Gaia Vince

The 2024 Angela Croome Award is awarded to Gaia Vince for a purposeful and persistent mission conveying the social dimensions of planetary change, through a breadth of media communications to the widest public audience.

Gaia Vince is an ardent advocate for the planet we live on, pursuing a purposeful mission to communicate the threats to our natural world, and the solutions, to the widest audience. The diverse array and sweeping breadth of her media activity is hugely impressive. She writes books and articles, including for the BBC, The Guardian, New Scientist, Australian Geographic, and Science, has held senior editorial positions science journal Nature, Nature Climate Change, and New Scientist magazine, makes and presents science documentaries for radio and television, and gives popular science talks around the world. Her creative endeavours skillfully intertwine grounded storytelling with significant societal issues, crafting compelling narratives that open up the intricate interaction between human systems and Earth’s planetary systems and lay bare what that means for people and places. In her book ‘Adventures In The Anthropocene’, which won the 2015 Royal Society Prize for Science Books (the first woman to win), she drew testimony from ordinary people, scientists and political leaders to chart how human activities are changing our world. That social geoscience theme remains a constant thread in her work, and it persists in her latest (2022) book, ‘Nomad Century’, which investigates how climate change will force us to change where – and how – we live. Like much her of her creative output, it is a book of solutions and a rousing call to arms, setting out how we can plan for and manage the now unavoidable climate migration while we restore the planet to a fully habitable state. This blending of strong Earth science impelled by deep human optimism makes Gaia Vince a highly deserving and very timely recipient of the Angela Croome Award.