356: Flooded: Is extreme weather shifting the climate front lines?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Yeah, I mean, with a bit of a don't try it at home disclaimer, I suppose, but I had built relationships with funding bodies and trust with them and a track record with them. And so one very generous funders placed enough trust in me and I think gave me a small grant of 15,000 pounds, I think it was. And so what I do with that, I went to travel to places in the UK that I understood might have some sort of flood risk. That was in February of 2024. One of the poster childs of flooding at the time in the UK was a village called Fairborne in Wales, which in a sense before climate change was cool, was declared by its community, by its authority to be a sacrifice zone. And they were like, no, don't sacrifice us, that's what people do. And so through, I knew a guy who's like a big vegan activist, as it turns out. And so I was just basically tapping networks. That's what you do at this point. Hey, does anyone know anything about Fairborne or flooding? And so this guy said, well, I happen to know a vicar who lives in Fairborne and we should chat to him. So I did. He's also Paul, Paul Cawthorn. He's absolutely formidable character. I mean, Paul is a riot. Like spending time with Paul, it's like you take private eye and you treat it like the Narnia cupboard. And all of a sudden, you're in this world of cover ups. And it's insane. So off I took a train and I get myself on the seaside. Beautiful place. Well, not that I know, because it was dark and step into a car with two strangers who weren't Paul's neighbors. And off we go. And I end up in some kind of fishing shack in Fairborne and meet the old vicar. So we walked around Fairborne and met people and talked to them about the flooding, which was really interesting in its own right. And then he drove me to Shrewsbury. So Shrewsbury floods really badly. And we looked at Guardian articles and we found the spokesperson who was talking about flooding. And we tracked her down online and found her number. And so I was canvassing Main Street, one of the streets in Shrewsbury, talking to shopkeepers about their flooding. Then this number calls me and it's the woman from the Guardian, Siobhan, and she's like, yeah, come to my house right now. So I hit Paul and I, Paul, go time. And so Paul the vicar and I go and meet this complete stranger's house in Shrewsbury where you can see the flood marks. That's a really conspicuous sign of a house that's flooded. You can see it's got this haunting presence. And she said, come to a meeting next week. And we said, yeah, we'll be back. And off we go to that meeting, which is crowded, 70 people, absolutely packed. But then I went back to the funders with video of this.

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Paul Dickinson: Is that the one you sent me a recording of?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Yeah, I would have because the first thing I did was I bought a camera as well. Like I bought this little GoPro that I could document this and I've still got the footage. And so then I took it back to the funders and I was like, here is this place in so-called Middle England that is absolutely jam-packed with extremely upset people who have been flooded. There's a lot of anger in the room. This train is already rolling. It's been rolling a while. You need to hop on now. And from there, they gave more money so I could be full-time. And then they used that money to meet some of the people who had been doing this for a long time. And through that, Flooded People UK was born out of my strand of disillusioned climate and professional advocacy work. And battle-hardened flood organizers from England. And here we are.

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Paul Dickinson: I think you're a really good example of what I call servant leadership. So rather than hiring these people, you co-found with them, right? So you basically share the organizing power you've got with these other people who are experts to kind of make a coffee and cream combination rather than command and control.

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Yeah, that's fair. I mean, there was a kind of background theory working through that time, which is that you want to spot the leaders. You want to spot the people who are already influential in that because God knows how many people who flood and such things. So you do need to be quite selective about who you're going to go and invest in. And so this is training and theory. And so you're out there trying to understand, like, who are the people who you want to go after? And so reasonably quickly, it was obvious that these were the influential people and that it was really important to meet them and understand where they're coming from and see and come in with a kind of like, I'd like to help. And then eventually you need to prove that you can help because these people get solicited all the time, you know. And if you hear it from, if you hear this story from their side, they're like, ah, this random guy comes in, like 12,000 other campaigners have come knocking at my door. But then, you know, you need to kind of prove that you can actually be helpful. So there's these baby steps that you take to build a relationship with someone that's based on trust, that you're actually out there to build something collectively and that you're prepared to take the back seat on it for a while and let them be themselves.

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Paul Dickinson: I mean, I hope our listeners won't kind of throw up with me doing this kind of like, oh, I'm so impressed, Louis. But I was kind of impressed when I listened to this two-hour, I was on a long walk through London. I listened to you for about 90 minutes at this community meeting. And I felt that you were clearly a good kind of community organizer, but I don't really know why I thought that. What do you think you were doing well in that situation?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): You're talking about a Shrewsbury meeting in October of 2024. I think that you need to be yourself. That's the most kind of make or break thing, which is that you need to be yourself. You're going to go to people who are quite intimidating to you, who are very different, who come from a very different walk of life.

