The climate films shaping society

We need a subtler, more varied portrayal of climate change in film than just climate disaster blockbusters, says Becca Warner

In a fictional hospital in Seattle, surgeons are sweating through their scrub caps as a heatwave descends on the city. With a sudden whoosh and a clank, the building's overworked air conditioning system comes to a halt. Within minutes, the stifling temperature makes it unsafe to operate, and surgeons are forced to rush to finish their procedures.

The Grey's Anatomy doctors are navigating the same relationships and patients that have kept them on our screens for some 400 episodes of the show. But in this episode, for the first time, the backdrop to the drama is the very real issue of climate change. The air conditioning system, Dr Richard Webber says, "wasn't designed to be pushed that hard". Dr Addison Montgomery replies: "the Earth wasn't designed to push this hard".

It's a relatively rare example of the many kinds of climate-related storylines that are typically missing from fictional TV and film worlds. Social scientists and non-profits argue that climate is a topic that belongs in many kinds of on-screen stories, not just the occasional climate-disaster thriller. But can seeing the realities of climate change affecting characters on the big and small screen really help us to relate differently to the unfolding climate crisis – to cope better, or even change our behaviour?

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Non-profit storytelling consultancy Good Energy believes it can. It is among a small but growing number of organisations calling for far more TV and film scripts to feature climate-related storylines, characters and reference points.

In April 2022, it released its Good Energy Playbook, a set of guidelines for embedding climate change into any on-screen story. It joins other initiatives in drawing attention to the need for film and TV to reflect the myriad ways climate change leaves its mark on our everyday lives, including Planet Placement, a set of tips for the TV and film industry from Bafta’s Albert, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC)'s Rewrite the Future.

The Good Energy Playbook's suggestions are appropriately wide-ranging: characters with climate anxiety and those fighting against injustice; utopian narratives that explore climate solutions; storylines that quietly weave climate references into their characters' worlds. Examples span from showing solar panels on houses in the background of a shot to main characters taking on the fossil fuel industry.

Good Energy argues that the stories on our screens should hold a mirror up to our real, climate-changed lives. This includes imagining what could go wrong, as many dystopian blockbusters already have, but also what could go right. It also emphasises the importance of thorough research and avoiding tired environmental tropes; of recognising intersectionality and including marginalised voices.

The playbook was created by Good Energy founder Anna Jane Joyner, whose background in climate communications led her to question why climate was barely appearing in fictional TV and film worlds. "It started very much as a personal campaign, where I just got on the phone with as many screenwriters as I could," she says.

She quickly learned that writers increasingly wanted to talk about climate, she says, and were more and more worried about it in their personal lives, but "didn't really have the support and toolset to be able to do it".

Storytellers might be ready to bring climate into the writers' room, but is it the job of fictional TV shows and films to deliver climate realities to our sofas and cinema seats? More to the point, what good will it do?

Climate stories do, of course, already exist. A wave of dramatic, often icy, nearly always apocalyptic movies has graced cinema screens since The Day After Tomorrow's box office success in 2004. A handful of research studies looked at the impact this film had on viewers, and found that it prompted greater concern about climate change. It also shifted people's understanding of it and made them more likely to say they would take action to reduce their emissions or donate to a climate-related charity. (Listen to this podcast from our colleagues on The Climate Question about how science fiction is affecting climate action.)

These different impacts – on how people think, feel and behave – appear to go hand-in-hand. A 2019 study of climate change in mass media more broadly found that attitudes, understanding and behaviour interlink. The authors called on governments to consider media an important tool in making progress on important climate pledges.

Science also tells us that stories have a power that hard facts often don't. Research has long established that the human brain finds it easier to understand and remember information delivered as a narrative, and has even found that stories can influence behaviour. In one study, when research participants read about the environment in the form of a story, they were almost twice as likely to sign up to Greenpeace or recycle their paper than participants who were given the same information as a series of facts.

Climate stories, then, seem like a pretty good idea. But these sorts of narratives have been few and far between. Julie Doyle, professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton in the UK, says climate change has struggled for years get into any form of fictional film or TV representation. "There's been a silence around it," she says.

In fact, according to Good Energy's commissioned research, just 0.6% of scripted TV and film released in the US between 2016 and 2020 mentioned the term "climate change". The word "dog", meanwhile, was mentioned almost 13 times as frequently as all 36 climate keywords combined. And "beer” was uttered 19 times more than "climate change".

It's time to break the climate silence, says Doyle. "Mainstream media has tended to follow rather than lead, and it would be great if mainstream media could lead this."

Being such an integral part of our everyday lives, media can prompt discussions and debates about how we best address climate change, she says. "There's still a real lack around that and that seems like a loss but a great opportunity."

