The new wave of climate storytelling on screen

“Virtually non-existent.”

That’s how researchers in the United States described the representation of climate change in scripted media in recent years. Studies conducted in other parts of the world have come to similar conclusions.

When researchers at the climate storytelling consultancy Good Energy asked people if they could recall any recent portrayals of climate change in film or TV, the most common response was ‘I don’t know’, followed by The Day After Tomorrow – a film that is over two decades old – and 2012 – an apocalyptic thriller that isn’t even about climate change. With scientists telling us that we might be the last generation able to prevent runaway climate change, and the entertainment industry being the greatest lever we have for sparking cultural transformation, the silence seems absurd.

Ironically, the most popular climate film of recent years, 2021’s Don’t Look Up, was a savage critique of our collective denial. The good news: Don’t Look Up’s huge success seemed to spark a change. Now, all over the world, climate storytelling initiatives are sprouting like fungi, with the aim of creating fiction to help us reimagine the future.

But what will the new wave of storytelling look like, and how do we ensure we get the culture-shifting, world-changing content we need? Imagine5 asked the experts.

Can we do better than chocolate-covered broccoli?

“I think we need to imagine a future without cliff edges and fiery infernos.” That’s the message of More Flames, in which Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor plays a movie star exasperated by the doomy narrative her character finds herself in. The short film makes the case that it’s time to ‘flip the script’ on climate in TV and film. Lucy Stone, director of Climate Spring, which created the film (and has dozens more in development), says: “We’re reaching peak dystopia and peak apocalypse saturation, and there is now an appetite for something new.”

Nicole Alexander of Futerra, a creative agency focusing on sustainability, sees things through a similar lens. After a gloomy climate fiction show triggered her Gen Z stepsister to walk out halfway through the first episode, Alexander penned an article titled, ‘Hey, Hollywood – don’t make the same climate communications mistakes we made as marketers’. Information alone doesn’t create change, and doom and gloom don’t inspire action, she warned.

“Being preachy is mistake number one,” says Bruno Olmedo Quiroga, director of strategy at Good Energy. He warns that climate storytellers run the risk of alienating their audience if they are too judgemental and that guilt, shame, and fear can be paralyzing. “That’s why BP invented the carbon footprint calculator,” he says.

Stone agrees: “We need to move away from trying to make the audience feel guilty, especially for what might be inconsequential behaviors, and instead shift focus to inspiring systems change and holding corporations, financial institutions, and governments to account.”

Actor and activist Rainn Wilson, who made his name in the classic sitcom The Office, is now a co-founder of Climate Basecamp which, among other things, uses funny videos to shift the conversation around climate. Wilson believes laughs are crucial. “Humor opens people’s hearts and it opens their minds, and they might think about something in a different way if they’re entertained… Doom and gloom data points are just not going to work,” he said.

No matter the message, the experts agree: for climate storytelling to work it has to be engrossing, entertaining, and narrative-driven. “It can feel like chocolate-covered broccoli. It really has to feel like candy,” says Olmedo Quiroga.

Dreaming on screen

Almost every government on the planet has now set net-zero targets for some time in the next few decades. But how to get there fast enough? Stories that imagine new worlds can help.

Daniel Hinerfeld of Rewrite the Future (a project through which environmental organization NRDC works with film and TV companies), says a number of exciting projects are in development – but he also warns that the fossil fuel industry has spent decades turning climate into a political football. “We still have millions of Americans who see their disbelief in climate change and their opposition to climate solutions as part of their personal identity.”

Documentaries have also played a powerful role in inspiring change, but Hinerfeld – an Emmy-winning doc-maker himself – acknowledges the limits of their reach and impact. As he puts it: “There aren’t many skeptics who went to see An Inconvenient Truth.”

According to Hinerfeld, the best new climate films will avoid ‘dog-whistle’ language that plays well with audiences already engaged with climate, while alienating those who aren’t (even terms like ‘net zero’ and ‘save the planet’, which seem innocuous to climate nerds, can be surprisingly divisive, research suggests). Instead, successful films will need to focus on values and narratives that resonate across the political divide, Hinerfeld believes.

For Stone, the most powerful role stories can play is “dreaming on screen”. “We need to show that a sustainable, regenerative economy won’t just be better for the planet, it will be better for all the humans and animals that inhabit it,” she said. Stone wants to see a mix of utopian and ‘thrutopian‘ fiction which points the way from where we are to where we need to be.

Meredith Milton, creative director at NRDC, points to Black Panther’s Afrofuturist-inspired city of Wakanda as a rare example of an inspirational vision in cinema. “It’s the best universal-level solutions story, because it shows us an equitable society living in harmony with nature,” she says.

At a more mundane level, Steve Smith of Picture Zero wants to see more content that reflects the “accuracy and truth of people’s lived experiences” – which is why he helped create a guide for bringing stories about low-carbon living to the screen. Despite negative press, research shows that people actually love their heat pumps, EVs, and induction stoves, and these positive experiences should be reflected on screen, Smith says.

A new breed of hero

If the first rules of climate storytelling are ‘don’t be preachy’ and ‘don’t be defeatist’, the third rule is ‘don’t underestimate social norms’. Ellis Watamanuk, a director at Rare’s Entertainment Lab, tells us: “I’m always surprised when a character’s climate concern is unironically the butt of a joke on screen. It may seem harmless, but when those moments add up, it can signal to the audience that it’s socially unacceptable to care about the planet or worry about our future.”

In the new world of climate storytelling, the old tropes of naive adolescents, eccentric hippies, and whiny oddballs are out, and taking action is in. In 2021 Britain’s leading media companies signed a climate content pledge which resulted in the first multi-soap climate crossover, with stars from EastEnders, Coronation Street, and Emmerdale (each of which attracts 4-5 million viewers per episode) making climate cameos in each other’s shows.

There’s an endless source of real-world heroes waiting to be fictionalized on screen. In Unstable, Rob Lowe plays a biotech guru working to fix the planet, Partner Track gives us a lawyer and entrepreneur crusading to protect a climate tech company, and in Ted Lasso a soccer star protests his team’s fossil fuel sponsorship.

But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean we’re going to see a rush of unbearably flawless ‘saints’. As the team at Good Energy point out, “earnestness can be a buzzkill” and the most compelling characters are usually flawed, contradictory and even hypocritical – just ask anyone who’s watched Succession.

Authentic portrayals of diverse cultures and identities are also crucial – especially Indigenous stories, which too often are overlooked. After all, as Leigh Medeiros, co-director of a ‘pitchfest’ for climate screenwriters, points out: “climate issues are intrinsically tied to issues of race, class, health, and gender”. Tory Stephens, who leads a climate fiction project at Grist, says: “I know for me, I like characters that remind me of the people in my life that I hang out with… and who really wear their identity on their sleeves.”

A golden age, only green

At first, “I felt really lonely,” says Juliette Vigoureux. “I don’t anymore.” At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, Vigoureux helped launch the Cut collective, which calls on the film and TV industries to get behind the ecological transition. Now its manifesto has been signed by over 700 celebrities including Natalie Portman, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Vincent Cassel.

Change is in the air.

The convenient truth is that, with climate-related films proving popular with audiences and lucrative (analysis of movies released in the last decade shows that those mentioning climate change actually earned 8% more than those that didn’t) production companies are finally ready to greenlight more.

In the words of Olmedo Quiroga: “We’ve reached the cultural tipping point.”

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