Keywords

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international environmental NGO founded in 1970 by lawyers and law students alarmed by ecological destruction. They sought to hold polluters and government agencies accountable and created the first public interest law firm to protect the environment. The organization gradually expanded its toolset beyond the law, first developing scientific and policy capacities and then communication capacities intended to broaden and diversify the environmental movement, lead people from awareness to action, and build political power.

Today, NRDC’s top priority is to solve the climate crisis.

Rewrite the Future is a program within NRDC’s Communications Department that works with Hollywood professionals to support storytelling about the climate crisis in entertainment film and TV. Its goal is to help shift attitudes and behaviors around the crisis with stories that reflect our climate reality, enable audiences to feel the urgency of the challenge, confront their fear and grief about it, and imagine better futures that inspire hope and action.

The seed of Rewrite the Future was planted in the mid-2000s by the actor, filmmaker, and environmentalist, Robert Redford, a longtime NRDC trustee. At a meeting of the board he hosted at Sundance, Mr. Redford encouraged NRDC to develop the capacity for visual storytelling. In response, NRDC established a documentary unit to make films about the environment. These efforts resulted in documentaries, such as Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification (Bayer & Hinerfeld, 2009), Stories from the Gulf: Living with Oil Disaster (Hinerfeld, 2011), Wild Things (O’Brien & Hinerfeld, 2014), Sonic Sea (Dougherty & Hinerfeld, 2016), and Our Ocean Planet (Hinerfeld, 2018). They were well-received and recognized with numerous accolades.

Sonic Sea, for example, won two Emmy Awards (Outstanding Nature Documentary and Outstanding Music and Sound) and helped raise awareness about little-known but critically important issues, such as ocean noise pollution (Meulmester, 2017). The NRDC films aired on national television showed up in screenings for policymakers and opinion leaders and proved useful for inspiring targeted policy initiatives, such as ship quieting rules (Bahtiarian, 2019) and congressional action on ocean acidification (Congressional Record, 2009).

However, NRDC recognized that the medium of documentary film, with its relatively small and self-selected audience (Borum Chattoo, 2016), could only go so far in driving change on an issue as fundamental as climate, where the science is well-established but progress has been slow, in part, because public opinion has been fractured by a fossil fuel industry led disinformation campaign (Tabuchi & Friedman, 2021).

According to research such as Yale Climate Change Communication’s “Six Americas” study (Leiserowitz et al., 2021), awareness about the urgency of the crisis, its causes and solutions, and the cost and time to fix it vary among Americans, falling short of the political will needed to push through large scale decarbonization. For instance, recent surveys found that over 70% of Americans believe climate change is happening (Leiserowtiz et al., 2018) and 62% say it is impacting their local community (Funk & Kennedy, 2019). However, only 19% think we can solve it (De Pinto et al., 2019). Experts call this disparity the “hope gap”—a recipe for disengagement or fatalism (Upton, 2015). Simply put, people will not work toward a goal they do not think is achievable or cannot envision. To bridge the hope gap, we need stories that show us that a better future is possible and what it might look like.

We find in our audience research that even the alarmed [those most concerned about climate change] don’t really know what they can do individually, or what we can do collectively. We call this loosely ‘the hope gap,’ and it’s a serious problem. Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism. – Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

The state of public opinion about climate is especially problematic because the societal transformation required to address the challenge is of unprecedented scale and complexity; the time left to achieve that transformation is short (IPCC, 2018, 2021); and the consequences of failure are catastrophic.

Fifty years of entertainment-education research have established the efficacy of public health and social welfare messages in entertainment stories (Frank & Falzone, 2021; Singhal et al., 2004; Singhal & Rogers, 1999; Wang & Singhal, 2021). Based on this body of evidence, we theorized that public attitudes toward the climate crisis might have the potential to shift through the same means and that compelling climate-savvy entertainment may be the fastest way to bring about the cultural change we need.

Theory of Change: Good Stories Can Change Hearts, Minds, and Behavior

For many decades, popular entertainment has played an important role in cultural change. Scripted TV shows and films have helped transform the public discourse and opinions about social issues, such as racism, women in the workplace, immigration, and LGBTQ communities, and have changed behavior around public health issues, such as drunk driving (e.g., Koh & Yatsko, 2017).

