Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

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2. Storytelling as a Catalyst for Climate Change Communication and Empowerment

   • Open Access

   Hua Wang, Emily Coren

   Abstract

   In this introductory chapter, we use storytelling as an umbrella term for any type, form, genre, and practice of narrative communication. After briefly reviewing the current scientific understanding of climate change, recent public opinions about the issue, and the international community’s efforts, we point out three critical and interrelated gaps in climate change communication and articulate how narrative strategies, especially entertainment-education for social and behavior change, can effectively inspire and mobilize individuals and communities worldwide to engage in climate action and empowerment.

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3. Entertainment-Education and Climate Change: Program Examples, Evidence, and Best Practices from around the World

   • Open Access

   Suruchi Sood, Amy Henderson Riley, Lyena Birkenstock

   Abstract

   Entertainment-education is a global theory-driven and evidence-based storytelling strategy that promotes social and behavioral change. A formal review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature, alongside consultations with program and industry experts, revealed several contemporary examples of entertainment-education and climate change. Late-night comedy, with the inclusion of climate change storylines within popular entertainment, is common in the Global North. In the Global South, climate adaptation and mitigation narratives are situated in formats portraying audiences’ lived experiences. Crosscutting trends relate to documentary storytelling, children’s programming, and future efforts. Recommendations include re-examining theories across the social–ecological model; placing entertainment front and center; including messaging on rewards; using positive language; linking climate change with other issues; and emphasizing formative, process, and impact evaluation. Entertainment-education may be a promising vehicle for climate change communication, but the strategy requires a multidisciplinary set of changemakers working collaboratively to create meaningful and relevant programs.

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4. The Power of Locally Driven Narratives to Support and Sustain Climate Action

   • Open Access

   Neemesha Meesha Brown

   Abstract

   This chapter will explore the value of entertainment-education applications that center narratives that originate from the local context. The discussion will examine how centering narratives informed by local points of view have the potential to create the conditions for climate solutions to be optimally contextualized in the socio-cultural context of intended audiences. This optimal contextualization can lead to deeper engagement with the entertainment-education application and greater impact. The chapter will illustrate these concepts through two examples, the Sustainable and Thriving Environments for West Africa Regional Development (STEWARD) Program administered by the US Forest Service—International Programs Department, West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC) Program funded by and administered by USAID. Using these examples, the chapter will demonstrate how PCI Media’s My Community methodology allows local actors to authentically engage in a participatory approach to the narrative development process as part of an entertainment-education program.

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5. Positively Life-Changing Stories Today, Intergenerational Climate Benefits Tomorrow

   • Open Access

   Joseph J. Bish

   Abstract

   Today, popular entertainment is purposefully creating a more sustainable world. Locally produced radio and video series, created from applied theories of social learning and social cognition, feature relatable characters, familiar communities, and dramatically unfolding plots. Constructed to improve human health and human rights, these stories also offer audiences liberating information, alternative perspectives, and confidence to enact meaningful change in their own lives. Unrestricted access to family planning and universal girls’ education is instrumental in realizing the full human rights of women and girls around the world. Moreover, by destigmatizing voluntary family planning, correcting misinformation about the safety and efficacy of modern contraception, and strengthening social acceptance and support of girls’ education, the long arc of human population size is influenced toward a smaller, more sustainably scaled civilization in the future. This relatively smaller human presence on the planet offers many potential alleviations of human-induced environmental stress, including scaling down the basic human need for, and propensity to emit, greenhouse gas emissions in the future.

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6. Kembali Ke Hutan (Return to the Forest): Using Storytelling for Youth Engagement and Climate Action in Indonesia

   • Open Access

   Ankur Garg, Anna Godfrey, Rosiana Eko

   Abstract

   Known as the “Lungs of the World,” Indonesia has some of the world’s highest proportion of forests and biodiversity. However, it also has one of the world’s largest carbon footprints, owing to the development needs and land use changes. BBC Media Action’s Kembali Ke Hutan (Return to the Forest) project aims to engage the millennials on the sustainable development challenges the country faces, help them to make informed choices, and create platforms to have their voices heard. To achieve this, we have co-produced an award-winning TV drama #CeritaKita (Our Story) with a companion social media discussion series Ngobrolin #CeritaKita (Chatter—Our Story), created a social media brand AksiKita Indonesia (Our Action), and partnered with media and civil society organizations for community engagement and capacity strengthening. This chapter outlines the project objectives, presents the program strategy, and details how research shaped the creative process. It also shares the planned evaluation.

