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
Develop your story with interdisciplinary research and learn tips for working with scientists and expert consultants.
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Climate Genres
When people think of climate stories, they often default to disaster tales, but climate storytelling is far more diverse. By understanding the strengths and challenges of different genres, you can craft climate narratives that drive meaningful engagement and action.
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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
A narrative is a story pattern that emerges as audiences create, consume, and share stories. Understanding who you’re reaching–their values, motivations, and media habits–can transform storytelling into genuine connection.
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Thinking in Systems
A ground-swelling tool in our complex world, systems thinking looks at climate change not as a single crisis, but as a hyperobject embedded in the systems we have built. Philosopher Thomas Morton coined the term hyperobjects to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space and transcend localization, such as climate change and the internet. Stories move through cultural platforms and systems like film and television, genre and myth, media, education, art, humor, rituals, and the physical yet existential drama of climate change. A narrative strategy maps these systems and arenas where meaning can spread.
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.
Getting Started with Climate Communications
Our communication guide offers producers guidance on how to support writers, crew and cast in their efforts to bring forward solutions.