How stories achieve this influence is explained by various theories involving the psychological effects of storytelling (Brown, 2015; Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Sood et al., 2017; Wang & Singhal, 2021). The theory of narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000; Green, 2021) posits that when we’re caught up in a good story we’re put into an open and receptive state in which we emotionally identify with and root for characters even though they might be different than we are. We also effortlessly absorb and retain large amounts of information.

The parasocial contact hypothesis (Schiappa et al., 2005) states that exposure to TV and film characters over time builds social affinity similar to how we feel about our friends. We begin to see the world as they do. This can open our minds to new ways of thinking, normalize the unfamiliar, and reduce social group bias and anxiety about change.

Studies of the long-running hit Will & Grace, one of the first TV sitcoms with gay lead characters, found large reductions in viewer bias against LGBTQ communities (Schiappa et al., 2006). Medical shows like ER and Grey’s Anatomy that convey health information embedded in emotionally engaging stories have effectively changed behavior (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004). Primetime television programs such as Law & Order have effectively educated viewers about exposure to toxic substances and clarified environmental health policy (Kennedy et al., 2011).

These and other entertainment programs have helped people articulate, process, and understand their (sometimes conflicting) feelings about social developments that challenge the status quo. The more entertaining a story is (i.e., the more thoroughly a viewer is “transported” and identifies with fictional characters), the more potential that story has to bring about social change. These programs have reached large audiences, become societal shorthand, and shifted prevailing attitudes. Legislative and policy wins followed, and the world changed.

Where Is Hollywood on Climate?

In some ways, the climate crisis seems ready-made for film and TV. It is an urgent, high-stakes crisis, rife with human conflict. Heroes and villains abound, and there are trillions of dollars to be made or lost. It is a deeply emotional drama about human survival. And yet storytellers—in Hollywood and beyond—remain curiously quiet about it. There are so few stories involving climate change (or that even mention climate change) in mainstream entertainment that a viewer could watch popular film and TV content for weeks and have no idea that humanity has little more than a decade to avert catastrophe (Buckely, 2019; Dembicki, 2019; Lawson, 2019; Littleton, 2019).

When Hollywood has taken on climate change, it has tended to do so through a narrow lens—mainly in the genres of disaster (e.g., The Day After Tomorrow, Deepwater Horizon), post-apocalypse, and dystopia (e.g., Mad Max, Blade Runner), or the “Planet B” genre (e.g., Interstellar, Midnight Sky), in which the only hope for humanity is to escape to another world. Nearly absent are stories that reflect today’s climate realities, depict characters dealing with the complex emotions and choices that millions of people already struggle with, or allow for the possibility of positive human agency, solutions, and hope.

The Rewrite the Future design phase included months of research, including conversations with writers, directors, producers, executives, and agents, with organizations that support or influence storytellers, and with the Hollywood guilds. That work uncovered an odd dichotomy: a widespread desire among creative professionals to tell climate stories and a culture of resistance to telling such stories based on the perception that many impediments stood in the way. Therefore, an early goal of Rewrite the Future was to identify and analyze those impediments, whether illusory or real, and develop ways to support creative professionals in surmounting them.

Psychological, Creative, and Business Impediments

There is a perception in Hollywood that it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell entertaining stories about climate. Broad awareness of climate change only dates back about 30 years, and for most of that period, the phenomenon has seemed remote and abstract. Many people still have a hard time connecting what they see as impacts on glaciers and polar bears or distant disasters with their daily lives. Yet even as climate awareness has grown with rapidly mounting threats from extreme weather, clear degradation of the natural world, and more robust news reporting, there remains among storytellers an assumption that the issue is primarily scientific, impersonal, and dry—antithetical to entertainment.

Good stories are about people, not issues, and many creative professionals have difficulty making the leap from “climate change” writ large to the personal conflicts and transformations that are the grist for drama and comedy. There is, as well, a reflexive association between climate change and disaster/apocalypse, as suggested above.

Another challenge comes from the unconscious climate denial of creative professionals themselves. Writers are people too, and very few people enjoy thinking in detail about existential threats to themselves and their families. Telling a compelling story about climate change requires overcoming the tendency to look away.

Part of Rewrite the Future’s job is to inspire writers by reminding them of their unique power to contribute to climate solutions through storytelling. That power is a privilege and can be a salvation. As Greta Thunberg (2018) says, “Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”

For writers, the very act of working through this psychological bottleneck may inspire ideas for character development and plot.