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7. Let’s Go! Let’s Know! N*Gen as an EE Tool for Climate Education and Agency

   • Open Access

   Paul Falzone, Joy Kiano, Gosia Lukomska

   Abstract

   Sub-Saharan Africa is incredibly vulnerable to the increasing impacts of climate crisis. With a median age of 19 years old, it is also home to the largest youth population in the world. How this population understands their relationship to science and nature can have incredible impacts moving forward. The case study in this chapter is N*Gen, the first cross-African science TV show for kids. Filmed across Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, its goals are to elevate girls and women in STEM, increase trust in science and scientists, and help give people the critical thinking tools to fight misinformation by exploring a range of topics, including ocean conservation, ecosystem change, zoology, vaccines, and human–wildlife interactions. This chapter also details broader aspects of the media landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, existing science education efforts, and opportunities to use media to change knowledge, attitude, and behavior related to the climate crisis.

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8. Rhythm and Glue: An Entertainment-Education Prototype for Climate Communication

   • Open Access

   Emily Coren

   Abstract

   This prototype of entertainment-education protocols is adapted for mainstream American audiences for climate change mitigation. The example demonstrates how entertainment-education can be used for creating community adaptation and resilience in supporting rapid transitions for sustainability. Using a narrative approach for climate communication, the Rhythm and Glue story emphasizes personal and collective efficacy, including layered examples of how climate change is already affecting the health of Americans. In the serial comedy drama, Rhythm and Glue, a Los Angeles community humorously learns to collaborate, sharing their skill sets to build a better city. Slapstick, romantic entanglements, and career advancement anchor the story, while real-time audience participation drives engagement with climate topics. Audience participation facilitates engagement increasing the capacity of existing climate mitigation programs. Each season presents an overarching climate change issue. Season One focuses on transportation transitions and the current health impacts of climate change, with subsequent seasons addressing; energy, water, food, and waste. The show highlights the realities of climate change facing residents of the United States and presents realistic solutions and behaviors that citizens can take to mitigate those effects, for themselves and their communities.

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9. Rewrite the Future: Helping Hollywood Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling

   • Open Access

   Daniel Hinerfeld, Cheryl Slean, Katy Jacobs

   Abstract

   Rewrite the Future is an initiative of NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council) launched in 2020 to help Hollywood tell stories about climate change. Our team assessed the social impact entertainment landscape and interviewed over 50 entertainment professionals. We determined that concerted advocacy, outreach, and education were needed to position climate entertainment as a powerful strategy for social change. We developed a program offering climate storytelling events, workshops, consultations, publications, and diverse partnerships. The centerpiece of Rewrite the Future is climate story consulting to help entertainment-makers engage creatively with a range of topics that best pertain to their show or film. Consultations are customized to interact with each story on its own terms and defer to storytellers’ expertise in entertainment. Early outcomes of Rewrite the Future’s programs will be reported including successful story placements and evidence of a growing community of climate story practitioners in the entertainment sector.

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10. LOLs: Secret Weapon Against CFCs and CO2?

    • Open Access

    Celia Gurney, Mamoudou N’Diaye

    Abstract

    • Read This Chapter If You Do Not Want to Get F**ked

    The climate crisis is serious, confusing, and has a lot of words people don’t understand. But everybody understands comedy! So, how do we weave these two very different fields together? Well, we don’t have to—it’s already happening. This chapter gives a brief overview of the history of entertainment-education; highlights research that demonstrates the efficacy of comedy as a communication strategy; details how various creators are using comedy to break down barriers to understanding how completely f**ked we are if we fail to build a more inclusive, justice-oriented clean energy economy; and explains what the climate change comedy field needs to move forward. If being completely f**ked is not on your agenda or the agenda of the future generations in your family, please read this chapter and join these collective efforts. Increased support and engagement could open doors for more mass media outlets, shows, and other entertainment projects to improve accessibility for the climate justice movement and invite more allies into it.

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11. Climate Fiction to Inspire Green Actions: A Tale of Two Authors

    • Open Access

    Denise Baden, Jeremy Brown

    Abstract

    Many works of ‘climate fiction’ have a tendency to depict an apocalyptic future that imagines a planet in dystopian collapse. While hope is that such cautionary tales will prompt constructive behavior change, unintended consequences can occur leaving some audiences feeling defensive, hostile, or overly anxious. In contrast, there is a body of evidence indicating that stories and characters that model positive solutions to climate change are more likely to inspire audiences to imitate the fictional role models. This positive approach is shared by the authors of this chapter—Denise Baden in her rom-com Habitat Man and Jeremy Brown (and team) in the comic series The Renegades: Defenders of the Planet. This chapter draws on their experience to offer advice to creative writers within climate fiction. While there are differences in the depiction of gentle versus radical solutions, both authors advocate the need for stories that generate a sense of agency, hope, and courage.