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Paul Dickinson: Who were quite angry in that meeting. I noticed there was quite a bit of anger, not directed at you, but directed at the situation.

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Yeah, who are angry and who are also, at times, people in crisis. So they can, they might get really, really, really focused on one thing. And because you've got a distance from the crisis, your role is to work with them to try and interrogate, okay, well, is that thing really the, you know, so there's a lot of dynamics at play. And I think in that room, we were trying to pull back from people very naturally focusing on their local area and trying to explain like, yes, that's fine. But what happens in your local area is actually decided far away from that local area and in a different way. I think you need to come in and build a trust with people that, over time, that you are here to help them, you are prepared to listen, you're not going to judge them. And then secondly, that you're actually very competent to do that and that you can actually do something they can't. So, that's often the line that I try to strike and you do that progressively. You first do something very simple a lot of the time. I've done this type of work with impacted communities before in Canada quite a bit. The trust is built by fulfilling incrementally larger promises and the first one is to show up. You show up once, you show up twice. Oh, okay, this lad took a train to come and see me. That's nice. Okay, this lad took a train to come and see me twice. I mean, people are often really, especially people in crisis, especially people in flooding are really starved of a sense of being seen and recognized and just treated with dignity. So the first thing you can do is just treat them with the respect that they actually deserve. And then maybe they'll let you do something else then. And then maybe they'll let you do something else. And then one or two years later, you are their advisor and the relationship looks a bit like as your lawyer, which is you're in charge. I'm just here to give you advice. My stake is clear. As your lawyer, I would really, really, really advise you not to do this particular thing that you're so angry about right now, and makes a lot of sense. And I often tell them, well, it's not my house that's flooding. So I have that luxury of distance. I don't know what I'd do in your position. I probably wouldn't be handling it very well. But I've done this much. So trust me or don't.

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Paul Dickinson: One more question about organizing. I've described to you, and we had a chat yesterday about servant leadership. I noticed there was really quite a good article in The Guardian about you. And you weren't in it. You know, your colleagues, your co-founders were in it. Well, why don't you describe your leadership style? Maybe you don't want to use the word leadership. But if there's something about getting people together and making stuff work and being that kind of coordinating and facilitating force, what's your style?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): There's this quote from a very, very famous dude at Harvard called Marshall Gans that goes, organizing is leadership that allows people to use the resources they have to build the power they need to get the change they want. Now, I don't know if that's useful or not, and I don't know that that's my style of leadership. I think it really, really depends, which is not a very good answer. But I mean, there's the way that I work in leadership with the professional team at Flooded People UK, and there is the way that we express leadership and our role in relation to the communities impacted. And with the communities impacted, there is a general sense that we take a very pedagogical approach to the way that we work with communities, and we have this wonderful advisor that teaches us on that. So there's this idea of a zone of proximal learning, which is that people have a comfort zone, they've got a panic zone. So if I was to say, right, Paul, why don't you go and set up a 20-meter-by-20-meter banner outside of your MP cell? Well, whoa, I'm not going to do that. What are you talking about? But if I were to say, okay, Paul, let's think really carefully about what you've been doing till now and has it worked or not, then you are trying to expand people's zone and sense of what they themselves can do collectively, of who they belong to, of what their stakes are. And so that's very much the philosophy when we work with communities, which is that we really have an understanding that if it's your house flooding, it's your rules. Your house, your rules when it comes to flooding as well. Our role is to help you and be there for you to think really clearly and carefully about how you're going to stop that problem and to support you and give you the resources you need to do that. That's at least how I would speak to an impacted person. But your role in organizing is always to be developing other people and developing other people's agency and sense of confidence because you can't do that much by yourself faced with a political issue ever.

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Paul Dickinson: That's such a good answer. That's such a good answer. All right, in my opinion, but whatever, who cares? Here's the thing, last question, really. Love to hear your vision for the future of flooded people, however you want to express that because obviously it's kind of silly. No one knows what's going to happen in the future. And you actually, you've said that so much of your development is kind of contingent upon how things are turning out. But I'd love to get any kind of pictures from you about how you see things.

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Well, flooding in the UK is probably not going away. And it's probably going to get worse. In fact, it's almost certainly going to get worse. And so if floods can generate political will to fix floods, and if that loop can be stronger than the general accelerating loop of climate change development, bad infrastructure that's making the floods worse, then you can be on a trajectory to things getting better at national level for people, would be the vision. So if every time it does flood, that generates more people who are convinced and critical and collect and behaving strategically and collectively and generates added political will to fix the flooding, then eventually you get on a different trajectory.