A primary goal of Rewrite the Future is to expand the notion of what climate storytelling can be. This includes highlighting possible angles for compelling climate stories—beyond disaster and apocalypse—that involve characters’ everyday lives, livelihoods, hopes, and fears. The provocation for writers is to consider what our present climate reality actually is and how it plays out on a personal level.

Climate change already affects most of us whether or not our house has burned down or been washed away in a flood. We worry about it. We talk about it with our partners and friends. People agonize over whether to have children, they wonder where is the safest place to live, how they can protect their families from wildfire smoke, or whether the ocean is dying. They fear losing their livelihoods in the transition from fossil fuels, resent decades of inaction by older generations, or retreat into denial or nihilism.

This is our present reality, and yet, with few exceptions, we don’t see it reflected in scripted TV and film. Neither do we see the dramatic and inspiring struggle and progress by student activists, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and others to save humanity.

Although the subject might seem gigantic and impersonal, the truth is that people made the climate crisis, people are impacted by it, and people are solving it too.

Dorothy Fortenberry, a writer and producer (The Handmaid’s Tale, Extrapolations) and advocate of climate storytelling in TV and film, said the following during a Rewrite the Future panel discussion “Beyond Apocalypse” at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival (NRDCflix, 2021):

I think any story can and probably should be a climate change story. I think it’s sort of like, you know – are walls entertaining? I don’t know, but most TV shows have them. Climate change is just as much a part of our reality as walls, so it should be in TV shows as much as walls are. Maybe the episode is about the walls, or maybe they’re just there, but they influence everybody’s decisions because you have to go around them or through a door … So there’s a part of me that feels like if we just made the small adjustment to make it reality, that would be enormous.

Rewrite the Future encourages writers to work with climate themes as they do with other themes: to start with character, relationships, and setting, to focus on the personal and emotional, and to lead with making entertainment rather than “educational entertainment.” Because climate impacts and solutions are everywhere, involve everyone, and touch on many aspects of our lives—almost any story can find a natural climate angle. These will be the most effective stories—the ones designed primarily to entertain.

And then there are advertisers. Fossil fuel companies, automakers, and consumer goods conglomerates are perhaps less likely to spend ad dollars on shows that take on climate change and unsustainable consumption. The mere notion that advertisers might use their leverage to quash climate content seems to have had a significant chilling effect.

In addition, some Hollywood professionals are concerned about the politically charged nature of the climate discussion in the United States. Many Americans identify themselves in part by whether they “believe in” climate change or not. They connect the issue with different philosophies about the role of government, the scope of individual liberty, and even the intentions of God. This is potentially problematic for entertainment storytellers because they (and the companies they work for) want their content to reach the largest possible audience and certainly not to alienate millions of potential viewers.

We believe climate stories can be told without triggering identity politics; that advertisers’ power to influence content is declining with the rise of subscription-based entertainment platforms, such as Netflix, Apple, and Amazon; and that network creators and executives won’t want to miss out on truly compelling content. The climate crisis is arguably the greatest storytelling opportunity of our era.

Finding a Path Forward

Months of conversations with entertainment professionals revealed that many writers, producers, directors, and studio executives are deeply concerned about climate change and recognize the influence their industry could have on society’s response to the crisis. They want to tell climate stories on screen. Many also know that they need help doing it.

The question we needed to answer was how to provide that help. It would involve gaining the trust of Hollywood professionals, showing them that Rewrite the Future had useful ideas and information to offer, but doing so without infringing on the principle that it is the writer’s job to write.

Advocacy groups have long worked in Hollywood, attempting to use the power of film and TV to advance their own objectives. This phenomenon has reached new heights in recent years. Organizations across the spectrum try to integrate their stories into the entertainment content. Although many share core values, their issues are diverse, including public health, immigration, civil rights, women’s rights, Muslim and Jewish affairs, LGBTQ communities, gun violence, and the environment. This profusion of advocacy in Hollywood presented another challenge.

The strategy we settled on was that Rewrite the Future would begin by producing, sponsoring, and participating in public discussions about climate storytelling in entertainment. It seemed a good way to spotlight the work of writers already experimenting with climate themes, to find and recruit new Hollywood allies, to identify and find solutions to climate storytelling hurdles, to help create a community of climate storytellers, to illuminate the intersections of climate with other social justice issues, and to establish Rewrite the Future as a trusted resource.

