Imagining a Writer’s Toolkit for Hopeful Climate Futures

from Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination

Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn are the editors of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, which was published by the MIT Press in December 2025. They both work at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University; Ed is the center’s founding director and Joey is the managing editor.

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It’s hard to craft a hopeful story about our climate future, and writers interested in the topic today could be forgiven for asking if the exercise is worth the candle. Humanity’s collective commitment to addressing the crisis has never been even close to enough to match the challenge, and 2025 was plagued by dithering and backsliding. As nation-states and major corporations back away from climate pledges, dodge commitments, or actively block efforts to decarbonize our global society, narratives of progress and concerted climate action feel, perhaps, less credible than ever. But exercising the power of hope remains necessary, and only grows more urgent as this pivotal decade rolls on. We need more stories that can help us chart pathways from today’s malaise to tomorrow’s zeal. We need fresh narratives that can keep climate issues salient for people who are concerned and committed. We need fiction that connects us to one another and deepens our understanding of this global catastrophe, which does not recognize national borders, shifting political winds, or the vicissitudes of zero-sum geopolitics. We need writing not only to alarm and elegize—though those are immeasurably valuable, and certainly timely—but also writing to galvanize.

For our recent book Climate Imagination, we worked with more than thirty contributors across seventeen countries, over the course of four years, to construct a collection of stories, essays, and artworks that imagine concrete, hopeful climate action shaping possible futures, starting with the local and the particular. These fictional and nonfictional visions of climate futures grow out of specific human and physical geographies across the globe, from the Himalayan foothills to the wind-swept cliffs of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, from Argentina’s monte grasslands to English gardens, a greenbelt cutting through Berlin, a Greek isle, and the valleys of central Mexico. We believe that hopeful climate futures are most resonant for readers, and most credible, when they are enmeshed with local climatic, environmental, and cultural complexities, rather than offering a generic futuristic “view from nowhere.” After all, though the climate crisis is globe-spanning, something we’re all living through together, its effects are multifarious: it creates different challenges, opportunities, and dangers in every place it touches.

Though neither of us are writers of climate fiction, we have had the good fortune to collaborate with talented writers from all over the world on this project. Based on our experiences editing the fiction (and future-looking nonfiction) for Climate Imagination, we’d like to share here the rudiments of a toolkit for creating hopeful visions of climate futures that catalyze new thinking, conversation, and action. The toolkit is presented here in four parts—each representing both a writerly habit of mind and an approach to storytelling that we believe can lead to stories of climate action and hope that are grounded, credible, and compelling. The four tools are each illustrated and expanded upon with one or two examples from Climate Imagination. We hope that these elements prove helpful to you in your own future-visioning and world-building, and that others will iterate on and expand this preliminary effort into more comprehensive and detailed forms.

1. Be intergenerational

The climate crisis is a multigenerational project: it was created, intensified, and mismanaged over the course of many generations. Fiction allows readers to experience the evolution of Earth’s complex systems from multiple perspectives, building a more holistic understanding of the past, the present, and the future. Creating situations in which different generations directly and indirectly communicate about the climate crisis and grapple with its consequences can be a powerful way to build solidarity and encourage readers to imagine all of the ancestors and descendants linked to us through the narrow loom of the present.

Intergenerational thinking can help us understand all kinds of change—the bad and the good. Climate action will also be the work of generations: our descendants will be living with the effects of global warming, ocean acidification, destabilized glaciers, devastated forests, and more for a long period. Having unleashed these energies, our planet and its ecosystems are forever altered; we can repair and restore, but we will also be adapting and changing in the wake of the climate crisis for untold years. Sharing a longer time horizon through individual characters is a powerful way to show the stakes and the benefits of that long-haul restorative work.

Many of the stories and essays in Climate Imagination, and in many of our other favorite works of climate fiction, embrace and explore this intergenerational quality by focusing on interactions and relationships among people from different generational cohorts.

“Cosmic Fire,” a sprawling novelette written by Libia Brenda, Andrea Chapela, Gabriela Damián Miravete, Martha Riva Palacio Obón, Iliana Vargas, and Alejandra Espino del Castillo (translated by Emma Törzs), begins with the eruption of Iztaccíhuatl, a currently dormant volcano in central Mexico. The eruption parallels the destructive effects of the climate crisis (albeit in a brutally condensed timeframe): it poisons the air and waters, kills crops, and touches off waves of migration away from the volcano, which is about 95 kilometers southeast of Mexico City. The story is structured as a set of interlinked vignettes, delivered via transcripts recorded into different types of media, ranging from paper to magnetic tape to digital audio to, eventually, some kind of futuristic storage crystal. These stories reveal the journey of generations of women scientists and explorers who rebuild their communities, devise new modes of ecologically minded living, recover knowledge lost during the eruption and subsequent exodus, and over almost two hundred years, work their way back to the site of the eruption, where a new kind of settlement is established.

