She flew 7,000 kilometre in a paramotor, tracking Bewick swans across 11 countries to help save them. A human swan, she flies the skies to save endangered wildlife and to bring awareness of climate change.
Australian biologist Sacha Dench flies the skies to emphasize a “drastic shift is needed in the global economy to save endangered wildlife,” according to news.un.org.
Her flight in 2016, across “11 countries, from Arctic Russian to the UK,” “which saw her braving thunderstorms and polar bears, was an attempt to understand why Bewick swan populations were declining,” according to news.un.org. She told the website that “everything impacting Bewick swan populations was pretty much exacerbated by climate change.” That nudged her to focus on climate change as an issue.
Then, she had another “close encounter with climate change,” when she lost her family home in the Australian bushfires in 2020. After that, she felt “as if I couldn’t ignore it (climate change) anymore.”
changing the narrative around climate change
Dench wants to change the “whole narrative around climate change,” helping people to understand it isn’t “this horrible scary thing,” she told the website. Instead, she wants “to try to reframe it as a massive opportunity,” showing the “incredible ideas and innovators out there who are really trying to do something about it.”
She also believes, the website’s story said, that “we need a drastic shift in the way our economy works.” She said, “We have destroyed so much natural habitat in the world that the planet is really struggling to cope.” To solve the problem, she said the “Circular Economy is the only way to go.” A circular economy “extends product lifespan,” relocating “waste from the end of the supply chain to the beginning – in effect, using resources more efficiently by using them more than once,” according to unido.org.
how to get people to help fight climate change
Dench believes that “if you can communicate something in the right way, you can get other people on board and wanting to help as well.”
She told news.un.org that when people hear stories about other people who are helping to fight climate change they “start to think, well, maybe I could do something too.”
“We need to keep showing people examples and stories of the massive impact that individuals, companies and other organisations can have if they get involved,” she said in the story.
“Round Britain Climate Challenge”
Dench, who is ambassador for the UN Convention on Migratory Species, has “campaigned to raise awareness of the problems facing many species and habitats around the world,” according to news.un.org. In June, 2021, however, she participated in the “Round Britain Climate Challenge,” focusing on climate change, “which she describes as the greatest threat we are facing as a society.”
According to Conservation without Borders, Dench will attempt “something that has never been done before – a 3000+mile circumnavigation of Britain in a specially adapted, green electricity powered paramotor.”
“Because she can take off and land almost anywhere,” Conservation without Borders says on its website, “she and the team will be landing to recharge and rest with the interesting and inspirational people around the country, the ones (who) can show us exactly how climate change is changing our country, and what we can do about it.”
In this journey, she will visit “farms, rewilding areas, small businesses and schools in order to discover their sustainability stories and share with the world as many innovative climate solutions as possible,” news.un.org said. Dench will also attempt to break two Guinness World Records.
How to get involved
Follow social posts by Conservation without Borders to read the stories of those Dench meets who “can show us exactly how climate change is changing our country, and what we can do about it.” Follow the human swan as she flies the skies to save endangered wildlife and to bring awareness of climate change.
