In this episode, our guest Grace Chua talks us through her work as the Head of Writing and Storytelling at Kite Insights. She explains how storytelling can bring us to a more sustainable future, while highlighting the ethos of trying to serve people and curiosity as essential qualities in content production jobs. We also discuss our perceptions of using AI and strategies to avoid greenwashing for clients.

Speaking from her previous experience, Grace shares her career journey as an environmental journalist. We touch on the issue of misinterpreting scientific findings, what it takes to properly communicate science and tips for asking questions.

For inspiring books and essays on sustainability, Grace recommends What If We Get It Right?, Climate Action for Busy People, Braiding Sweetgrass⁠, The Field⁠ and an essay on Solarpunk.⁠⁠ When it comes to climate-friendly food, it’s hard for her to pick a favourite, but she enjoys the creative recipes from Plantasia, which celebrates plant-based twists on traditional Asian cooking.⁠

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Yongsi: Your title is Head of Writing and Storytelling. Can you give us some details of what it involves?

Grace: I can give you a bit of background on Kite Insights and what I do here. Right now, I'm Head of Writing and Storytelling at Kite Insights. Kite is headquartered in London, which is a research, strategic, thought leadership and climate and sustainability upskilling agency. We started out as purely research and thought leadership on climate and sustainability issues initially 10 years ago, when we started helping corporate clients to understand emerging issues on climate and sustainability that were going to affect their industry and their business, and to talk about what they are doing on those fronts, credibly bringing out their internal expertise alongside the expertise of other kind of external experts.

About six years ago, we began to realise the clients that we work with have oftentimes got these really ambitious science-based climate targets. Yet they have no way of operationalizing those targets if they have a workforce that does not yet have the know-how or the motivation or the empowerment to do something about it in their roles. That's when we started Climate School, which is our sustainability assessment and upskilling package of solutions. That provides employees with the knowledge and the motivation and what they can do in their roles. And we work with companies to deliver this to employees.

A few years ago, we also began to develop an app that delivers this climate and sustainability upskilling from another angle. We did a survey where we found a large proportion of employees would be willing to change jobs to be able to take more action on climate in their role and so we developed this app called Hurd, h-u-r-d. You can find it on the app store. That allows employees to share what it is their company is doing to support them to take climate action. Also, Hurd provides micro learning. Let's say you're in IT or you're in finance - our latest collection that actually just launched today is marketing and communications, which I'm very excited about - if you're in one of those roles, what can you do? Where do you start? How do you work internally to take action on climate and sustainability issues?

Yongsi: It sounds really useful. I like what Hurd is offering because not everyone wants to change their jobs.

Grace: Yeah. In my specific role as Head of Writing and Storytelling, I oversee a lot of the quality of the content that we put out, whether it's a research report for clients or it's some of our learning content. For day-to-day, it could be totally different. I could be working on a client report about the circular economy and gender. I could be working on a business development proposal that packages together all of our Climate School solutions. Let's say some company wants to train its executives or its rising managers. How do you package that together and tell the story of what it is and why they need it? I could be overseeing the development of our e-learning course content or maybe some video scripting for clients. So it's a full range of really everything.

Yongsi: Wow, that's a diverse list of tasks. What's your favourite part about your work?

Grace: I feel like I'm always learning. As long as I'm learning something, I'm very happy to stay in an organisation, in a role. I'm somebody that's really motivated by learning something new. With every project, with every proposal, I feel like I'm learning something new, whether it's the subject matter or how to do something better; whether it's a skill or something like that.

Yongsi: What did you do before joining Kite?

Grace: I started out as a journalist, a daily news journalist, which is very fast-paced, very on the ground, very challenging. I started out right after high school. I did an internship with a newspaper.  And it just so happened that the newspaper was in Singapore in the year 2003. A lot of things happened in early 2003, a big one being SARS. And SARS, which like COVID, of course, affected us all very directly. It was terrifying and the news was changing day to day. That was my first experience of journalism, being able to go out, to learn more, to ask questions and to really make a difference to people's lives because I was, through that work, getting them the information that they need to stay safe, to go about their day to day, school, work, business, etc.

Then I went on to study literature and psychology in university and came back to be a journalist at the same newspaper, at the Straits Times in Singapore. I was there for six years. After my first year being on the general newsbeat, I moved on to the environment and science beat, covering everything from municipal issues - Why is the town council cutting down a stand of trees here? What is the residents’ reaction? Why do they feel that way? - to everything from that to national climate and environment policy. So again, learning something new all the time and being able to use that knowledge to serve people.

