Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions by Emily Coren and Hua Wang – Review

Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions by Emily Coren and Hua Wang, is a collected body of research and case studies on climate storytelling. It has incredible breadth covering cli-fi, journalism, documentaries, music, comedy, illustration, food, geospatial tools, and much more.

This is a crucial book for anyone involved in telling the most important story of our time – that of the climate emergency. The authors put this book together to create a “Community of Practice for Climate Storytelling,” to showcase how climate storytelling is used in professional practice, and to highlight best practice. I believe the lessons from this book can also be used to address the escalating threat of algorithmic extinction. It’s also the kind of book that makes a fantastic reference, and one I wish I had back in the days of writing uni essays.

Most importantly, the book is open access and completely free to download and read. This can be done here.

As a cli-fi writer, I was delighted to see D.A. Baden’s co-authored piece with Jeremy Brown. Indeed, I’ve previously written about the power of storytelling and was delighted to see how much research there was on this subject. I’ve collated some quotes which really stood out for me from this essential volume, and included them below. But before that, a quick note on the copyright licence.

Creative Commons Licence

I have included a selection of quotes from Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions by Emily Coren and Hua Wang in the section below. I’m sharing these unedited quotes, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format. The chapters that the quotes are taken from, and the authors of the chapters, are listed below.

Selection of quotes

Storytelling as a Catalyst for Climate Change Communication and Empowerment by Hua Wang and Emily Coren

• “Storytelling is an essential part of human communication. We are all storytellers, and we all love stories! Since time immemorial, we have relied on storytelling for information sharing, sense-making, and social transformation.”
• “Storytelling is at the core of our very being. The art and science of storytelling in recent decades have taught us that, when told well, stories are powerful. They can not only change people’s minds and actions but also fight social ills and save millions of lives.”
• “According to the UNDP, in People’s Climate Vote (the largest public opinion survey on climate change to date), 64% of their 1.2 million respondents across 50 countries said that climate change is an emergency. Of those, 59% said that the world should do everything necessary and urgently in response.”
• “Moreover, there is an urgent need for programmatic investment in full-time jobs dedicated to climate change communication and systematically developed networks of these professionals to create a truly meaningful and sustainable impact over time.”
• “We must shift the messages in the stories we tell about climate change from issue-oriented to action-oriented and focus on positive framing and actionable solutions to foster human agency and facilitate real change.”
• “Due to financial and capacity constraints, even climate communication professionals are mostly working in silos. This is a major challenge for knowledge sharing. Many must reinvent the wheel and experience difficulty when disseminating their products or interventions. In addition, the messages from different groups and fields are scattered, and there are no clear pathways to connect the dots, leverage existing resources, and amplify positive impact.”
• “Using the exemplary approaches and applications in this book, we argue that storytelling is an effective catalyst for climate change communication and empowerment. We advocate for it to be integrated into climate change funding, planning, and monitoring to help avert this global crisis.”
• “Decades of work in entertainment-education have proven it to be a cost-effective way to foster positive change in communities around the world.”

Entertainment-Education and Climate Change: Program Examples, Evidence, and Best Practices from around the World by Suruchi Sood, Amy Henderson Riley, and Lyena Birkenstock

• “Entertainment-education (EE) is the term used to describe the specific communication strategy whereby educational messages are purposely integrated into entertainment platforms to influence knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and social norms.”
• “Almost all EE tackling climate change falls within the realm of cli-f (Baden & Brown, 2024), which translates into narratives of a dystopian future arising from failure to address climate change. These narratives, while compelling, may not be entirely relevant for several reasons. First, they display a post-disaster world that human beings are helpless to change and cannot do anything about. Second, this type of narrative does not engender self-efficacy by making audiences feel confident in their ability to take positive actions that help address a problem. Finally, these narratives do not provide audiences with concrete cues to action, that is small measurable steps that they can take to address this broad and overwhelming issue. It is important to reduce eco-anxiety by focusing on science-based tangible, actionable, and concrete cues to action. This is where the Sabido methodology of transitional characters who change their behaviors during the course of an EE narrative is critical. For example: to address climate change specifically what can individuals do, how these actions impact their livelihood, and what are the different actions that people can take. Another programmatic implication is that the language used to address climate change needs to be consistent and positive.”

