In November 2022, at the American University in Cairo’s pavilion at COP27, a film I co-directed had its premiere. Emissions Market India: Surat Leading the Way told the story of the world’s first emissions trading scheme for particulate matter in seven minutes, through the lens of the researchers and regulators who built it. The story showed the journey of a city of textile mills that had cut particulate emissions by about a quarter while lowering compliance costs and increasing profits – something that has never ever been seen in developing economies.

I was not in the room – communications people rarely are. We build the story, send it out, and follow its journey from a distance. This one travelled well – a year later the film featured in a video presentation at the Pollution Pods in COP28 as well. It isn’t every day that the visual story of a research experiment finds a COP audience two years running. But something was missing, and it took me a while to notice. I will come back to that.

For the better part of two decades, my work has been moving climate evidence from the researchers who produce it to the people it concerns. Some of that work has aged well. But the lessons have come from the rest, which hasn’t.

When I look back, I find that every miss had the same habit underneath – I started with the climate problem and got to the audience later. That habit taught me five uncomfortable truths and here they are:

1. Nobody is waiting for our message

The newsroom taught me this early. A story that did not touch the reader’s health, money or family moved down the priority, however important you thought it was.

Institutions run the other way round, and the topics you’ll pick to tell stories about will be mandated. For me, that meant emissions markets, sulphur dioxide, particulate matter. Over time, those words became my default language. I wrote press notes on trading schemes for readers who were thinking about the smog outside their window and a child’s cough that wouldn’t go away.

A Yale and CVoter survey asked 10,751 Indians about climate between December 2024 and February 2025. Seventy-one percent had lived through a severe heat wave that year. More than 25% had never heard the term “global warming.” Both numbers describe the same country, often the same person. My audience was living the story, and I was writing it in a language they had no reason to know.

It began to get better when I started writing from their side of the window.