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STORY ARK

tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points

Welcome to Story Ark, where investigative journalism meets immersive storytelling in a voyage around southern Africa that’s documenting how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime.

Seasoned science journalist and author Leonie Joubert is on the road in search of the invisible and untold stories that unfold far from newsrooms. She’s also scouting for solutions to the pressing social and environmental justice issues that surface along the way. Story Ark aims to inform our public conversation and stoke active citizens in a way that supports more resilient and responsive communities in these disquieting times.

The name Story Ark draws on the importance of storytelling and how we can use it to create a Noah’s ark for ecological, cultural and social conservation.

1 May 2026

21 May 2026

The ferrymen: SA’s taxi drivers face deadly heat on the job

A new study from Durban shows how at risk taxi drivers are to life-threatening heat stress, and not just during once-off extreme events. Long-term exposure to rising temperatures in their mini buses may end in kidney burnout.

First published by the Daily Maverick.

7 May 2026

Gut feeling: Wild Coast’s food heritage holds solution to ‘lifestyle’ diseases

At a time when whole food farmers’ markets have been replaced by Whole Foods Market Inc, and glitzy packaged foods trump home-grown greens, research with farmers on the Wild Coast shows that sometimes progress means returning to our roots.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

1 May 2026

BBC Unexpected Elements: The soaring price of condoms

Leonie joins the Unexpected Elements team to talk about the blockade on the strait of Hormuz and how this has led to an unexpected consequence – condom prices are set to increase by up to 30 percent! They also delve into all things contraception, starting with koala hormone implants, the lengthy process of providing birth control to elephants, and a microplastics mystery.

Broadcast by the BBC.

22 April 2026

Cape Talk: Views and News with Clarence Ford

Clarence Ford spoke to science writer Leonie Joubert on how extreme heat is impacting on affecting informal settlements.

Broadcast on Cape Talk.

21 April 2026

The fourth horseman: Extreme heat, a silent killer stalking informal settlements

Of the disasters that sweep through the Dakota informal settlement in south Durban, fire is feared most. Flood is the great leveller on lower ground. Wind gnaws at exposed homes. Heat, though, is stealthy and lethal. Research from this muggy East Coast neighbourhood shows how hellish shack life can be when temperature and humidity spike.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

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22 April 2026

Wild Coast’s amaMpondo want greater part in preservation and management of ancestral lands

South Africa’s newly minted Ramsar wetland on the Wild Coast shows that the notion of development is contested territory. The story of a Pondoland fisherman shows that while the bull elephants tussle, it’s the grass that is trampled.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

16 April 2026

Government funding is the final hurdle to unleash the weevil to control pine weeds

A likely cure for one of the Western Cape’s worst pine weeds is ready for roll-out, after conservationists and pine growers break a 15-year deadlock on the safety of the biological control agent. Government funding remains the last bottleneck, as the province gets hotter, drier and more fire-prone.

By Don Pinnock in the Daily Maverick.

22 Feb 2026

Climate activism is dead, long live climate activism

In his latest column, Steven Boykey Sidley gives a strident take-down of climate activism. But he’s parroting a British libertarian with questionable credentials and a blind spot for evidence.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

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5 March 2026

Thonga fishing families count the cost of decades-old eviction from Kosi Bay

In creating the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa chose ecotourism over extractive mining for the region’s development. But conservation authorities inherited an apartheid-era model of exclusion, which may continue the erasure of Thonga fishing culture from the landscape.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

15 Feb 2026

Leonie Joubert – An ‘accidental writer’ taking the long way around

Climate journalist Leonie Joubert and the lonely work of creating agency among communities struggling to make sense of the effects of climate change.

By Don Pinnock in the Daily Maverick.

31 Jan 2026

Our own flavour of climate avoidance — why science journalism can’t save us [Part 2]

Science journalists are humans, before we’re society’s watchdogs. The talking points at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists show we’re so busy surviving the immediate threat to our careers that there may be little headspace to confront the enormity of climate collapse.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

9 Feb 2026

What is a lethal dose of plastics poisoning?

In this TEDxJohannesburg talk, Leonie traces how profit-driven systems keep the tap of plastic production wide open while the rest of us absorb the consequences. Exposing the politics behind this crisis, she argues that only bold regulation, accountability, and a global shift toward a true circular economy can uphold our right to healthy, breathable air.

Hosted by TEDxJohannesburg and #TEDCountdown.

28 Jan 2026

Microplastics critique is a damp squib, not a bombshell exposé of faulty science

The Guardian supposedly dropped a bombshell when it reported recently that early research on the extent of microplastics in the human body is too fraught with errors to be taken seriously. It misses the point, and sets back efforts to address this pressing public health crisis.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

18 Jan 2026

Disruptive storytelling — the need for slow journalism at a time of planetary crisis

The annual gathering of African investigative journalists last November was a reminder of the need for slow, methodical reporting to expose social ills that span decades and vast geographies. A journalist’s craft, though, starts with the A-B-Cs.

First published in the Daily Maverick. Photograph: Sam Nzima.

29 Jan 2026

Magical thinking vs the laws of physics — why science journalism can’t save us from climate collapse [Part 1]

Science journalism is reporting on the symptoms of a disease whose origins lie in an economic model that’s at odds with the laws of physics. Until we address the root of the problem, we won’t bring down the fever of climate collapse, biodiversity loss or other planetary boundary crashes.

First published in the Daily Maverick.

Family jewels: the Richtersveld's many endemic dwarf succulents

More wordsmithery…

Introducing Invisible Ink, the ‘most brilliant climate crisis memoir the world has never heard of, and no one wants to read’, according to the entirely unbiased author.

Leonie’s most recent book is a rollicking, white-knuckled ride through 20 years of misadventures on the frontline of climate reporting in Africa.

It is sometimes dark, sometimes funny, often furious. It's also 'too much', according to one critic. Way too much.

A self-inflicted injury this big — turning a planet’s climate system into chaos — is too much.

Join our intrepid misanthropic memoirist — a competent writer who is not a man, if you can believe it — as she goes utterly mad in the face of climate collapse, and is absolutely sane as she watches herself do so.

Warning: includes at least one irate witch hunter, a few insurgents with hand-me-down Kalashnikovs and murderous intent, some predatory capitalists, a sexist or two, and a deity in the shape of a cat.

Because no adventure is complete without a cat. Even dog people know this to be true.

Invisible Ink is available in ebook or audio book.

Retro-futuristic illustration of Earth seen from space with floral and cosmic elements, including a robot, planets, and abstract shapes, in red, black, and white colors.

“... no adventure is complete without a cat.
Even dog people know this to be true.”

— Leo Joubert

Person with curly hair wearing a dark shirt standing with arms crossed against a yellowish wall.

Leonie Joubert has an unusual beat.

She writes about pollution: carbon pollution of the atmosphere that’s driving climate collapse; how highly-processed food-like products pollute our bodies, causing the ‘oil spills’ of hunger, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and the supposedly self-inflicted cancers; and plastics, which are now milling down into such small particles they’re washing up inside our bodies like toxic sludge on a beach.

Mostly, she’s interested in who profits from being able to pollute, and who pays the price.

Through this unusual journalistic beat, Leonie critiques the limitless-growth economic model through the lens of climate change and food security, and how this is driving systems collapse.

She has spent the better part of 20 years exploring these topics through books, journalism, communication support to academics and civil society organisations, non-fiction creative writing, podcasting, and public speaking.

Using long-form journalism, her storytelling weaves ‘person’ and ‘place’ into the complex science of the issue at hand.

Story Ark is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative reporting, and the Daily Maverick. Stories are also being published by Mongabay and Nature Africa.