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Last month, climate scientists delivered their “final warning” on the climate crisis. In the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, scientists warned that continually rising global emissions will cause irreversible harm to the environment if governments don’t act now. The last few years have been a sobering reminder of the havoc climate change is wreaking on our environments. Last year, floods in Pakistan left thousands of people dead and millions displaced, with 10 million still relying on contaminated and unsafe water supplies. Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years. Australia saw a month’s worth of rainfall in six hours. Hurricane Ian, in Cuba and the US, killed 150 people and left 40,000 homeless. 2023 is set to be one of the hottest years on record. The message is clear: climate disaster is happening now, and it won’t go away on its own.

This is exactly the message that Alice Aedy and Jack Harries – two determined documentary filmmakers, climate campaigners and hope bearers – want to get across with their impact-driven media company, Earthrise. Alice and Jack are more than business partners, they’re also life partners. The pair met in 2015, when they found themselves working at the same refugee camp in Calais, France. Jack began creating YouTube videos with his twin brother Finn, who also co- founded Earthrise, in 2012, when the platform was in its nascency. After a few years, Jack decided to shift his focus from travel vlogging to climate work. When he met Alice, he’d been travelling the world and creating videos about those facing the brunt of the climate crisis. “I was really searching for a sense of purpose and wanting to have an impact with the work I was making, and the environment and climate presented itself as a really important story in my eyes,” he tells Semaine.

That climate justice was a cause worth fighting for had been ingrained in Jack, who often attended climate protests with his mum, from a young age. In that respect, working in climate activism was a no-brainer. Alice, however, never pictured herself as a major player in the fight for climate justice. A documentary filmmaker and politics graduate, Alice’s focus had always been on people, whether that was raising awareness of the UK’s loneliness epidemic or highlighting the experiences of young Somali women studying at Cambridge University. When she met Jack, Alice had been travelling across the world, telling the stories of those on the frontlines of the refugee crisis. “I never ever thought that I would be in climate work,” she says. “I didn’t really see the people in it beyond the heroes that so many share, like the David Attenborough’s of the world.”

But when Jack and Alice began talking about the intersection between environmental issues and social justice, Alice’s understanding of what climate activism could be, took a new shape. “Reframing the climate justice movement as a human issue and a human rights issue was super important to us,” she says. The two soon developed a romantic relationship, and they decided to travel across the globe, documenting the stories of those suffering from drought in Somaliland and the inhabitants of Kiribati, one of the lowest lying islands in the world that is predicted to be the first to disappear from sea level rise.

Five years later, in the midst of the pandemic, the pair founded Earthrise. “Lockdown forced us to think a little bit differently about the way we communicate and the way we tell stories, and out of that this idea came about to try and create a platform where we could communicate these issues in a way that was accessible and understandable,” says Jack. Earthrise is the platform Jack and Alice wished they’d had when they first began to learn about the climate crisis. “We wanted to create a space that was accessible and inclusive and, importantly, took an intersectional approach to climate with a real human focus.” It’s been three years since then, and Earthrise, which boasts 3.66 million YouTube subscribers and more than 200,000 Instagram followers, is now a fully fledged media company. Jack and Alice are accompanied by six other team members, all with the same mission: “to tell stories that have impact and stories that help us hopefully navigate to a better world.”

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By Ella Glover for Semaine.
Photography by Benedikt Frank.