Positively Life-Changing Stories Today, Intergenerational Climate Benefits Tomorrow by Joseph J. Bish

• “Humans have always told stories as a way to understand, share, and shift beliefs and actions.”

Kembali Ke Hutan (Return to the Forest): Using Storytelling for Youth Engagement and Climate Action in Indonesia by Ankur Garg, Anna Godfrey, and Rosiana Eko

• “A Cambridge University and YouGov study (2020), which showed that Indonesia is home to the largest percentage of climate change deniers in the world, who do not believe that human activities could cause natural disasters. The study further showed that over eight percent of Indonesian respondents assumed that human-driven global warming is a swindle and an element of conspiracy theory.”
• “Stories not only inform, educate, and entertain but also encourage empathy and promote social cohesion (Gowland, 2021), challenge harmful gender norms (Shannon, 2018), start conversations on invisible and hard-to-address topics like fecal sludge management (Newton-Lewis et al., 2021) and inspire new intentions.”
• ““Saving our planet is now a communications challenge. We know what to do, we just need the will.”—Sir David Attenborough Broadcaster, natural historian and author, on Instagram”

Let’s Go! Let’s Know! N*Gen as an EE Tool for Climate Education and Agency by Paul Falzone, Joy Kiano, and Gosia Lukomska

• “It should not be the responsibility of entertainment-education to play a significant role in averting a climate crisis. It should be the responsibility of lawmakers and diplomats who create the policies that govern the industries and corporations that despoil our planet. But we do not live in the world of should. It is an unfortunate truth that public opinion is far more likely to shape policy than the reverse. Just as we saw in the battle for civil rights, for gender equality, for marriage equality, and in many other areas, public opinion frequently evolves more quickly than the laws that follow.”

Rhythm and Glue: An Entertainment-Education Prototype for Climate Communication by Emily Coren

• “Stories set in the future will lose the detail of optimizing present moment solutions emerging daily. Instead of jumping into a hypothetical future, I encourage you to stay in the present.”
• “I would answer to the question, “If we optimized narratives to have the largest constructive difference we can make right now?”: Set your story here and now in any present-day community, take the climate mitigation and adaptation work already being done, and include it in your story.”
• “Adapting to climate change is the fastest global set of cultural changes that humans have ever made.”
• “Characters should be demographically matched to your target audiences, and behavioral interventions should be modeled for multiple parallel targets by identifying existing community positive outliers.”

Rewrite the Future: Helping Hollywood Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling by Daniel Hinerfeld, Cheryl Slean, and Katy Jacobs

• “People will not work toward a goal they do not think is achievable or cannot envision. To bridge the hope gap, we need stories that show us that a better future is possible and what it might look like.”
• “We find in our audience research that even the alarmed [those most concerned about climate change] don’t really know what they can do individually, or what we can do collectively. We call this loosely ‘the hope gap,’ and it’s a serious problem. Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism.  – Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication”
• “Based on this body of evidence, we theorized that public attitudes toward the climate crisis might have the potential to shift through the same means and that compelling climate-savvy entertainment may be the fastest way to bring about the cultural change we need.”
• “For many decades, popular entertainment has played an important role in cultural change. Scripted TV shows and films have helped transform the public discourse and opinions about social issues, such as racism, women in the workplace, immigration, and LGBTQ communities, and have changed behavior around public health issues, such as drunk driving.”
• “The theory of narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000; Green, 2021) posits that when we’re caught up in a good story we’re put into an open and receptive state in which we emotionally identify with and root for characters even though they might be different than we are. We also effortlessly absorb and retain large amounts of information. The parasocial contact hypothesis (Schiappa et al., 2005) states that exposure to TV and film characters over time builds social affinity similar to how we feel about our friends. We begin to see the world as they do. This can open our minds to new ways of thinking, normalize the unfamiliar, and reduce social group bias and anxiety about change. Studies of the long-running hit Will & Grace, one of the first TV sitcoms with gay lead characters, found large reductions in viewer bias against LGBTQ communities (Schiappa et al., 2006). Medical shows like ER and Grey’s Anatomy that convey health information embedded in emotionally engaging stories have effectively changed behavior (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004). Primetime television programs such as Law & Order have effectively educated viewers about exposure to toxic substances and clarified environmental health policy.”
• “The more entertaining a story is (i.e., the more thoroughly a viewer is “transported” and identifies with fictional characters), the more potential that story has to bring about social change.”
• “There are so few stories involving climate change (or that even mention climate change) in mainstream entertainment that a viewer could watch popular film and TV content for weeks and have no idea that humanity has little more than a decade to avert catastrophe.”
• “Good stories are about people, not issues, and many creative professionals have difficulty making the leap from “climate change” writ large to the personal conflicts and transformations that are the grist for drama and comedy.”
• “Writers are people too, and very few people enjoy thinking in detail about existential threats to themselves and their families. Telling a compelling story about climate change requires overcoming the tendency to look away.”
• “The climate crisis is arguably the greatest storytelling opportunity of our era.”
• “The co-viewing experience is salient because research has shown that children, and especially daughters, can inspire climate concern in their parents, especially fathers and conservative parents.”
• “Stories that address the climate crisis are underrepresented in entertainment film and TV by any reasonable measure. Hollywood has been reluctant to tell climate stories for fear of losing advertisers and boring or alienating audiences.”

