Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions

Edited by Emily Coren

I’m developing a book with Springer as a springboard for a dozen or so teams in the informal education space who are all working to develop climate communication work in a variety of areas.

Description of work and its purpose:

The climate is changing faster than our cultural practices are adapting to it. Entertainment-education has been proven over decades to be an effective tool for education and behavior 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 social learning for effective 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 of creation climate storytelling efficiently by sharing and amplifying what is working well, and building collaborations between practitioners and researchers.

Agency as a story structure refers to characters modeling iterative goal setting. Social psychology teaches that iterative goal setting, or making short and long term goals and periodically reevaluating your success, increases our sense of efficacy. There are lots of variations of how this can be represented within narratives, but as a society we need to make a lot of changes really fast. Culturally normalizing iterative goal setting as a community skill will significantly help us meet those targets. Climate resilience is complex in that we’re not looking at a single behavioral intervention to solve it. By emphasizing agency, we can teach people how to solve complex local challenges and to support each other in the process.

Storytelling spans media types, including but not limited to fiction writing, screenwriting, illustration and music. Creating Communities of Practice for will support a wide range of storytellers creating an interwoven web of stories building a culture of agency. Organizing and supporting this community will improve climate storytelling to accelerate community resilience globally. Generating and coordinating these stories across formats so that the messages people receive is consistent helps meet the criteria of a “clear simple message told frequently by a variety of trusted sources.” Connecting these stories at multiple governance levels (global, country, state, city) across multiple target audiences, and across multiple story types (fiction, non-fiction/news, formal/informal education) requires an unprecedented level of coordination and partnership. The severe and urgent nature of the public health consequences resulting from climate change justifies a dynamic update to science engagement. This is a space for sharing successes, building partnerships and suggesting next steps so that we move ahead as a team.

Iterative goal setting story structures will improve our cultural capacity for solving complex social and environmental problems efficiently. This book proposes that storytelling with agency as a story structure is a vehicle for teaching collaboration and resilience strategies with the potential to reduce the harm from extreme weather disasters caused by climate change while also better preparing communities to respond to them when they do occur.

There are enormous, undeveloped areas here for expanding content creation. There are nearly an infinite number of possible stories capable of pertaining to a myriad of target audiences while teaching a variety of resilience strategies and some underlying techniques that ground them.

For the format of the book, we’re making an edited volume with three sections, each with three to four chapters of up to five authors each. The book will include academic best practices of what these stories should include and how to connect them as a network. It will include case studies and examples of programming and the research in process or completed on them. The main points that it will emphasize are agency as a story structure and coordination-building across existing groups and projects. This book is a tool for improving collaboration for our interdisciplinary community including climate education, public health communication, research and media teams. It is also a reporting space for sharing where these discussions are currently as this work evolves.