Yongsi: And how did you move from journalism to your current position?

Grace: The way I got here from journalism, actually, to backtrack a little bit, is I had moved to the US in 2014 because my husband was going to grad school. I was still trying to work as a freelance journalist. Because all of my contacts were in Asia and all of my work was in Asia, I realised I would need something that synced up better with daytime hours in the US, which is 13 to 14 hours behind Asia. So I kind of lucked into this role. I was also looking at the time for something that was a little bit closer to the action. I believe business has a very, very big influence and massive potential to help to address climate change and other global challenges. I was also looking for a way to work more closely with business and the influence and power that it has and to shift that in the right direction for good.

Yongsi: I'm glad that you seem to have found something that you like and works for you, judging by the fact that you've stayed at Kite for more than eight years. What are the transferable skills between these two roles?

Grace: I think one of the fundamentals here is always one, an ethos of trying to serve people. When you have that core audience that you're trying to serve, whether it is readers of media content or whether it is people in businesses who are trying to do right, you have a focus on that audience in mind and understand how to serve them.

Another one is curiosity. If I'm developing a story, it can lead you in a completely different direction. It can help you uncover new information. It can lead you to enrich that story in ways that you would not have imagined if you hadn't been curious about something in the first place. Likewise, you need that curiosity to be able to ask questions about how climate change is going to intersect with an industry, social dynamics or gender to be able to predict or forecast how all of those factors are going to affect a company or its investment or the society and community in which it exists. So curiosity is another one.

Yongsi:  We're going to return to your past experience in a bit. Right now, I'm curious about how AI has impacted your work.

Grace: Right now, we are not extensively using AI for a number of reasons. One, the way that AI works is that there is a risk of it coming up with basically something that is completely untrue. Our clients and our audiences rely heavily on us to be a source of truth, to deliver the facts. So we still do all of our desk research. We dig through all of the academic literature, for example, instead of relying on AI or any other method to digest it for us. So that's a big one. If I were to use AI in any other capacity, I think our clients would want to know. So there's a big issue around transparency. If I were to use AI for any product or service, we would certainly be transparent about that. Then another risk with AI, you're probably aware, is that answers that it returns can just reinforce existing biases because of what exists out there and what it is trained on. I don't want to reinforce existing biases. I want to bring about the system change that is going to make our systems and economies and societies much more sustainable. I don't want to stick to the status quo. For those reasons, we don't rely heavily on AI at the moment.

I know that this is a big issue, and it's a big commercial issue with many consumer-facing media outlets today as there is more and more pressure. I'm really sympathetic to that pressure to just put up news and analysis as fast as possible. But even as a consumer of that media content, I would want to know if AI has been used. I would still have those standards of transparency.

The other thing is that our clients rely on us to make connections and intersections creatively. I think that's something where human thinking is very, very strong right now. I feel like people still have this innate ability to see connections and intersections and even opportunities that maybe do not emerge with AI. I think if you were using a tool like Copilot or ChatGPT as a conversation partner, eventually you would get there. But it's not in a format that would be useful to my clients and audiences just yet.

Yongsi: So I had tried to get ChatGPT to generate an interview plan, but it was too general because it could not tailor the questions to the guest's profile. I mainly use it to check the grammar of my writing. That's been quite helpful since my English is not perfect as the audience knows.

Grace: I do think it has a lot of potential to, you know, help with productivity. Things like can it proofread, not for fact, but for grammar and spelling. It's like a tool like any other, right? You use it in that way.

Yongsi: Exactly! So how do you see the role of storytelling in tackling climate change? How can storytelling bring us to a more sustainable future?

Grace: I think it's another very, very powerful tool, right? If you've spoken to people in film and TV, you've probably also heard about the power and the impact of storytelling in helping people to imagine a different future, in helping people to understand the scope of a problem and helping people to understand the different impacts that climate change has on different people and different environments around the world that you may not have direct exposure to.

With my sort of storytelling, there's also an element of who the audience is. The audience is other business leaders. Oftentimes, one business leader or one industry wants to bring others along. They want a critical mass of companies being able to take action and understanding the urgency of the problem, understanding why it's important for them to take action now, and understanding the scale of maybe the investment that you need to really address it, and then bringing it all back to people at the centre of it, who are going to be the most affected by climate change and by climate solutions.

Yongsi: Can you give us some examples of the type of messages you usually create?