LOLs: Secret Weapon Against CFCs and CO2? By Celia Gurney and Mamoudou N’Diaye

• “Research has repeatedly shown comedy’s power to get our attention (Borum & Feldman, 2020), and a recent study found that people are more likely to remember things they learn from humorously presented news clips than seriously presented ones.”
• “A study of tweets about social issues found that funny tweets are more likely to get retweets than serious ones, and a 2021 study found that viewers of news clips are more likely to share funny clips than serious ones.”
• “At least a couple pieces of legislation can even thank comedy for helping them get passed: 1) the 9/11 First Responders Health Bill, which Jon Stewart advocated for on The Daily Show, and 2) the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act, which got a boost from a Funny or Die video called “Even Supervillains Think Our Sexual Assault Laws Are Insane” (Funny or Die, 2016; Hill & Holbert, 2017; Kim, 2019).”
• “For instance, if someone’s going to be the butt of a joke, it should be a person in power; it’s called “punching up” and has a history dating back to court jesters roasting their kings and queens.”
• “Sometimes this “greentrolling” can be pretty funny—like when BP suggested people calculate their carbon footprints and Heglar replied, “Bitch what’s yours???””

Climate Fiction to Inspire Green Actions: A Tale of Two Authors by Denise Baden and Jeremy Brown

• “Tip 1: Model Actions That Are Both Achievable and Aspirational”
• “Tip 2: Break Free from the “Echo Chamber””
• “Tip 3: Play Around with Careful Metaphors”
• “I’d recommend to any writers of climate fiction that you feature entertaining role models that act out solutions that are sometimes metaphorical and always aspirational. But it’s important that your protagonists balance their heroic aspiration with solutions that are still achievable to readers of many different cultural and political identities.”

Visuals as a Catalyst for Climate Science Communication by Kalliopi Monoyios, Kirsten Carlson, Taina Litwak, Tania Marien, and Fiona Martin

• “A successful arena for science communication where scientists and visual science communicators already work well together is in children’s picture books. Overall, consumer sales of children’s books increased 9% from 2020 to 2021, and this section of the book industry is on track to experience the strongest year of sales it has had since 2014 (Green, 2021). Additionally, book publishers are turning their attention to comic books and graphic novels for emerging readers (ages 4–8) in response to the growing popularity of this same category with middle school students. At the 2021 American Booksellers Association Children’s Institute, it was reported that manga and comic sales were up 17% in 2021. Of great promise for visual science communicators is that publishers see an opportunity to tell many kinds of stories through this genre.”

Telling the Story of Climate Change through Food by Danielle L. Eiseman and Michael P. Hoffmann

• “People tend to assess technical knowledge within the whole of their worldviews and beliefs as opposed to rational thought.”

