Hannah Walker at Salix Finance had Morgan and Ollie on her podcast last week. She asked if we could share it. We can do better than that, we can write a whole blog post about it.
The podcast is The Decarbonisation Dialogue. Salix administers the UK’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme; the heat pumps in schools, the retrofits in NHS estates, the heat networks at universities; and the Dialogue is the show they’ve built around it, where the people doing climate work get half an hour to explain how it actually gets done. Hannah was great. Morgan and Ollie were, by most accounts, almost too enthusiastic about the medium of film.
Listen
- Salix Finance — salixfinance.co.uk/news/here-now-films-podcast
- Apple Podcasts — Morgan Cartlidge and Oliver Couch from Here Now Films
- Spotify — The Decarbonisation Dialogue
- YouTube — Episode Link
- RSS — feed
What we ended up talking about
The thread we kept coming back to: most climate communication ends up preaching to the converted. The films get commissioned by environmental organisations, distributed through environmental channels, and watched by environmental audiences. Our job as a production company is to broaden that, through brand work, character profiles, documentary, anything that puts a story in front of someone who didn’t go looking for it.
Three of our films came up as the evidence:
- Bio Estrela — self-funded doc from Portugal’s Bio Valley. Won CINEECO Best Landscape. Helped a small charity hire two new employees off the back of it.
- Somerset Local Nature Partnership — film led to three years of funding and an NHS partnership, both off the back of post-screening conversations.
- EcoTrust Uganda — currently in post. Community-led carbon credits done properly, shot with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) across four regions of Uganda.
The pattern across all three: the film isn’t the impact. The film is what gets you the room. The impact happens in the room.
Why we said yes
The films we care most about are the ones that reach people who aren’t already converted, and that doesn’t happen if you only ever talk to your own room. Showing up for conversations like Hannah’s is part of how that work moves: more people get to hear how environmental films actually get made, the field becomes a bit less mysterious, and the next charity or public body trying to commission one has a slightly better starting point.
The other reason is that Hannah asks the right questions. Most coverage of climate work asks whether it matters; the Decarbonisation Dialogue asks how it gets done… the team, the budget, the on-the-ground choices, the measurement problem. That’s the conversation we’d want to be in even if no one was paying attention.
Thanks to Hannah and the Salix team for the invitation and the questions.
If you commission environmental or impact work; for a charity, a public body, an NGO, or a brand with a sustainability story; drop us a line. We’d love to talk.
