Storytelling Overview
As a producer, you are uniquely positioned to lead your team. Climate storytelling offers a path to move away from a cultural identity built around high energy use and extractive wealth.
Storytelling has a critical role to play in provoking curiosity and understanding about the multifaceted ways that climate is changing our world. Research has shown that when audiences emotionally connect to climate impacts and science, their perception of risk changes and they tend to explore and embrace solutions, be more hopeful, and feel a stronger sense of responsibility and agency.
What we need now are more complex, world-building climate stories in popular culture–ones that center compelling characters with emotions, don’t shy away from attribution, and reach global audiences with interconnected themes.
Producers often work supportively and collaboratively—with writers, directors, cast and crew, researchers, consultants, and institutions. Values can move through storytelling like an undercurrent. When working across multiple projects simultaneously, producers are often building ecosystems that reflect their values. Collaboration, authenticity, and a culture of care are creative assets.
As a producer, you are uniquely positioned to lead your team. The goal of this tool kit is to support and enable your climate awareness to move freely through phases of storytelling, including development, production, post, and marketing in the same way that climate permeates everyday life.
Climate storytelling offers a path to move away from a cultural identity built around high energy use and extractive wealth. We can imagine new stories to inspire future thinking, and by doing so, not only deeply engage our core audiences, but we can expand our reach to wider audiences.
Whether you are new to climate storytelling or building on your current approach, this section of the tool kit offers creative and practical guidance for actionable steps.
Together, these sections cover:
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Researching a Climate Story: From Ideation to Experts
Enrich your story with interdisciplinary research, with tips for working with scientists and expert consultants.
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Climate Genres
Understand the strengths and challenges of climate genres—from disaster films to psychological dramas—to craft stories that inspire meaningful engagement.
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Building Worlds That Move Audiences
Deepen your world-building to make climate impacts visceral.
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Characters That Inspire Action
Craft complex characters who reveal pathways to change.
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Beyond the Three-Act Structure
Discover narrative paradigms inspired by nature that reflect environmental complexity.
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Audience Impact
Understanding who you’re trying to reach–their values, motivations, and media habits–can transform storytelling into genuine connection.
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Thinking in Systems
Systems thinking is an approach to understanding complex issues by viewing them as interconnected, dynamic patterns and structures and analyzing how elements within a system interact over time to produce observable patterns of behavior.
The Storytelling sections were developed by Global Rise: Stories for the Future, a company that works with creatives across media to examine the role of science and the humanities in crafting rich climate narratives as part of a culture shift to mitigate climate change.
Sustainable Storytelling Communication Guide
Our communication guide offers producers guidance on how to support writers, crew and cast in their efforts to bring forward solutions.