Genre-by-Genre Breakdown

Disaster Films

Examples: The Day After Tomorrow, Don’t Look Up, Twisters

Disaster films can excel at translating abstract climate data into visceral drama. They reach massive audiences who might not choose “climate films” and create urgency and emotional impact.

However, keep in mind these common pitfalls:

  • Creating events that feel too extreme to seem realistic
  • Positioning climate as the antagonist without showing the human responsibility for climate change
  • Promoting a dangerous hero complex—audiences fed on a steady diet of disaster films may be less likely to evacuate during real emergencies, believing they can outsmart nature

Bear in mind that, while raising attention, studies have shown that disaster films rarely translate to lasting paradigm shifts.

Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Stories

Examples: Children of Men, The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, Leave the World Behind, Mad Max franchise, Station Eleven

Apocalyptic narratives offer opportunities to imagine new societies and value systems. The word “apocalypse” itself means “unveiling”—a potential to reveal new ways of organizing life.

However, be aware of these potential storytelling traps:

  • Trafficking in stark binaries of good and evil, hope and hopelessness, which merely reinforces polarized thinking
  • Perpetuating a fantasy of climate change as “done”—a sudden extinction event—rather than highlighting the slow, incremental reality we face and ignoring our own ability to intervene
  • Promoting escapism rather than future thinking to a world we’d like to live in

Ecodramas (Interior Crisis)

Examples: The End We Start From, First Reformed, Safe

Ecodramas can address emotions like eco-anxiety, solastalgia (grieving a climate-altered place to which you feel deeply connected), and what climate researcher Dr. Britt Wray has termed “generation dread”—the fact that 45% of young people report that climate worry affects their daily functioning. These stories validate emotional experiences often ignored in climate discourse and show characters working through grief toward agency.

Tropes to avoid:

  • Depicting characters as unhinged, which can shame audience members who are experiencing similar feelings
  • Dwelling in paralysis without showing pathways to action

Science Fiction, Solarpunk, and Fantasy

Examples: Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther, the Dune series, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Strange World, Wakanda Forever, The Wild Robot

These genres excel at world-building that shows sustainable futures are possible. They ask “What if?” and remind audiences that our current reality is open to change. Solarpunk specifically rejects dystopian doom to depict cities integrated with nature and regenerative economies. Science fiction draws on scientific and/or speculative technologies, whereas fantasy pulls from myth, magic, and fable.

Be careful of:

  • Using technology as a “silver bullet” that absolves humans of behavioral change or systemic transformation
  • Depicting a sustainable future as achievable only through catastrophe or collapse rather than through deliberate choices we can make now
  • Reinforcing colonial narratives in which solutions come from outside rather than from within the communities

Indigenous Wisdom and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Examples: Dark Winds, Green Frontier, Reservation Dogs, Spirit Rangers

Perhaps most crucially, we need stories that platform Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. While Indigenous Peoples account for just over six percent of the global population, they are custodians of more than a third of the world’s most important areas for biodiversity.

Seek out opportunities to collaborate with creators connected to these communities. Shows like Reservation Dogs demonstrate how environmental wisdom can be embedded within mainstream storytelling, reminding audiences that humans are part of nature, not separate from it.

Be mindful of narratives that:

  • Romanticize Indigenous peoples as inherently spiritual or mystical rather than showing them as complex, contemporary people with valuable knowledge systems
  • Extract traditional ecological knowledge without Indigenous creative leadership, representation in writers’ rooms, or proper consultation
  • Treat traditional ecological knowledge from distinct Indigenous cultures as interchangeable or as one undifferentiated whole
  • Use Indigenous characters or settings as exotic backdrops while centering non-Indigenous protagonists and their journeys

Everyday Activism and Environmental Justice

Examples: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Dark Waters, Erin Brockovich, Radium Girls, Princess Mononoke

Finally, climate activism can take many forms. Yes, How to Blow Up a Pipeline generated buzz, but activism also looks like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, fighting for communities poisoned by corporate negligence, or like Joey King in Radium Girls, galvanizing her coworkers to sue the corporation that knew radium was poisoning the factory workers.

Guard against stories that:

  • Show communities as helpless victims waiting to be saved rather than as active agents with their own strategies and solutions
  • Ignore the intersectionality of environmental justice with race, class, and economic inequality

Great climate stories expand the models of what activism looks like, depicting ordinary people taking on corporate negligence and winning—reminding audiences that everyone is capable of climate action and that everyone deserves to see themselves as a potential protagonist.

The question isn’t whether to tell climate stories. It’s how we tell them, who tells them, and whether we’re brave enough to imagine futures worth fighting for.