Community-Based Resilience: The Influence of Collective Efficacy and Positive Deviance on Climate Change-Related Mental Health by Maya Cosentino, Roni Gal-Oz, and Debra L. Safer

• “Comprehensive reviews show connections between high temperatures and aggressive behavior (e.g., physical assaults, homicides, domestic violence) as well as suicide.”
• “Air pollution and temperature variability are also associated with declining mental health (Xue et al., 2019). Additionally, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires, and drought increase the likelihood of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts.”

Exploring Climate Science in the Metaverse: Interactive Storytelling in Immersive Environments for Deep Learning and Public Engagement by Stacey Spiegel and Hua Wang

• “The new wave of AI-generated media has arrived with many cautionary tales and unprecedented ethical concerns (Mets, 2023). As with any new technological innovation, it will serve as a double-edged sword and will require dedicated support, effective guidelines, and thoughtful collaborations to serve the public good.”

Bird’s Eye View: Engaging Youth in Storying a Survivability Future through Performance and Interspecies Friendship by Beth Osnes, Chelsea Hackett, Molly T. McDermott, and Rebecca Jo Safran

• “Part of the widening of our own behavior is to unlearn the humanist delusion of being separate and above the rest of the planet and instead be “in service of worldmaking,” recognizing “nonhuman animals as agential others swirling in, and of, this shared earthly substrate”.”

Instructional Strategies for Climate Education in the Classroom: Storytelling about Our Place in the Earth System by Jessica R. Bean

• “There are four major shifts we must make in climate education:

1. Create learning sequences (“storylines”) in which students actively seek to coherently connect their learning to climate change.

2. Interweave climate stories throughout curricula; do not teach climate as an isolated topic because everything is connected to the climate crisis.

3. Connect students’ lived experiences and the places they care about to their learning about climate change.

4. Provide opportunities to envision and plan for a resilient future in your community.”

What We Need Now to Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling by Emily Coren and Hua Wang

• “We are in a planetary race, and the climate crisis deserves the use of all tools at our disposal to achieve the recommended mitigation and adaptation goals. Effective communication strategies are necessary to accelerate climate solutions at the required speed, scale, and scope, and they can be designed and implemented based on decades of research in behavior science.”
• “It is not too late to change the climate stories we tell ourselves and each other; difficult is not the same as impossible and nothing is inevitable.”
• “To improve public engagement, we need messages that are “simple and clear, repeated often, by a variety of trusted and caring messengers,” and to promote climate action, we need to make the recommended behaviors “easy, fun, and popular”.”
• “Storytelling—purposefully designed, implemented, and integrated into a larger and funded public communication system to help coordinate multilevel and interdisciplinary efforts—is what we need now to accelerate climate solutions at the necessary speed, scale, and scope to foster real change.”
• “As humans, we are wired as storytellers and crave stories.”
• “We acknowledge that the climate crisis is complex but emphasize that there are ways to improve the communication methods that we use. In the hyper-interconnected world that we live in today, we are all in this planetary race together. There is still time. We can change the current trajectory. Focusing on positive and actionable stories and coordinating our efforts across disciplines and geographics will accelerate climate solutions. Let’s write the most epic story of our time.”

Summary

Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions is a rich collection of advice and guidance for incorporating storytelling in everyone’s creative work. Both the climate and AI crises deserve widespread incorporation into storytelling across all mediums, to raise awareness and ultimately bring about the changes we desperately need in this critical decade. This book is the perfect starting point for understanding how we can achieve that.

In their first chapter, Emily Coren and Hua Wang highlight the need for investment in full-time climate communication jobs. This is something I believe we desperately need, as these jobs are few and far in-between. They also note that many “climate communication professionals are mostly working in silos.” This is something I’m all too aware of. There is so little collaboration or outreach between professionals in this space, and I’ve found this very hard to understand. By working in silos, we remain isolated and fail to learn best practice from each other. This simply has to change. As with most things in life – we’re stronger when we work together.

I highly recommend this book to all creatives – particularly those interested in incorporating climate themes into their work, or those already doing so. There is much to be learned here, which could ultimately help bring forth a future that we can all be proud of. So let’s create stories like the future depends on it… because it genuinely does.

My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.