For the past 7 months, I worked at GRID-Arendal, a non-profit environmental communications centre. This sadly led me to neglect writing here for a while. To rectify this, I will link some of the pieces I wrote in my time at GRID:
I started during Arendalsuka, a democracy festival held every year in August in Arendal. GRID usually hosts many events, and I co-wrote a summarising article of our events. One of the highlights for me were the talks where we collaborated with different indigenous communities and talked around a bonfire in a lavvu.
In September, we were part of hosting the first ever World Cleanup Day in Tromsø, and I wrote an article about why the world need such a day. The theme this year was 'Arctic Cities and Marine Litter’. Plastic is currently a constant problem, specially in and near the ocean, but the Norwegian cleanup model is a great example of how the tidy up can look like.
In leading up to the massive UN plastic treaty meeting happening Busan, South-Korea, I interviewed all our scientists and experts working with plastic on how GRID would contribute to making a strong plastic treaty. Sadly, the run up to this meeting got little media attention, so I wrote an article originally called “INC - the meeting that nobody is talking about”. It was fascinating to hear all the different approaches, even though the meeting ended up unsuccessful.
Throughout the time I worked at GRID, I was also part of writing a longer storymap on GLOF’s - Glacier lake outburst floods! 2025 is the International year of glacier preservation, and leading up to this, we published this new research on the significance of both Norwegian and Pakistani glaciers.
One day we got a visit from Geneva, from Zoï Environment Network, to go into collaboration with them. To sign the memorandum, I was invited for a small ferry ride where I photographed the seanse, and afterwards wrote a small piece.
In November, I interviewed our delegation going to COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. GRID hosted different meetings at the climate summit, and from Norway, we worked on spreading this information.
In February, we were approached by the church if GRID wanted to do a collaboration during Arendalsuka 2025. In preparation for this, we had a meeting with 8 priests and the bishop, and I was so fortunate to be invited to attend. Afterwards I wrote a piece I called 'Hope is the thing with feathers’ on how environmentalist organisations like UNEP and religious communities has a long history of cooperation, and why it is so important to strengthen the message of hope.
During my time at GRID, I both got to work with exciting topics like the oceans health with scientists from Havforskingsintituttet, Flødevigen. Another ongoing project I worked a lot with was a sea drone project called “SeaBee, where I wrote numerous articles and helped create the new website.
In addition to doing social media, making reels, and writing manuscripts for videos for GRIDs social media, my own was neglected, but for the future, I hope to update both instagram and here more often.