Grace: Sometimes it might be a message for internal employees, a message like - you're not alone. If you look around you in your office, there are probably 20 other people sitting at desks around you who also feel like they want to take climate action, but don't know where to start. If it's external messaging, it depends on what the company's goal is. It might be, can we convince other companies in the construction and real estate sectors to change their practices and work with more sustainable suppliers? There's always a call to action and how you convince others of the need for action.

Yongsi: When you're conveying these messages, how do you avoid greenwashing?

Grace: That’s why in Kite, like many other companies, we have a set of guiding principles of how we work and whom we work. But basically it's around - is this company in the fossil fuel industry with no plans to change that? Is it still getting the majority of its revenue from fossil fuels and it's not working to transition their company, their industry, the economy? So we're not going to work with those companies. What companies do we prioritise to work with? Are they the ones with science-based targets? Are they the ones with transition plans? Have they signed up to a commitment? Are they a member of something like the Climate Pledge or We Mean Business? Things that tangibly show their commitment to changing the system. So we try and prioritise those companies and seek them out as clients.

Yongsi: The key is to do your due diligence, right?

Grace: Exactly. The last thing that we want to do is enable greenwashing. You may have seen a few days ago, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres actually called on ad agencies. He said, madmen, stop enabling the fossil fuel industry, stop working with them, right? Along the same vein, you do have to be very careful and do your due diligence about whom you work with, whom you enable, what messaging you enable.

Yongsi: Speaking of due diligence, it's probably something you were already very good at before coming to Kite. Can you tell us how it works to be a journalist?

Grace: I'm no longer in the industry, but I can tell you a bit about how it worked when I was a practising daily news journalist. You are meant to be enterprising. So you go out and sniff out issues. You talk to your contacts. You do lots of reading and research and thinking about what kinds of issues might affect my community that I serve, that I write about. It can be something like digging through academic journals even.

One of my favourite stories I did when I was a very young journalist was looking through a local biology journal and seeing, oh, there's a record of this exotic species of stingray in the reservoirs that supply Singapore with water and their breeding, right? So I went to the scientists and said, oh, my goodness, what does this mean for our reservoirs?  What does it mean for the species also? What does it mean for other species that might be living in those ecosystems and the health of the ecosystem? We did an article about it and we got some great pictures.

As a journalist, there are many ways that a story might come to you. It can be assigned. You can get a tip from a newsmaker. You can get a tip from a member of the public that they write to you or to the editor or they call. Increasingly today, people are looking online for  conversations, discussions that are controversial or might make interesting pieces of news.

Yongsi: So journalists are like a bridge in science communication because not everyone has the capacity to read scientific journals. But it's not uncommon that information gets twisted or cherry picked when it's taken from the journals to mainstream media. So from a journalist perspective, how does this happen?

Grace: Sometimes it's because journalists are time crunched, right? So they just take the whole press release, swallow it and regurgitate into whatever article. But you know, a good journalist, given the time, would go to the primary source. If you're a historian, you go to the primary source first. So the journalist also should be going to that primary source. Ideally, read the paper. Speak to the researchers. Speak to people who might have differing opinions if it's a particularly controversial topic. Do your best not to reduce. Not to sensationalise. Be accurate. Because ultimately, that's what is going to advance the public's understanding of both the science and how science works. A lack of public understanding about how science works is why we have climate deniers today.

Yongsi: Does it happen occasionally because the media wants the article to get more clicks? So they choose to interpret the information in a certain way.

Grace: Yeah, I mean, there's no such thing as an unbiased media, right? Every human has some sort of bias. The key is also, as a consumer of information, of media, you should be getting your information from many different sources and critically reading and judging those perspectives. It's like having a diet that is made up of many different foods. You always hear, eat the rainbow. If you ate only potatoes, you wouldn't have a very healthy diet.

Yongsi: No, I’ll get very bloated.

Grace: So it's the same with any kind of media diet, right? You have to have a diversity of nutritious foods, right?

Yongsi: Did you have an education background in science or science-related subjects before you became a journalist?

Grace: Yes, my undergrad was in psychology as well as English literature. A lot of that was biological psychology and neuroscience. Understanding how things like molecular biology, genetics work was a key part of that.

Yongsi: Was the background a necessity for the job? Do you know any successful science journalists without a technical background?

