by Daniel Grossman, Reporter and Radio Producer on "Turning Up The Heat"

"Heat of the Moment: The Faces of Climate Change" is the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s ambitious campaign of complementary, mutually reinforcing media products that will put a human face on global warming–a problem so huge and imponderable that to most people it appears intangible, anonymous and, ironically, hypothetical. This project will transport television viewers, radio listeners and web visitors to global warming’s hottest hot spots that already are, and in more and more places will be soon, facing the consequences of global warming.

The project will bring the human impacts of climate to life through the stories of people suffering from them (or trying to counter them). It will focus on three of the most serious climate impacts: floods from sea-level rise, heat waves and droughts. Almost every news story about the growing evidence that Earth’s great ice sheets are losing mass to the sea faster than thought refers to Bangladesh. But few reports actually show firsthand the plight of people on the crumbling coast of the Bay of Bengal. By the same token, climate change reports often allude to the 2003 heat wave of Europe and to advancing deserts, but few show viscerally the human impacts of these events.

At the BAVC Producers Institute, Pulitzer’s creative team honed its plan for an interactive web application to supplement and enhance the reach and utility of the project’s video and audio materials. The team believes the project needs to include interactive web applications because climate change is a global issue requiring a global medium. Web 2.0 has made participatory online media possible. And if any issue requires global participation it’s climate change.

The site we developed engages visitors to:

1) Explore the issues:

• Spotlight reporting: original reporting provides in-depth explorations of the issues in India, France and Southern AfricaRelated reporting: aggregates reporting from around the world that also puts a human face on climate change.The result is a global web of reporting where visitors can explore the depth and breadth of the issue.

2) Share stories : people around the world tell their own story of climate change

• Users will respond to the question: How does climate change affect you? (other questions may follow) by uploading text or short video or audio clips

3) Take Action: here, users can take action and SEE their action

• Users can upload video, text or audio in response to the question: “what will you do today to help prevent climate change?”
• Individuals and groups with the most activity will be featured
• Provides dynamic visual representations of actions through color-coded dots on the maps and links active users together
• Navigation of these different content areas will be possible through traditional online navigation, as well as through geographic browsers such as Google Maps and Google Earth.

The Pulitzer team anticipates that when people come to the site they’ll be inspired to act to reduce their carbon footprint. That personal action alone will be a beneficial outcome; but it will also inspire others to act. And it will deepen the public commitment needed to build a consensus that as a nation the U.S. needs to act.

 As part of the outreach strategy, at BAVC the team also made plans to host a “Global Warming Day” in Second Life, where users would volunteer to either flood their virtual plot or cause drought or a heat wave to show their concern about climate change, raise awareness of the issue with other Second Lifers, as well as draw attention to the website and original reporting. They worked with Second-Live journalist “Draxtor Depres” (reporter/composer Bernhard Drax in real life) to create a newscast that demonstrated what Global Warming Day in SL would look like.

The site aggregates all the project’s products into one place so they can be seen as a whole. But individual elements will also live and be distributed in various places on the web—including New Media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Witness.org, OneWorld and Second Life—and on traditional media outlets—such Public Radio International’s news program The World and PBS.

Status:

Heat Of The Moment has already received seed funding from the Barbara Smith Fund, the Whole Systems Foundation and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.  The team is looking for additional funding to permit the reporting to begin as soon as possible. Its application to the Cinereach foundation recently advanced to the second stage of the funding process.

A preliminary preview of the site, including a link to the Second Life “newscast” can be seen at: http://www.turninguptheheat.net/

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