‘I had a crazy dream’: The couple sailing around the world to help coastal communities adapt to climate change

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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