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Paul Dickinson: Nice theory Louis, but what's the infrastructure that makes it better?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Well the infrastructure, you need to find the people who have flooded. You need to build trust with them. So you need to bolster the numbers and capacity for collective action. So you need to have very, very well worked out digital processes, it's what's working right now, to make sure that those people who have flooding and need help in a moment of crisis know how to find you and can find the support they need. That that support they need can then create space for them to think, and it's hard to do that when you're in a situation of emergency and you have PTSD. But that situation can then give them the space that they need to gain a clear, I guess you'd call it a theory of change, about how this does or doesn't get better, and creates a virtuous dynamic where they can actually act collectively with very limited resources, even we're quite well funded, but it's tiny, it's a drop in the ocean. And so finding people and creating the space where they can strategize effectively together, it would be a less abstract way of describing the type of infrastructure that you need to get that. And so then in Nuts and Bolts, you're talking about very well moderated Facebook and digital spaces that are very clearly linked to in-person experiences, very skilled community organizers with enough capacity to meet the need and generate the need. And then that working seamlessly with media and different types of pressure tactics that you can pull off and successful peer learning mechanisms. It's actually quite complicated to engineer as it goes, but luckily we've got really, really good people in the team who can make my crazy ideas happen.

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Paul Dickinson: Here's my last question for you. A challenge, one of the biggest challenges you've, I want to say faced and I don't want to say overcome because I think we need to be realistic about challenges. What's been hardest for you and how have you faced it?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Polarization. We pick people out of the world as it is, but they're very different. They are reading all types of different media. They're working in a really difficult, confusing society with lots of competing interests working covertly or overtly. And so there's a lot of forces pulling against unity in flooded people. I think climate change is one of the places where this is the strongest. It's such a difficult topic to broach with people. But if they're talking to you and then they're going back to a different online space that is much more rooted in anger and divisiveness and blaming other people, and there's just so much of that going on that these are really, really, really difficult forces to overcome and to keep a kind of positive experience where people can disagree constructively and leave disagreements, even really, really difficult and fundamental differences by the side to work together on something that they do agree. That's incredibly difficult to do.

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Paul Dickinson: How did you do it?

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Louis Ramez (guest, co-founder of Flooded People UK): Well, as best we can. We're learning a lot about the limits of what you can and can't do online, for instance. Facebook is an incredibly good tool for support and for working when there is already common ground. I think it's not very good for discussing highly charged political issues. I think fundamentally these things aren't rocket science, which is that we all know how to talk to people. So how do we do it? Well, with empathy and with care and with a bit of humility. We go and we talk to people and we say, look, I really, really, really want to support you in working your flooding. I really, really, really believe that you need to work together to do that. Therefore, I need you to do that. Are you up for it? Are you not? Does this make sense to you? How do we change that? You do it one person at a time. You do it through many people at a time with media. You do it by thinking an awful lot about what you're doing and trying to learn the right lessons and keeping it together under pressure and financial pressures and all sorts of pressures.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Great, Paul, thank you for bringing this fantastic conversation to Outrage and Optimism. We'd love to just hear maybe first from you. What did you take away from that conversation?

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Paul Dickinson: I mean, I'm kind of very interested in the notion. And well, I don't think it occurred to me before, but when Louis first suggested that he wanted to get together people who were suffering from extreme weather and try and organize them, I suddenly felt a sort of a tangible sense that this was like a really important opportunity to add sort of visceral lived experience to the kind of compelling force of political change. And so, yeah, I mean, he's sort of one person who's been involved in starting one relatively small NGO in one country. So it's not a panacea. But I thought his comments about how you can build community, how you can build trust, how you can have right relationship with people who are suffering, who are very diverse. This is definitely not, I'm going to draw my political community. Oh, no, no, no, no. The water will get to people completely at random. So you're compelled to deal with every different kind of political flavour and group and try and find something out of them. So I guess maybe just talking to you now in response to the question, I think something quite interesting is how there's a sort of central humanity or public interest to this, which is perhaps not so relevant in other community or other organisations I've come across in climate change.

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, and to that I would add how important it is to realise that personal resilience to tragedies like this are based certainly on oneself but fundamentally in our relationships with other people, the community that we have built or that gets built around these tragedies that happen to towns. And I guess in my memory comes up how much literature has been written about how we do develop this sense of compassion, camaraderie, love for people that we don't even know in moments of acute distress. It's when humanity has the capacity to actually act out of its highest and best instincts.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, it does. But I thought it was also interesting him talking about how the hardest challenge nevertheless is polarization. I mean, even in an area that should be unifying, as you've talked about, that navigating divided information environments and kind of sustaining unity across these differences through empathy remains a real challenge in his community work. But I thought the vision to create this positive feedback lead where flooding, which of course can lead to isolation and despair and all of these psychological problems could actually lead to collective action and political pressure. We have talked sometimes about how the sharp end of climate change doesn't necessarily lead to togetherness, it leads to division, and it doesn't necessarily lead to action to solve the problem. So I think some of the work that Louis is doing to help connect the impacts to more action to both address the impacts on community, but also keep in mind the solutions to climate change. It's a really interesting model that we should explore more.

