How to Improve your Climate Storytelling

by Emily Coren

The climate is changing faster than our cultural practices are adapting to it. Now, a new book, called Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions, showcases a variety of research-based paths forward, with examples including academic, journalistic, and popular media projects, across genres, media platforms, and communication modalities.  The full free book is published Open Access and posted here by Springer. The chapters are also available individually from the same site. Climate Fiction Writers League member Denise Baden, a Professor of Sustainability at the University of Southampton, contributed a chapter, along with Jeremy Brown titled Climate Fiction to Inspire Green Actions: A Tale of Two Authors.  

This Open Access volume, co-edited by Emily Coren (a science communicator) and Hua Wang (a communication scientist), presents a survey of the latest in agency-focused climate storytelling. Together, practitioners and scholars across different fields shared their knowledge, experience, and insight about how stories can be designed to engage, enable, and empower individuals and communities in climate communication and action. It shares a wide range of narrative strategies and exemplary applications of climate storytelling in terms of professional practices (e.g., education, literature, journalism, popular media), genres and formats (e.g., drama, comedy, fiction), media platforms (e.g., television, radio, mobile), and communication modalities (e.g., text, visual, audio, multisensory). 

In the span of over 50 years, the idea of intentionally combining entertainment with education for health promotion and behavior change, known as entertainment education or edutainment, has evolved into a field of research and practice around the globe, making a significant impact at the individual, interpersonal, community, and societal levels. In its early years, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, practitioners mainly worked with government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and creative professionals in developing countries to create prosocial radio and television serial dramas. Given that context, entertainment education was defined as “the process of purposely designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate in order to increase audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior”. The focus was to find the “sweet spot” that helped balance the entertaining and the educational elements in the story so the audience members would relate to the plots, fall in love with the characters, and participate in solutions to empower the health and safety of their own communities. 

Entertainment education has been proven over decades to be an effective tool for social and behavioral change in the public health sphere and has not yet been applied at scale to the massive ongoing climate-related disasters that we need to solve now, fast. There is an urgent need to rapidly apply and adapt public engagement tools for climate communication to speed up our response times for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This book takes a snapshot of where climate storytelling is currently at, describes where it fits within a climate communication landscape, and supports the next steps of its development.  It facilitates the creation of climate storytelling efficiently by sharing and amplifying what is working well, and building collaborations between practitioners and researchers.

Whether you are using the research-based methodologies that are combined to create public health impact campaigns such as entertainment education or just crafting enjoyable stories with climate themes, the guiding principles outlined here can provide guideposts for narrative framings in climate stories. With decades of public health communication research in place, we feel confident that employing agency frames and highlighting existing solutions in the present day can empower fiction writers to encourage action. 

Our book is about using storytelling as a tool to improve climate change outcomes efficiently and how creatives in communities of practice, such as fiction writers can play a meaningful role in improving planetary health outcomes. So, what (academically speaking) makes a good climate story?

The most effective stories are set in the present and demonstrate personal and collective agency at climate solutions. It’s helpful if the climate solution examples are specific and do-able and combined with linked resources. I’ll define some terms and provide a story example based on my own lived experiences, here in California. 

There are three key concepts that I’d like to highlight are positive outliers, agency, and linked resources. First, when selecting character behaviors for inspiring climate actions focus on demographically representative Positive Outliers or Bright Spots where community members have found actionable behaviors to solve a community challenge are identified and amplified through storytelling. These examples are chosen to demonstrate The second concept of importance is agency, which was developed by social psychologist Albert Bandura (1982, 2006, 2018) as part of his social cognitive theory. It means 'knowing how to act in order to bring about an intended effect' and is a fundamental aspect of human functioning. Agency is exercised in three forms: individual agency applies to someone's personal sphere of control; proxy agency applies to situations where people try to influence others to act on their behalf; collective agency happens when people pool their knowledge and skills to act in concert. Agency is usually achieved by setting short-term and long-term goals and periodically reevaluating to reach those long-term goals. Linked Resources are what connect the narrative to activities that people can participate in their own lives in person. For example, suppose you are modeling characters getting vaccinated in your story. In that case, then providing a website that directs people to where they can get vaccinated in their own neighborhood is a type of linked resource. 

Okay, let’s get into some specific examples for California, where I live. 

• Dystopian:  It’s hot here in California, so I’m going to talk about heat waves, which are one of the many health impacts of climate change. Let’s say you have a story about people dying in heat waves in the future. It doesn’t help us prevent heat waves now and what we’re hoping for isn’t a bunch of dead people. So, let’s say that’s not a great climate story, if our intended outcome is people not dying. Which certainly is my goal at least. 

• Health impacts: We get the same outcome if we jump the same story to the present, and show a bunch of people dying in here waves in a present-day setting. Although this could demonstrate the current health impacts of heat waves, which probably should be some percent (I’d guess non-empirically at 10%-20% of the story touches that the public encounters). It doesn’t really help people to either know how to prevent future heat waves or how to respond to present-day heat waves.

• Individual Agency: Now, take an intro with people suffering in the heat (demonstrating health impacts) and build the story out so that a single protagonist seeks shelter in a city cooling center, learns how to install a heat pump, and then assists vulnerable (possibly elderly) neighbors to install heat pumps in a heat wave, then you have a good individual story.

• Collective Agency: Okay, now build on that same heat story but show many different characters working together in a variety of settings and roles to reduce urban heat islands by increasing green space and switching the city to renewable energy sources in addition to the heat pump bit. That’s a great visualization of collective actions being taken to mitigate and adapt to heat impacts.

• Collective Agency with Linked Resources: One last addition here. Take your collective action story with its specific and doable behaviors that people are demonstrating in your present-day city and add transmedia support such as social media linked to the characters in your story where audiences can participate in the actions that are modeled. 

We’ve now gone from bad to best. And, repetition is helpful in social learning, so the more stories we have reinforcing similar behaviors over more contemporary settings the larger impacts the stories have. So, work together and often. Ed Maibach, the Director of George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication reminds me that, “Clear, simple messages told often by a variety of trusted sources.” 

We know that everyone in this community already passionately cares about climate outcomes. We hope that this book is a useful resource for you in your work. We hope that science communication research can serve communities of practice, such as the Climate Fiction Writers League, in creating stories that improve the rate of climate change mitigation and adaptation, so that we can all enjoy a healthier, safer planet. 

If you have any questions, please write to us at: emilycoren@gmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you!

Read the essay collection here for free, and find out more about Emily Coren’s work.

Emily Coren is a science communicator and an affiliate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University where she has been working to adapt entertainment education strategies for health promotion and social change to create more effective climate communication.

She has a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is a certified professional Science Illustrator. She has worked in science communication for almost 20 years, contributing to collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, consulting on a World Health Organization clean air campaign, and developing educational content for children’s films.

In recent years, her work has led to new methods in developing frameworks at a national level, connecting community-led experiences to federal, local, and nonprofit sector programs for climate change communication. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the Society of Environmental Journalists.