The Stories on the Edge podcast, hosted by Veronica Lysaght and Dr Nigel Jollands, features conversations with people living and working on the frontlines of climate change, offering a closer look at how communities are responding to a rapidly changing world. The Stories on the Edge podcast is available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.
Loss has a way of forcing people to act. In 2019, after the passing of her sister, while sitting in our London home, my wife Veronica turned to me and said, “You know that dream of yours to sail to New Zealand? How do we make it happen?”
I had a crazy dream of sailing around the world, and after my initial shock, we agreed that if we were going to set out on this adventure, we wanted to do it with a sense of purpose, drawing on our professional experiences to help the communities we encountered along the way. Our purpose became the Novara One Planet project and later our Stories on the Edge podcast.
The Novara One Planet project has a simple mission: to support at-risk coastal communities in becoming climate-safe. This means, to us, helping them understand their evolving risks, work collaboratively to set adaptation priorities, and have a realistic pathway – political, financial, and practical – for turning those priorities into action.
It goes without saying that the effects of a rapidly changing climate are accelerating and becoming impossible to ignore, with more frequent and intense wildfires, droughts, floods and other disasters reshaping daily life. Frontline coastal communities in particular are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, and our professional experiences have prepared us well to assist these communities with finding ways to adapt to the growing burden.
There is a gap between policy conversations in conference halls and the realities in small harbours and island communities. After purchasing the sailing schooner Novara in 2023, we transformed the custom-built, high-latitude expedition yacht into a mobile platform for climate education, community engagement, and adaptation planning in some of the world’s most exposed coastal regions. By travelling by sea, we are able to reach places often left out of formal climate conversations and spend time with the people already navigating rising seas, stronger storms, shifting fisheries, and uncertain futures.
So far, we have worked with communities in the United Kingdom, Morocco, the Caribbean, the U.S., and Canada. In Scotland, we helped people in the town of Stornoway, an important port town, promote their climate risk mapping tool, which enables users to flag flooding risks and climate hazards in their local areas. While in Morocco, we helped develop a screening tool to evaluate projects in Agadir through a climate-adaptation lens, a critical step toward helping the city respond to its extreme water crisis.
We have encountered stories of resilience and ingenuity and share these stories in our podcast, Stories on the Edge, amplifying coastal voices to wider audiences, including policymakers and fellow sailors.
In this series, you’ll meet people on the front lines of coastal change: Zakaria Oulad, a city councillor in Agadir; Kimberley and Leo, fishers from Petty Harbour, Newfoundland; and Manfred Webster, a fisherman from Providencia Island in the Caribbean, which was devastated by a hurricane in 2020.
Over the past three years, we have aimed to show up — not just in inboxes but in home waters. To arrive under sail, tie up at a community pier, and ask, “How is climate change affecting you and your community, and what do you need to stay safe and thriving?”
The boat gave us a reason to be there and, unexpectedly, a kind of credibility with fishers, harbourmasters, and coastal dwellers who live by the rhythms of the sea.
Arriving by sea means entering as guests, with limited authority. We are forced to listen, facilitate, and connect rather than prescribe. As we have learned along this journey, adaptation strategies only become actionable and sustainable when informed by local contexts: identity, capacity, and need.
We document and share these stories through the Stories on the Edge podcast, reporting on our experiences and the lessons learned from communities across the Caribbean, the Arctic, Alaska, and Morocco, where, in these vulnerable regions, climate change is already bringing daily disruption, community upheaval, and the loss of homes, livelihoods, and ways of life.
After three decades of working in leadership coaching, climate policy, and climate finance, our professional lives had already taken Veronica and me deep into the worlds of climate negotiations, development finance, and organisational change. We understood the language of “resilience,” and we now understand the language of loss.
To learn more about Novara, visit their website.
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Facts Only
* The podcast is hosted by Veronica Lysaght and Dr Nigel Jollands.
* The project is the Novara One Planet project, which supports at-risk coastal communities in becoming climate-safe.
* The goal of the project is to help communities understand evolving risks, set adaptation priorities, and establish pathways for action.
* The team uses a custom-built expedition yacht named Novara as a mobile platform for climate education.
* The project involves working with communities in the United Kingdom, Morocco, the Caribbean, the U.S., and Canada.
* In Scotland, help was provided to Stornoway in promoting a climate risk mapping tool.
* In Morocco, a screening tool was developed to evaluate projects in Agadir through a climate-adaptation lens.
* The podcast shares stories from communities in the Caribbean, the Arctic, Alaska, and Morocco.
* Interview subjects include Zakaria Oulad (Agadir), Kimberley and Leo (Newfoundland fishers), and Manfred Webster (Providencia Island fisherman).
* The team's background includes experience in leadership coaching, climate policy, and finance.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The narrative establishes a critical tension between high-level policy discussions regarding climate change and the lived realities faced by frontline coastal communities. The methodology employed—using physical presence via sailing to engage directly with local knowledge—challenges traditional top-down approaches in adaptation planning by prioritizing local contexts, identity, capacity, and need as prerequisites for actionable strategies. This shifts the focus from imposing solutions to facilitating the recognition of existing resilience and ingenuity. The reflection on the team's professional journey, moving from understanding climate negotiations to understanding "the language of loss," suggests a pattern where abstract knowledge (policy, finance) requires grounding in embodied experience (loss, adaptation). The act of traveling by sea functions as a mechanism for achieving this immersion, positioning the travelers as guests with limited authority, which paradoxically grants them credibility by forcing a shift in relational dynamics toward listening and facilitating. The broader implication is that effective climate action demands an integration of experiential knowledge into formal systems, rather than viewing community responses merely as data points to be managed or projected onto.
Bridge Questions: What are the specific mechanisms through which local context shapes adaptation priorities when formal frameworks do not account for embodied experience? How can the credibility gained from a position of limited authority effectively translate into systemic policy change without displacing local agency? What are the long-term consequences, both positive and negative, when external knowledge is integrated through participatory methods versus purely expert-driven interventions?