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12. Visuals as a Catalyst for Climate Science Communication

    • Open Access

    Kalliopi Monoyios, Kirsten Carlson, Taina Litwak, Tania Marien, Fiona Martin

    Abstract

    Visual science communicators (aka science illustrators) are an underutilized resource in the collaborative effort underway to foment changes in policy and behavior necessary to address the unfolding climate crisis. While science illustrations have a robust history in textbooks and picture books, they are quickly replaced with stock imagery outside those realms, particularly when describing climate change topics. Visual science communicators are practitioners who have a mastery of graphic design principles and various art forms, but are also, importantly, fluent in scientific concepts. With this unique combination of skills, the visuals they produce can deliver complex information in concise, easy-to-understand ways and make climate information more culturally accessible, ultimately resulting in broader community engagement. In order to bring the benefits of illustration into the climate education effort effectively, climate advocates must budget for visuals and bring professional visual science communicators into the fold.

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13. Music as a Vehicle for Climate Change Communication: The ClimateMusic Project

    • Open Access

    Catherine Emma Dixon, Laurie S. Goldman, Stephan Crawford, Phoebe Camille Lease

    Abstract

    Climate change is often communicated in a scientific manner that fails to capture lay audiences emotionally, resulting in a lack of motivation to take action. Studies show that narrative is an effective strategy for engaging the emotional response to scientific information that is necessary to encourage community participation and action. Music can reliably express, modulate, and induce emotional states, and, as a temporal art form, may be a particularly effective vehicle for conveying narrative. This chapter reviews the evidence for music-based approaches to emotional engagement, information delivery, psychological well-being and social cohesion, and their application in climate change communication. The authors discuss the methodologies used in The ClimateMusic Projects compositions and performances, as well as their outreach projects and partnerships. Lastly, the authors examine future opportunities in climate communication, including potential funding sources.

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14. Telling the Story of Climate Change through Food

    • Open Access

    Danielle L. Eiseman, Michael P. Hoffmann

    Abstract

    The impacts of climate change continue to magnify, having devastating effects on populations across the world. Despite the mounting evidence that climate change will continue to intensify and it is due to human activities, humanity is slow to act. To encourage wider action among the public, this chapter discusses the use of food to tell the story of climate change, a growing yet underexplored area of research. The chapter first discusses the current state of food and climate change as an engagement tool. Next, the chapter describes how both food storytelling can overcome some of the challenges within the field of climate change communication. Lastly, the chapter provides examples of how food storytelling techniques can enhance engagement with climate change solutions and shift eating patterns.

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15. Three Ways to Introduce More Stories of Climate Action into Climate Change News Reporting

    • Open Access

    Joe Whitwell

    Abstract

    Traditional types of climate change news reporting can overwhelm, depress, and disempower readers. In this chapter, I propose three approaches to introduce more climate action-based storytelling to complement the traditional climate change news reporting. Firstly, we can tell these stories from across the newsroom and not just rely on the “science” or “climate” team. Secondly, we can engage with audiences to gather and share their own examples. Finally, we can take a systematic approach to incorporate stories of climate action at scale, by using technologies such as natural language templates that are reducing the cost of producing content while enhancing data-driven hyperlocal news reporting to promote human response and community engagement.

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16. Community-Based Resilience: The Influence of Collective Efficacy and Positive Deviance on Climate Change-Related Mental Health

    • Open Access

    Maya Cosentino, Roni Gal-Oz, Debra L. Safer

    Abstract

    Climate change threatens not only physical well-being but also the mental health of individuals and communities. This chapter aims to provide examples and useful tools to create climate resilience in order to reduce harmful climate change-related mental health impacts. After reviewing the effects of climate change on health, the authors highlight the importance of social connection and resilience as mental health resources. The chapter then discusses how community-based resilience can be cultivated through social identity (i.e., perceiving oneself as belonging to social groups), collective efficacy (i.e., people’s shared beliefs about their group’s capability to accomplish collective tasks), and positive deviance (i.e., a behavior-change approach that amplifies the successful actions of existing community members). In addition, the chapter explores the potential for local, intentional community building to serve as an effective strategy to improve resilience. Finally, the specific examples of Cool Block and the Transition Town movement (e.g., Eco Vista) model how communities can effectively support climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience strategies.

