Stitching in detail in India

Dr Roxy Mathew Koll, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology – Author for the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019), @rocksea,@sarahembroidery, @iitmpuneofficial – Facebook, @iitmpune – Twitter, IITM Pune – Youtube

“Starting with a global perspective and then zooming into regional aspects, moving from national to state, and then district and village levels helps the audience to realise that climate change is at their doorsteps and inside their house. The local information is not there in IPCC reports, so I scour through scientific papers and government reports prepared by local scientists and academics. There is actually a plethora of information out there, you just need to connect the global to the local cues. I connect climate change to food-water-energy security issues and extreme events that the audience are facing now too. This makes engagement easier as the audience can more easily relate to specific, local and ongoing issues better than they can to generic climate change discussions.

Since most of the assessments made through IPCC points to grave danger, a talk solely on these aspects can be depressing— both to the audience and the speaker. I usually throw in examples of where local communities have successfully worked together to adapt and mitigate in the light of climate change. This gives them hope and a will to act. In fact a recent workshop that I attended was titled “Change Can Change Climate Change”. 

I use a variety of methods including using powerpoint slides with comics, newspaper clippings and other regional information. One project that I did with my wife branched out into using embroidery to show the spiral of rising temperatures through color coded embroidery stitches – ‘temproidery’. So here we engaged a different kind of audience over social media— some of them went to craft their own versions of temproidery.”