The scandals, hopes and agendas behind the policy briefing

My job is to write things that are easy to understand, and to explain stories in ways that interest people. I'm a press officer, with a healthy portion of forest campaigner on the side.

Much of the work that we do here at Greenpeace is based on climate science, and some of it is to do with government policy. Let's face it - words like science and policy are pretty boring. If I was a snooze button, I'd probably get pushed repeatedly in the face for even mentioning them.

But the scandals, hopes and agendas behind these words are absolutely crucial to our work, and have a huge impact on our chances of beating climate change.

Let's try an example. This morning I bumped into our chief scientist, Dr Doug Parr, next to the first floor sink. I was hoping he'd offer me a cup of his 'home-grown' nettle tea, but instead we began a long and winding conversation about something called forest offset credits. These are units that politicians want to introduce into carbon markets to mitigate their support for high carbon infrastructure projects, which could lock us in to a high emission trajectory for decades.

See what happened there? You were with me, happily gulping down some of Doug's nettle brew and then… wham! Words like 'mitigate' and 'trajectory' crashed the tea party and stomped all over the organic cupcakes. It's this kind of writing that makes a lot of people feel like climate change policy is a kind of secret society, a Masonic lodge for people with sandals and performance fleeces.

Let's try it a different way. I'll try to express doing something that's relatively cheap but very important (forest protection) as a way of avoiding something that's difficult but also needs to be done (reducing emissions in the UK). So here goes…

"Using forest offset credits in carbon markets is like paying your fitness trainer to go to the gym, so you can sit on the sofa eating cheese straws."

Not perfect, but suddenly the concept is easier to digest. This is essentially what I do on a day to day basis. Write press releases, I mean. Not eat cheese straws.

Right now, I am doing two jobs – I'm helping out as a forest campaigner as well as doing regular press work. The two areas overlap quite a lot, and it's a very exciting time to be working on forest protection.

If things go right, by the end of this year we'll start to see serious amounts of money flowing towards tropical rainforests to protect these huge natural assets. If things go wrong, we could lose species like the orang-utan forever and damage the global climate for good. At Greenpeace there is a real sense that we can win this battle. All I try to do is press the right buttons.