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17. Mapping Out Our Future: Using Geospatial Tools and Visual Aids to Achieve Climate Empowerment in the United States

    • Open Access

    Aviva Wolf-Jacobs, Nancy Glock-Grueneich, Nathan Uchtmann

    Abstract

    Urgent climate action is now impeded less by doubt that the climate crisis exists than doubt that we can do anything meaningful about it. Vivid stories of climate successes and geospatial maps showing the impact of such successes are the best way to meet this challenge. Accelerating climate solutions in the United States thus now turns on stories, maps, and other analytic and visualization tools to help achieve what the United Nations has termed climate empowerment, the “all-society” effort to mobilize all people of all nations to understand, gain the capacities for, and take the actions needed to save our planet and each other. In this chapter, we look at two types of narratives—those in the form of geospatial tools and images that help nonspecialists see and understand climate dynamics and distributional impacts of the climate crisis, and interpersonal solution stories that act as resources to help motivate collective climate action. Illustrative and analytical geospatial tools support community members in shaping climate action and environmental planning efforts, and help to ground climate adaptation processes in geographically specific data. In combination, these storytelling tools carry people over the entire arc of climate empowerment.

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18. Exploring Climate Science in the Metaverse: Interactive Storytelling in Immersive Environments for Deep Learning and Public Engagement

    • Open Access

    Stacey Spiegel, Hua Wang

    Abstract

    Climate science can be too complex for the general public to understand. By sharing several exemplary projects in this chapter, I hope to demonstrate how combining interactive storytelling in immersive environments with simulation, games, telepresence, social learning, and govies (a blend of movies with games) can provide mass audiences a deep learning experience about the natural world and issues related to the climate crisis. This approach offers participants extraordinary opportunities as scientific explorers to investigate real-world problems, present scientific information through live broadcast and pre-rendered videos projected on immersive cinema screens, and access media resources through individual touchscreen terminals and AI-driven voice-controlled interactions to participate in real-time group discussions in a shared space – physical and virtual – simultaneously. The metaverse is here, and the technological and social features of these immersive experiences hold tremendous value for public engagement with science education and climate communication.

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19. Bird’s Eye View: Engaging Youth in Storying a Survivability Future through Performance and Interspecies Friendship

    • Open Access

    Beth Osnes, Chelsea Hackett, Molly T. McDermott, Rebecca Jo Safran

    Abstract

    Bird’s Eye View is an art-science, informal learning project for youth engagement in storying our way beyond the climate crisis. The project is situated within the larger Side by Side initiative at the University of Colorado and was designed to lead a group of Boulder youth in observing and embodying birds through puppetry, costumes, and movement within multiple outdoor settings. Integral to this approach was the integration of equity and inclusion into environmental preservation. In this chapter, we share moments and highlights of our time spent alongside youth and birds in Side by Side during the summer of 2021. We connect this experience to the broader questions we face as a field: How can we create the rapid and lasting shifts needed to ensure our collective futures through creative climate narratives that can inspire action? How can we disrupt current ways of being and hierarchical models through interdisciplinary approaches? How can we story a new future? We offer our core findings as guideposts for our future work and for the collective efforts of all who work in informal learning spaces. Our findings center on the importance of fostering a sense of belonging through narratives of interspecies friendship that are created and performed by youth as a form of climate communication.

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20. Instructional Strategies for Climate Education in the Classroom: Storytelling about Our Place in the Earth System

    • Open Access

    Jessica R. Bean

    Abstract

    It is essential that we prepare tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, and communities to respond to the ongoing climate and environmental crises to plan for a sustainable future. Successfully addressing these needs requires contextualizing learning and using student-centered teaching practices that help learners construct an understanding of the world around them. For this reason, local phenomena can successfully anchor instructional storylines—coherent sequences of lessons that connect to students’ lives and engage them in synthesizing various scientific concepts to explain how the world works and why it changes through time. Students should reflect on how they are a part of the Earth system, and how individual and collective actions can address climate and environmental problems. These shifts in teaching practices are supported by tools developed by the Understanding Global Change (UGC) Project at the University of California Museum of Paleontology to investigate the causes, consequences, and solutions to the climate crisis.

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21. What We Need Now to Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling

    • Open Access

    Emily Coren, Hua Wang

    Abstract

    In this concluding chapter, we emphasize that 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. We elaborate on storytelling as a climate change communication and action strategy and highlight the power of narratives for social and behavioral change through popular entertainment. We especially advocate for the more rigorous approach of entertainment-education for social impact with better alignment across interdisciplinary partnerships, social objectives, narrative contents, communication platforms, linked resources, and program evaluations. Finally, we provide a tiered model with recommendations for actionable next steps to accelerate climate solutions.

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22. Backmatter

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