Gu Shi’s novelette “City of Choice,” translated by Ken Liu, is inspired by the legendary deeds of Da Yu, founder of the Xia Dynasty, and unfolds in Ze City, a hyper-futuristic Chinese metropolis that is subject to intense flooding. Tushan Jiao, an urban planner involved in the creation of an AI system meant to guide residents to safety during disasters, rescues two children from a flood during a test of the system. She ends up adopting the rescued girls, whose parents have perished during the flood, and raises them along with her own biological daughter. Throughout its twists and turns, “City of Choice” emphasizes issues of parenting, intergenerational connection and conflict, and inheritance: Tushan Jiao inherits the master key to the AI system from her partner and boss when he retires; the acculturation and training of the AI, and how it is taught to prioritize and value certain people and factors more than others, is a key plot arc; Jiao’s daughters each react very differently to a world changing environmentally and technologically, leading to tensions; and Jiao is strangely reluctant to leave her home in Ze City, even as the flooding becomes distressingly frequent—it is, after all, the place she gave birth to a daughter, discovered two more, and helped to create the AI, whose servers remain sited in a building that could easily be wiped out by flooding.

Telling intergenerational stories about climate chaos and human responses serves to emphasize solidarity among people whose experiences of climate stress may vary widely, and to probe challenging issues of responsibility, culpability, and duty. It also foregrounds the way that environmental knowledge should be shared across generations, rooting climate action in a deep appreciation for the contours of a specific place. The climate crisis is a narratively challenging subject partially because of its temporality: it can be slow moving, gradual, accumulative, but then hit tipping points and germinate emergencies and fast-moving disasters. Being intergenerational in our storytelling allows us to embrace a longer view and more precisely visualize the long-term effects of climate change on people who live and work together in a specific place with its own unique characteristics and histories.

2. Be cartographic

Working on Climate Imagination confirmed our longstanding suspicion that stories about climate futures are particularly powerful when they are situated locally and foreground geographic and cultural details. One tendency in rhetoric around the climate crisis and climate action, including many dystopian visions of planetary collapse and techno-solutionist visions of planetary engineering, is to render the Earth as a kind of flat, undifferentiated plane, rather than an inestimably complex and variegated space. The pieces that make up Climate Imagination, in contrast, revel in the hyperlocal and the particular. This makes for more nuanced storytelling that also more accurately maps onto the reality of designing strategies for climate action that meet needs and suit values on the ground, where the actual activity must take place and be locally supported. Effective stories about climate futures can only work in place, resonating with prior local history and cultural knowledge, and articulating a vision of tomorrow that is inspiring for the communities who will have to believe in that vision in order to realize it.

Stylistically, this means assiduous attention to the geography of a space, including unique locations and physical details and how they relate to one another spatially and symbolically. It means allusions to the local economy and institutions, as well as more prosaic details like weather and wildlife. It also means embracing cultural specificity, which might mean folding in details of local dialect and slang, cuisine, or dress, as well as specific values and ideas that are salient for community members. In Hannah Onoguwe’s novelette “Death Is Not an Ornament,” the plot moves the characters back and forth through time, both across decades and within the space of one climactic night, as well as across Nigeria’s South-South, which encompasses much of the Niger Delta. Onoguwe’s characters shift fluidly between English and Nigerian Pidgin, a creole language widely spoken in the region. The author includes references to regional clothing and food, to political figures like the Ogoni leader and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, as well as to local norms of beauty and attractiveness and to particular elements within religious communities. The story’s power relations are complex and locally rooted, including tribal leaders, national political figures educated outside of the country, an inclusive mass youth movement, environmental scientists, transnational organizations and international NGOs, charismatic and conservative Christian leaders, and even mystical beings from local folklore.

In terms of physical geography, Onoguwe opens the story with a specific geographical reference that many readers will need to look up: to the Brass River, a branch of a river that originates from the Niger River. Her narration of the climactic confrontation begins by locating a wealthy man’s house in Kwale, a town of just twenty thousand people in Nigeria’s Delta State, small by global standards but regionally important because of the oil and gas production and distribution facilities sited there. One smaller but still significant plot point turns on one character misidentifying which southern Nigerian province another character is originally from. These details combine to create a culturally distinct and resonant vision of the future in place.

