other things got in the way until your best pal watched it and said you absolutely had to see it and then you looked it up and realised there were screenings happening all around you. That was my experience, at least.
The People’s Emergency Briefing began life, in real life. Last November, nine climate experts delivered a “first-of-its-kind national emergency briefing” to an audience of MPs, civic and business leaders in Westminster. It was, by all reports, a galvanising event. The organising team – including pioneer in carbon footprinting Prof Mike Berners-Lee and TV environmentalist Chris Packham – then crowdfunded to turn the in-person briefing into a film, which anyone can register to screen in their local village hall, faith centre, workplace or wherever else they can get bums on seats.
I watched the briefing myself at an arts centre in Paisley on a sunny Friday evening last month. The 50-minute film felt like 15, as the roster of experts set out in plain language how global heating is affecting all aspects of life in the UK: the economy, food, healthcare, nature, national security.
It’s a hard watch. The alarming – but never alarmist – message is that the climate is changing much faster than expected, and that we are woefully unprepared for it. The grinding frustration of these experts – who have been repeating these stark facts to a sclerotic government and a sceptical public for years – is evident, but there is also hope.
The aim is to demand that the prime minister convenes a Covid-style primetime emergency briefing on the climate and nature crisis, led by independent experts.
As Packham says as he introduces the film: “I understand it’s human nature to prefer not to know, to try to bury our heads in the sand. But if we all take a breath and watch this together, well first of all that’s a huge relief and second we can figure out what to do about it.”
Do it like Gogglebox
What’s unique about the film is both how it’s framed and how it’s watched. “We knew you can’t just film people talking at podiums,” Oldridge explains, “so we decided: ‘We’ll do it like Gogglebox’.”
Spliced between the expert commentary, members of the public sit on a sofa across from Packham and talk about what they’ve just watched. “This is the nub of it,” says Oldridge. “This film has got to be watched in groups, people who experience it together and then talk about it, instead of the isolated way we usually consume media.”
Since the first community screening on 7 April, the film has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon – so far 2,789 screenings have taken place, with a further 1,395 planned. Readers across the country, from the south of England to north-east Scotland, have contacted the Guardian’s Environment desk to tell us about their involvement.
Anna Taylor, trustee of Wendover Climate Action, who organised a packed screening in the Buckinghamshire village after reading about the original Westminster event in the Guardian, told me: “It’s spurred me on so that, if nothing else, my kids will know I tried to make things better for them”.
Any group can register to host a screening, and will receive a carefully scripted guide for steering the discussion afterwards as viewers process some difficult material. Organisers have told me how essential it felt for people to sit together and share their immediate reflections on what was a shocking film for many, even those who considered themselves familiar with climate science.
That was my experience: the lump in my throat got smaller as I listened to other people talking about their visceral shock, anxiety and plans to take action.
Groups are also encouraged to invite local politicians – not to put them on stage to shout at but so they can sit among the audience as another community member. (Eleven were invited to the Paisley screening, none came – you know who you are!).
Will it burst through the eco-bubble?
One of the threads we unravelled in the discussion after my screening was how to normalise climate conversations: “How do we reach people who don’t even believe climate change is happening?” asked one woman. (It’s worth interjecting here that tracker polling suggests this summer’s extreme weather has prompted a big jump in voters’ ranking of the environment as an issue.)
But it’s a question that the People’s Emergency Briefing team have wrangled with extensively. Inevitably there’s an element of self-selection with community screenings, but there’s ongoing work to bring the film to wider audiences at Quaker meeting houses, churches and cathedrals, the Women’s Institute, hospitals, school staff rooms, the national lottery, the V&A, Channel 4, and even here at the Guardian.
All the organisers I heard from had plans to run more screenings and diversify audiences, while viewers reported feeling more hopeful, better informed and more motivated to act.
“We first realised something was happening when we watched the booming community screenings,” says Oldridge. “But now all these big brands are doing it too. You’re always trying to break beyond the eco-bubble and I think we’ve got a very good chance of doing that now”.
What difference can it make?
In recent years, the orthodoxy around climate communications has tended towards telling only hopeful stories, with a recognition that the public were beyond capacity for bad news.
“But we felt quite strongly that we need to reset the baseline of understanding,” says Oldridge. “Most surveys show people are worried, but they see it as a far away problem. And they don’t have all the facts that relate to the UK and their own lives.” This is especially salient when the right weaponise net zero as a threat to the economy.
Mindful of this context, the film is trenchant in its optimism. It avoids finger-wagging; there’s no scolding of those of us who still fly or eat cheese. There’s a recognition that – however helpful individual effort can be – climate change isn’t a problem that isolated action can solve. Rather, it calls for an emergency response equal to that rolled out during the pandemic, or a war.
“Our effort is focused purely on change driven by government, helping the public understand that they are one of the pieces of the jigsaw that enable the government to be bold enough to make those changes,” says Oldridge.
A major academic study of the film’s impact will be published next month and early findings suggest that every screening in a constituency makes its MP more likely to back a televised emergency briefing. “It’s clear evidence that this model works for engaging politicians.”
There is engagement too at the top of government, according to our environment editor Fiona Harvey. She reported this week how Ed Miliband brought the national security warnings to global attention at the UN general assembly in New York, with the backing of Andy Burnham. It marks a growing openness from the prime minister towards climate action, she believes, encouraged by Miliband and that goes beyond campaigning pragmatism ahead of the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, where Labour is taking on Green leader Zack Polanski.
Perhaps there is room for guarded optimism, as there is in this devastating film about the systemic collapse of society that is paradoxically hopeful. As one member of the public says on screen: “It’s not as if we need to go off and invent all the solutions. They’re right there. We just need to use them”.
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‘I understand it’s human nature to prefer not to know, to try to bury our heads in the sand.’ Chris Packham. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
