A look into sustainable organisations: Climate Operation

Climate Operation is a group that works to spread more awareness, education, and empowerment to our population when it comes to acting in a more sustainable manner. In this interview, Ani Talwar talks to an intern: Kalani Foster, to find out more about what Climate Operation does, how he gets involved, and how our readers can follow along with new projects.

Image Credits: @ClimateOperation Instagram. Used with permission.

Kalani Foster is a final year Human Geography student at the University of York, and started interning with a group called Climate Operation last June. His main involvement is blog writing and project write up around the different projects they do. Climate Operation operates physically in places like Uganda, with projects that are aimed to help the population have more capability to control how sustainable they are. They also conduct research across the globe into the ways different demographics can respond to climate change. Recently, the group has been branching out digitally, to allow more people to get involved with their various climate projects remotely.

So, who is Kalani and what do you do in Climate Operation?

As a final year Human Geographer, I got involved with Climate Operation as an intern. They told me they wanted a blog writer and someone to write up different project newsletters, which is my current project. It’s a new project for me that I’ve only started, and before this I was involved in brainstorming and developing new projects to go with the documentary that was being produced. Their mission at the time was to help youth in Uganda, so my role was as a remote intern.

At the time they were working on a climate documentary partnering up with a few organisations to see how people were responding to the climate crisis in the Philippines, Uganda, and Brazil. This was in order to create a climate module that went to COP27! There was also an online directory at COP27 which I was involved with, and all these projects aim to spread awareness into how the climate crisis is an interlinked issue, and help people see different ways they could get involved.

Essentially, Climate Operation deals with one: empowerment, and two: fighting Climate Doomism.

What kinds of projects do Climate Operation work on?

Currently, the organisation is working on a newsletter to be released, each month which will feature different businesses, organisations, and individuals involved in the fight to save our planet. There’s also a section on different climate jobs to help spread that good impact.

There’s another great project they’ve set up in Uganda, called a climate café. Every few weeks or month, they invite school children, activists and educators of all ages to discuss the climate crisis and how it affects Ugandan people. They’ve now branched out to an online zoom version to spread this globally.

Image Credit: @ClimateOperation Instagram. Used with permission.

Do you have a favourite project?

There are many great projects we’ve worked on. I think the best has to be the Climate Education module I mentioned. This was presented at COP27 and whilst it has not been related to educators yet, it is a holistic framework for educators of all levels to use in any setting to aid teaching. I’ve been able to work with universities and across different countries, UCL and in the Philippines being a few, to see different perspectives on climate change and justice. It’s been an amazing opportunity to work with brilliant people.

The people are also lovely to work with! In getting this position, I actually had several video conferences with the founder of Climate Operation with regards to different projects at the time and the atmosphere was wonderful. We had a lovely chat about moving around for work and life and compared the weather in the corner of the globe we’d moved to. It did involve me spilling my coffee and frantically paint matching a section of stained wall though, to no results!

Image Credit: @ClimateOperation Instagram. Used with permission.

So how can our lovely readers follow and get involved?

So we do have a website (https://climate-operation.webflow.io/) where you can see what we are about and what we do, and you can also sign up for the newsletter there. All it takes is an email and you’ll get an email notification when the next issue is going to be released. The newsletter starts in April, and then will have a new issue every month. The first one is on climate change and environmentalism in a literary sense, with a focus on climate literacy and its power, with the themes for the rest yet to be determined.

We also have an Instagram Page: @ClimateOperation and a Twitter Page: @clim_operation.

Wow, thanks for all this great info! Climate Change is certainly a contested, and often depressing interview the way it’s portrayed. Do you have any words of advice for our readers when they feel helpless to stop its tide?

It’s easy to get lost in all the bad, and knowing the top corporations or polluting countries are the biggest responsible. Early in my degree I heard something that resonated with me that went along the lines of:

"When it comes to individual change, it’s not about one person doing everything perfectly, but about a lot of people doing what they can,"

I remember that.

It’s not all on you, but any positive impact is going to amount to something.

About the author: Ani Talwar is the Content Manager at WILD Magazine. Ani can be found at @Mischief.weavers; she cares passionately about sustainability and wrote the book, Atro-City, The Flood, which introduces sustainability to readers in the form of a fiction adventure. She also writes her own blog at mischiefweavers.blogspot.