Under the Weather: Stories about Climate Change

Under the Weather: Stories about Climate Change, collected by Tony Bradman, is a set of short stories for 10 year olds about children living somewhere the climate has already changed.

What happens

Each story comes with a short note from the writer explaining the real place behind it. Candy Gourlay opens hers by saying her island is based on Boracay in the Philippines, where the sea warmed by one degree in 1998 and most of the reef that shelters the beach died.

Then the story starts, and nobody mentions any of that for ages.

Ben is on Sugar Beach building an enormous sandcastle. He should be at school. He isn't, because the tourists gather round to watch and drop coins into his coconut shell, and because he is amazing at this and knows it.

His dad wants him in school. His hero is Peanut, a sculptor with dreadlocks who carves driftwood and makes terracotta urns, and who this morning is swaying and slurring and telling Ben the sand is washing away.

Then Ben's friend Spit turns up with a baseball bat.

It's a really clever bit of writing. You get a beach fight, a grudge over who gets to build where, a boy laid out cold on the sand, and only afterwards the boat trip where Peanut drops his urns over the side and tells the boys to dive down and look.

They look. Where Ben expects a flower garden of rainbow fish there's nothing. Broken coral like smashed china. Still water. No fish.

That's when he asks what happened, and Peanut tells him about the one degree.

So you don't get a lecture. You get a boy who has just seen something and has to work out what it means for his beach, his dad's snorkelling trips and his whole island.

A couple of things to flag. Peanut is drunk in that first scene, with a bottle in his hand, and he smokes. Spit swings the bat and knocks him unconscious, with blood on his forehead, and the boys stand there thinking they've killed him.

And the subject is the subject. A child who already worries about the planet will find real worry here, not reassurance. For a reader who wants to know how it actually works, though, this is a much better way in than a facts page, because someone they like is standing in it.

What to read next

If they want a whole book rather than a story, Wrath is about a girl who can hear the earth in distress and gets laughed at for saying so.