Day-to-day mentions of climate change in media are especially important because, while blockbuster climate films can have a positive impact on awareness and action, the effect is woefully short-lived. People can feel inspired to take action in the moment, but the feeling fades in a matter of weeks.

Michael Svoboda, assistant professor of writing at George Washington University, has analysed over 85 climate-related films. "I'm totally in favour of at least making a nod to climate change in every film," he says. "When it's happening repeatedly, that could change the conversation."

We don't just need more climate stories but, as the Good Energy Playbook outlines, different ones. The nightmarish post-apocalyptic worlds painted by the likes of Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road rely on just one tool in climate storytellers' armoury: fear. And research shows that it may be a blunt one.

When study participants were shown fear-inducing images of climate change, like a dried-up lake or children suffering famine, they were left feeling the importance of the issue but also powerless to stop it. In contrast, images showing what people can do personally, like a cyclist and a house with solar panels, gave them the strongest sense of their own ability to make change. Too much fear can rob people of agency – the very thing the collective fight against climate change depends on. (You may also like: The harm from worrying about climate change).

Might hope be the antidote? Research suggests that it could. A US survey looking at how people's attitude to climate change impacts their likelihood to take political action on climate found that those most likely to engage in climate-related actions and feel like they can make a difference were people who felt "constructive hope". This is the belief that humans can be the solution to climate change, rather than having faith in a higher power. 

These findings point to the need for stories that show human-powered possibilities. Svoboda describes Black Panther's visionary landscape of Wakanda: an anti-colonial society powered by clean energy. "Black Panther was an interesting movie in that it envisions a sustainable world," he says. "If you're falling back into the old genre boxes, you're not getting the job done."

Even comedy has its place. When environmental communications try to make people laugh, they attract more attention to environmental issues and improve understanding of them.

The climate crisis might not seem like a laughing matter, but Nicole Seymour, associate professor of English at California State University, says it can be. "We still underestimate the value of comic relief and catharsis," she says. In fact, irony in fiction can help us navigate the absurdity of the real world, and our frustration at it. "There's something incredibly absurd about, for example, Donald Trump denying climate change when it's so palpable. So there's this way in which absurdity or absurdism seems like the tactic to reach for to kind of capture this moment."

She points to comedian Sarah Cooper's brightly coloured Netflix special, in which Cooper plays the part of a TV host on fictional breakfast show Everything's Fine. With a fixed smile and cheerful delivery, the show's weather anchor, played by Maya Rudolph, explains that the week ahead will see temperatures "most likely not survivable, so wear a jacket".

"You can laugh about it," Seymour says, "but then also feel like, 'Okay, so someone else recognises that the world's gone mad'". It's an experience that can make people feel less alone, she adds. The response of climate scientists to the satirical disaster movie Don't Look Up speaks to this, with some describing their relief at feeling seen. "If a climate scientist can […] go to work the next day and feel a little better, I feel like there's a lot of value in that," says Seymour.

Comedy also undercuts the kind of eco-moralising that can turn people off environmental messages. "A lot of the texts and works I'm looking at, they're making fun of themselves. It's a lot harder to dismiss them, because they're sort of like, 'No, I get it. I'm in on the joke, so we're all part of this,'" says Seymour. "It's a more collaborative feeling rather than someone coming at you, wagging their finger at you."

Indeed, when communicating about climate, what isn't said could be just as powerful as what is. Julia Leyda, a professor in film studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, focuses her research on climate depictions that are understated, even unconscious. In The Walking Dead, for example, characters are visibly and constantly sweating, with no relief from the Sun's relentless heat. The series therefore invites us to experience a hotter, post-air-conditioning future.

"It's not just science, it's not just numbers – it's our bodies, it's our clothes, it's our daily life," says Leyda. "Media prepares us to feel something we're going to feel soon. Watching representations of this stuff in fiction on the screen kind of helps us rehearse for it." These subtle references can be meaningful even when climate isn't directly mentioned.

Doyle says the Good Energy guidelines could reach even further. Her work has highlighted the importance of collaborative participation – "actually involving an audience in some way of participating". This could mean multiple story endings that an audience could choose from, or other creative ways for a viewer to engage directly with what's unfolding on screen. The possibilities, she says, "could be quite radical".

To truly understand how climate stories can best be told, we need more examples to experience and to study, including some that are less dramatic than we are used to. Certainly, sweaty bodies are less striking than collapsing glaciers. This shouldn't stop us creating and seeking out stories that offer greater psychological richness, and versions of reality that are more relatable, or more ambitious.

There is no single emotional lever to be pulled, but rather an artist's palette of optimism and unease, joy and jeopardy. This kind of depth and variety has the potential to mark a new chapter in the bigger story of our relationship to climate change.

Becca Warner is an environmental writer based in London, UK. Follow her on Twitter @beccawarner. She briefly worked on Bafta Albert's Planet Placement on a freelance basis several years ago.

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