3. Be ecological

We often talk about climate change in quantitative terms, with the emblematic figures being the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, expressed in parts per million, and the global average surface temperature increase from “pre-industrial” levels, which uses a baseline temperature drawn from readings between 1850 and 1900 and is expressed in degrees Celsius. These are reductive metrics, and that’s by design: carbon parts per million and average surface temperature increase provide clear, unambiguous, symbolically potent goals that allow for transnational tracking, negotiation, and consistent public communication. But when we’re writing climate fiction, we do well to steer away from what some scholars and critics call “carbon reductionism” and toward an ecological mindset, dramatizing how global warming and rising CO₂ levels are entangled with a wide variety of issues at the interface between environmental systems and human activity: species conservation, food security, water quality, extreme weather events, and much more.

We’re using the word “ecological” in part because this approach can also entail framing human life as endlessly caught up in networks of exchange and interaction with nonhuman life forms and entities, from bacteria and fungi to birds and beasts, from rivers and lakes to rocks and wind currents. Expanding movements like legal efforts to establish “rights of nature,” recent writing and advocacy around Indigenous ways of knowing and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and academic projects like multispecies studies and the more-than-human world all testify to how people are looking at humans not as masters of the Earth, separate from nature, but rather a part of complex systems prone to unexpected emergent behaviors, cascades of causality, and sudden reorientations. A number of stories and essays in Climate Imagination reflect this tendency, particularly Azucena Castro’s “Learning to Dwell in Multispecies Futures,” Claire Armitstead’s “The Robin, the Wolves, and the Library,” and Anna Pigott’s “Flights of Fancy,” along with Libia Brenda’s short story “Robots & Insects & Languages & Other Living Things,” which imagines networked intelligences composed of microorganisms, synthetic digital beings, plants, fungi, and other beings working together to circumvent humans entirely and address Earth’s climate crisis on their own terms.

We learned about this approach largely from our collaborator and Climate Imagination contributor Vandana Singh, who captures many of these currents in her kaleidoscopic, multi-perspectival novelette for our book, titled “Three-World Cantata.” She also expounds on a more broad-ranging, holistic approach to educating people about the climate crisis in her excellent monograph Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice, the writing of which overlapped with her work on our project. In “Three-World Cantata,” Singh makes the notion of imagining climate futures central to her story: a group of climate scientists and activists develop a technology for people to experience and inhabit possible futures, via a blend of real-world and simulated experiences. In modeling scenarios for change, they identify Manny, the CEO of an emerging tech giant, as a crucial figure in the direction that global climate action might take. Convincing him that their technology is a futures-forecasting tool for elite corporate leaders—and that it’s entirely virtual—they immerse him in two very different visions of our possible climate future. In actuality, some of the content is indeed virtual, but some involves transporting Manny physically to different communities and landscapes disrupted by climate chaos, and in exposing him to a variety of fabulistic and folkloric stories, often performed out loud in the style of an oral tradition. These experiences are grounded in ecology, from the mud that gets under Manny’s fingernails in a mangrove swamp to the otherworldly encounter between a human and an elephant in a remote jungle. Singh’s work reminds us that the Earth and its nonhuman living things have many stories to tell us.

A key element of “Three-World Cantata” is the juxtaposition between two major narrative poles of the immersive experience, which Singh’s characters call “World One” and “World Two.” In World One, humans have indeed responded vigorously to the climate crisis, but in a way that focuses myopically on the big-picture metrics we described above: average global surface temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide. What’s more, a response led by transnational organizations and global elites has led to high-tech geoengineering schemes to sequester carbon and the establishment of vast “sacrifice zones” in the Global South. In short, in this future we divide the world into high-tech, picturesque eco-zones for the world’s affluent, and devastated post-industrial landscapes marred by pollution and environmental externalities for the rest. In World Two, a network of many thousands of coordinated grassroots efforts at environmental stewardship, low-tech carbon sequestration, and a scaling back and reorientation of the global economy creates a world that is far from perfect, but that rejects carbon reductionism and tethers climate action to broader goals of protecting ecosystems and securing justice for all the world’s people. What’s more, in World Two the leaders are not CEOs and technocrats, but rather people with direct connections to the land and their local ecosystems, who build on and mobilize long-held traditional knowledge to address climate chaos, rather than discarding those stores of knowledge and emphasizing green-tech innovations that create their own knock-on problems.