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Paul Dickinson: I just want to reflect back to you, Christiana, your comment about in a crisis, people coming together. I mean, I've lived all my life in London, which is quite a cold city in some regards, and people are pretty sort of unfriendly and brusque sometimes. But if there's like a crisis somewhere, you suddenly find you're surrounded by the most lovely people who are just sort of looking after each other and work immediately as a team. And it's kind of like, you always kind of wonder, why can we do that? I knew somebody in my childhood and she remembered World War II pretty well. And she said just people were so kind of happy, you know, in the UK, as long as you weren't being bombed or you won't go having to go off and fight. Everyone had this incredible spirit of kind of like, come on, let's support each other. Can I help you? What do you need doing? What needs doing? That positivity, I think, is something that we should really seek to nurture and celebrate.

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Christiana Figueres: We saw that during COVID, remember?

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Paul Dickinson: Yes, we did. Ding, ding, ding for the NHS.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So that's a good question, Amina. If we try and project forward what's going to happen here, as these impacts get worse in the UK and other countries as well, people will begin to be sort of slowly abandoned by the state because the state can't keep up with these increasing impacts and potentially more reliant on their communities. That's going to maybe bring people closer together, but it's also going to lead to terrible challenges. How do we see around that corner a little bit?

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Christiana Figueres: Well, and just to double down on that, let's remember that these floods, when they have severe impact on infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, what we're not quantifying right now is the effect on the disruption of supply chains. We don't even quantify that. On energy networks, I can't tell you how many times I have blackouts in my house due to energy network failure.

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Paul Dickinson: Rain, right? No problem with renewables, it's rain.

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Christiana Figueres: Rain, rain, rain, rain. Agriculture, the impact on agriculture, whether you're a farmer and depend on that livelihood or whether you purchase food and the price of food goes up because there's scarcity of food. So at the top of the episode, I went through numbers of how much the flood-related economic cost has been, but that's just to the infrastructure itself. It doesn't even count the indirect cost and the complication to the social network that that then produces.

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Paul Dickinson: The famous one for the floods in Thailand quite a while ago was that there was one factory that happened to be producing the thing that reads the drives and all the hard drives of the PCs, and the entire global PC industry kind of went into a sharp halt whilst they figured out what to do. So I think people are a little bit wiser to those interconnections, but resilience is the name of the game.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, and resilience, as you try and pivot, I mean, you talked about World War II, the darker parts of those, the UK nearly starved, right? There had to be like every piece of ground had to be used for growing food, and it took time to pivot to that. If you're going to try and think about how do you reorganise for a world that's fundamentally different, where supply chains are disrupted, where food is more scarce, where, I mean, all of these things are coming, right? That's going to require quite a lot of rethinking, and I'm not entirely convinced that humanity in 2026 fits very easily into that box.

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Paul Dickinson: And what's actually super missing is some positive, shining, broad, sunlit uplands that come out of this. I think you can't necessarily coordinate strongly around just negative. There must be some positive way of communicating this collective enterprise, because otherwise I think it's going to fail.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So have a go. Tell us what that is.

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Paul Dickinson: You do your worst and we'll do our best. I think we probably need to articulate some sense of going through a crisis and how getting through it is going to build a new spirit and capability in us, where we're kinder and better to each other. It's kind of like this gigantic religious test, although I'm not a religious person, but it's like a religious test that we've been given by the universe to get us to be kind and good and sweet to each other, to re-engage with and celebrate the wonders of humanity. Rather than the challenge being our enemy, it's kind of our friend because getting through it will remake us in a way that we would be better with ourselves.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: You're just buying that? All right, great. Okay, anything else to say on this?

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Christiana Figueres: The way I say that, climate change is the gym for the human soul.

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Paul Dickinson: Nice one. Okay, good. A couple of hundred years in the gym and we're going to be very fit.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Very good. All right. Thank you so much, Paul. This is a great episode. Thank you for bringing this. Great to have this conversation, somewhat unexpected to talk about flooding in the context of the UK, but it's worth remembering these things are happening everywhere. So I think we'll leave it there. See you all next week. Thanks for joining us. Bye-bye.