Grace: Oh, completely. I think it's just a willingness to learn and to ask questions and to think critically about the issues. While a technical background does help, it's not an absolute hard must-have. You are not working in a lab. But understanding what a lab is like and understanding how people work in it is helpful. You don't need to build a plane. But understanding what it does and what makes it lighter and what causes it to consume more fuel or less is helpful again. But it's all about ongoing learning and a willingness to learn. It comes back to curiosity.

Yongsi: Coming from someone whose job was to ask questions, do you have any tips for that?

Grace: Follow your curiosity. Follow your interests. If you want to learn about somebody else's career journey, just come back to curiosity and building relationships and always learning, which is the red thread that has come throughout this conversation. There are different types of questions.There's a kind of question that is designed to show off how much the question asker knows and impress the person of whom the question is being asked. You can throw out those kinds of questions. There's the kind of question that genuinely comes from your curiosity, your desire to learn more about the field or about the person that you're talking to. Keep all those questions.

Yongsi: Definitely great tips for this podcast. And I'm sure you read a lot. Can you recommend any books that inspire you or motivate you?

Grace:  Yeah. Of course, I love reading. I love words. There are a couple of books on my reading list that I haven't got to yet, but I'm very excited about. One is by the climate scientist and activist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and it's called What If We Get It Right? It's climate optimism in a way. And then the other one is just launched. It's by somebody I know personally who works at the US organisation Groundwork. And it's called, her name is Cate Mingoya. I can send you that after this. It's called Climate Action for Busy People, which is all of us.

Yongsi: That's so true.

Grace: Coming back to our conversation earlier a little bit about having my climate motivation very strongly rooted in a sense of place - this is my personal experience and my fit with the physical world. This is why I love the physical world, whether that is through snow sports or you grew up going to the beach or you went to a park and saw this beautiful bird. It can be anything as small as like you're outside on a patch of grass and you see a spider web. That kind of essential memory of being a child in the physical world. I think a lot of our climate motivations actually come from there.

So a number of books that deal with the sense of place. One of my favourites is by the, she's a Native American author and scientist called Robin Wall Kimmerer. It's called Braiding Sweetgrass. It's a very famous one. Lots of people will have read it. There's another one from a Singapore writer. Her name is Esther Vincent. It's an essay called The Field. I can share that link with you after this. She's also edited a collection of eco-feminist essays from Singapore, which is something that you don't see very often because a lot of the dominant writing and narratives comes from the Western industrialised world. I'm always looking for eco-narratives from Asia, from Africa, indigenous perspectives and voices. Another one is an essay on Solarpunk, which is a movement that is very much ground up, rooted in community and rooted in place. Those are books and essays that kind of inspire me.

Yongsi: So we talked a lot about food for thought. My final question would be, do you have any food for soul? Like what's your favourite dish that's also climate or environment friendly?

Grace: Wow, that's a tough one. There's no one single dish, but there's a cookbook that I'm very, very excited about. It's called Plantasia. It's edited by a food writer, recipe developer named Pamela Chia. She is Singaporean. She grew up there, but she's been based all over the world. The traditional, cheap, Chinese diaspora food that you find in Singapore is quite meat and rice heavy. It's labourer food because it's traditional food of an immigrant population. The function was to feed everybody and give them enough calories so that they can work. What she's trying to do is find and celebrate plant-based alternatives and plant-based ways of interpreting traditional food, and also plant-forward traditional foods. She's got very creative recipes like salted egg yolk, Hasselback potatoes, or like a salad with shaved Brussels sprouts that uses yuba, which is tofu skin.

Yongsi: Oh, nice. Yes.

Grace: I've tried cooking some of these and they're actually very good.

Yongsi: That's so cool. I love good fusion food and I also make a lot of  fusion food with a vegetarian twist. For example, I would make a Greek moussaka with shiitake mushrooms instead of meat. I would also use this Middle Eastern spice mix called zaatar. It works very well with soy sauce. For example, if you make a stir-fry broccoli with soy sauce and garlic, you can actually sprinkle some zaatar. It gives a bit of acidic flavour and some tanginess to the dish. It's fun.

Grace: I love that. That's the power of human innovation and cross-pollination and creativity, right? I don't think ChatGPT will come and give you that recipe.

Yongsi: No, I don't think so. Well, thanks Grace for coming to our show and sharing your career journey and your thoughts.

Grace: Thanks for having me, Yongsi. All of this talk of food is making me hungry.

Yongsi: Well, it's lunchtime in Minnesota now.

Grace: And it's dinner time for you.

Yongsi: Yes, exactly. Well, I'm going to the grocery store now. And thanks everyone else for tuning in. Until next time.