Mapping the Green Transition: why story is the missing link

There are moments in a research career when a project stops feeling like work and starts feeling like a calling. That is where I find myself right now — standing at the threshold of something I believe genuinely matters, energised by the extraordinary opportunity offered through the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Green Transition Ecosystems, and rooted, quite literally, in the place I call home.

The project is called the Wrexham Room. And it begins with a deceptively simple question: what if the way we help people understand the green transition is not through data, targets, or policy documents — but through story?

For several years now, I have been involved in the Public Map project which, as it says on the tin, is all about developing a public mapping platform that puts communities (particularly children and young people) at the heart of how we document, visualise, and make sense of environmental change. Maps have always been political objects. They reflect whose knowledge counts, whose land is named, whose experience is rendered visible. The public mapping work I have been pursuing seeks to democratise that process — to give communities the tools and the invitation to map their own worlds, on their own terms. We have done this by deploying Welsh Bards - another moment in my career where I found myself thinking how fortunate I am!

The AHRC's Green Transition Ecosystems represent a pivotal moment for this work. They recognise something the research community has been circling for years: that the barrier to green behaviour change is rarely information. People know. The challenge is connection — between knowing and feeling, between individual action and collective meaning. That is precisely where narrative comes in.

A public narrative and storytelling approach to mapping the green transition lies at the heart of this work. Drawing on the rich tradition of community-based storytelling and the emerging evidence base around public narrative, this project asks what happens when we invite citizens not just to consume information about the environment, but to contribute their own stories to a living, evolving map of transition. Personal stories. Neighbourhood stories. Stories of loss, of adaptation, of hope.

The evidence is compelling. Using public narrative to engage citizens has demonstrated a real capacity to raise awareness and shift green transition behaviours around environmental issues in ways that top-down communication simply cannot replicate. When someone sees their own street, their own estate, their own community reflected in a shared story about climate and change, something shifts. The abstract becomes intimate. The distant becomes urgent.

Wrexham is where this begins. Not because it is exceptional — but because it is real. A post-industrial town navigating its own transition, full of voices that rarely appear in national conversations about sustainability and green futures. The Wrexham Room is conceived as a space — physical and digital — where those voices can be gathered, mapped, and amplified.

We are at an important new beginning. The conversation about how public narrative can serve the green transition is opening up, and this project intends to be part of shaping it. Not with certainty about the answers, but with deep conviction about the questions — and about the communities who deserve to be at the centre of finding them.

The map, as they say, is not the territory. But a map made by the people who live there? That might just change everything.