4. Be communitarian

The history and affordances of both novels and short fiction incline us toward the personal and the individualistic: depth psychology, complex emotions, troubled intimate relationships, philosophical reflections about emotions and states of being. Much of mainstream environmental rhetoric also misleadingly stresses the individual as the locus of meaningful change; think of the “carbon footprint” and similar constructs that obscure the vast economic and industrial structures responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions and other forms of pollution. These individualistic framings encourage emotions of guilt and shame, rather than solidarity and mobilization.

Climate fiction needn’t pontificate about structural versus individual registers of change and culpability, but authors do have the opportunity to imagine and articulate alternate modes of thinking about how climate action can work socially, economically, and culturally. Effective works of fiction, regardless of genre, often draw out internal conflicts and complications within communities and social groups, rather than treating communities as unitary monoliths. Works of climate fiction can use this hermeneutic of intra-group complexity to dramatize the challenges of designing and implementing communal forms of climate action, providing alternatives to “carbon footprint” imaginaries and demonstrating the importance of collective action and broader structural transformations.

In addition to “Three-World Cantata,” which we discussed above, Vandana Singh also wrote a shorter fiction piece, “Mina’s Dream,” for Climate Imagination. The story unfolds in an upscale suburb of New Delhi, and begins with the protagonist, Mina, having a chance encounter with a young unhoused laborer. She hires him as a gardener and gives him a place to live. As her garden grows and produces a bounty of edible plants, it becomes a hub for transforming her quiet, conservative community. The neighborhood gives rise to a social movement that begins thinking, in increasingly radical ways about how to decrease the consumption of resources and move toward economies and communities based on sharing and environmental stewardship. This all sounds idyllic and it largely is, but the story’s advances take place against the backdrop of simmering internal tensions in Mina’s neighborhood. When Mina first meets her gardener, a neighbor advises her to call the police on him; the neighborhood ends up restricting the use of personal cars, but the process takes eight months of “discussing, arguing, and persuading”; Mina’s neighbors are flummoxed when she breaks norms of class and status by giving her gardener and his children free access to her home; in perhaps the most dramatic incident in this generally low-key tale, a neighboring family calls the police on a peaceful gathering of activists at Mina’s home, saying later that they felt “it was their duty as patriotic citizens,” and decides to move away after a fractious neighborhood meeting about the incident.

“Mina’s Dream” uses the neighborhood as a laboratory for social transformation and the flowering of environmental and political consciousness. Seemingly radical ideas like communal property ownership, flouting norms of class and caste, sheltering dissident activists, and sharing food and other necessities in mutualistic economies of exchange all grow from the mundanities of daily life, the shared value of neighborly generosity, and the comfortable intimacies of people who have lived alongside one another for many years. But Singh does not downplay differences of opinion, the persistence of personal and political conflicts, and the outside forces that catalyze and constrain the action of the neighbors—whether those be media organizations supporting or opposing the neighborhood’s innovations, overzealous and oppressive law enforcement, long-held ethnic and class enmities, or the usual suburban peccadilloes of sanctimony, jealousy, and competitiveness. Singh deftly keeps things concrete and immediate without lapsing into atomistic individualism; it’s clear throughout “Mina’s Dream” that the potential of this neighborhood isn’t inward-facing but rather as an exemplar: its impact is ultimately proved by its ability to inspire other communities to adopt similar initiatives, to provide an achievable model for others to adapt to their own circumstances across all of India.

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We hope that this toolkit provides some useful starting points and ideas for contemplation in your own climate storytelling practice. We also trust that you’ll take it as an invitation to build and share your own toolkit, reflecting on the stories that ignite hope and resolve for you, your readers, and your communities.

Find out more about the collection Climate Imagination and explore other climate futures resources from the Center for Science and the Imagination:

• Everything Change, a series of three anthologies of climate fiction drawn from a set of global climate fiction writing contests: Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III.

• Two books exploring futures shaped by shifts from fossil-fuel energy sources to solar and other renewables: The Weight of Light and Cities of Light.

• A roundtable conversation in Literary Hub with four authors from Climate Imagination.

• A set of lesson plans connected to stories from Climate Imagination, created by Nicole Oster, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation.

• Two TED Talks connected to CSI’s climate futures work, delivered by contributors to Climate Imagination: “A sci-fi story of Earth’s renewal,” by Vandana Singh and “Remembering climate change…a message from the year 2071,” by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He has coedited a number of collections of fiction and nonfiction, including Cities of Light, created in collaboration with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory; A Year Without a Winter, named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times; and Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, supported by a grant from NASA. From 2016 through 2022, he ran Arizona State University’s Everything Change global climate fiction contests with colleagues at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the GAME School and senior global futures scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. He serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2018) and the coeditor of a number of books, including Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014).