Rewrite Future Public Educational Events

Our moderated panel discussions on climate storytelling topics were initially designed as live events in Los Angeles and included networking and community building. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a move to virtual platforms, which has resulted in reaching a larger audience but with less opportunity for live peer interaction. Nevertheless, both formats have been extremely successful in stimulating interest in climate on screen and have helped to address and expand some of the limiting creative assumptions discussed in the last section.

Events have exposed our target audience of content-makers and buyers to our theory of change and have nurtured industry dialogue about entertainment’s potentially powerful role in solving the climate crisis. They have grown our network of Hollywood contacts, including serving as an entree to studio executives, content creators, talent agencies, and others who invite us to offer targeted presentations to smaller industry groups. They have also led to opportunities for in-depth climate story consulting with on-air TV shows as well as films and shows in development. We discovered a great appetite for the topics we presented, as reflected in large and engaged audiences and robust follow-up conversations.

“Hollywood Takes on the Climate Crisis”

Our events often feature seasoned Hollywood creatives speaking from their experience integrating climate content into shows and films. For our first public event, we partnered with The Sierra Club, Lear Center Hollywood Health and Society, Center for Cultural Power, and the Good Energy Project to present “Hollywood Takes on the Climate Crisis,” a panel discussion and networking opportunity targeted to industry audiences (NRDC, 2019).

In this pre-pandemic networking event, we invited four screenwriters from diverse TV and streaming shows to highlight the wide range of creative approaches to climate content. They included a writer/performer from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a writer/producer from The Handmaid’s Tale, a writer/producer from Madam Secretary, and a writer/performer from a comedy web series called The North Pole (Healey et al., 2019), unique in the group for having been produced by an environmental justice nonprofit rather than a studio.

We were interested in hearing from writers in the vanguard of scripted climate entertainment about how they had approached the topic creatively through their various genres, characters, settings, and storytelling aims. The variation between shows also extended to different levels of climate engagement, ranging from central events and plots (a climate-exacerbated heatwave in the satirical comedy It’s Always Sunny, a super typhoon and climate denial in the political drama Madam Secretary) to subtle mentions (electric vehicles and winters without snow in the near future dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale) to intersectional topics (climate anxiety, food justice, and economic disparity in The North Pole’s Oakland, CA).

Each of these writers was passionate about seeing more of our climate reality reflected on screen but was faced with resistance from their showrunners, supervising executives, and writer’s rooms, as well as in their own creative process. Alex Maggio of Madam Secretary spoke of needing more right-wing characters to inhabit a political climate change story until he found inspiration in a real-life Christian activist and her evangelical preacher father. Since this event, prevailing industry attitudes have changed: One of our panelists, Dorothy Fortenberry, went on to co-executive produce an ambitious AppleTV+ anthology series called Extrapolations (Burns et al., 2022), the first show to our knowledge centered around the climate future.

The audience stayed long after the panel ended, continuing the discussion. We were struck for the first time by the entertainment industry’s hunger for more dialogue about how to address climate change in their work. We resolved to continue producing events to educate and stimulate discussion among industry audiences.

Sundance Film Festival 2020—Public Launch of Rewrite the Future

Our Rewrite the Future climate in entertainment program was officially launched at the January 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where NRDC hosted film panels, calls to action, and networking events celebrating the power of storytelling to engage the public on environmental issues. Sundance is an important annual gathering for the entertainment industry that attracts significant media attention and is, therefore, an ideal platform to advance our message.

Highlights included NRDC’s then-president Gina McCarthy, later National Climate Advisor for the White House, in conversation with comedienne, activist, and NRDC trustee, Julia Louis-Dreyfus; numerous film panels including with Ron Howard on his Camp Fire documentary Rebuilding Paradise; interviews on social impact entertainment with activist-artists Eva Longoria and Wilmer Valderrama; and the annual Women in Hollywood reception co-hosted by The Black List screenwriting platform, which led to a partnership on Rewrite the Future’s inaugural Climate Storytelling Fellowship (discussed later).

Each event was preceded by a brief overview of our theory of change and a call to action for a better representation of climate reality on our entertainment screens. Our message was well received and, like our other events, resulted in numerous new contacts and potential allies in the industry.

Partner Events

As interest in climate storytelling began to build in Hollywood, allied groups started producing their own workshops and events, inviting Rewrite the Future to partner or participate. For example, we programmed a keynote panel for the first annual Hollywood Climate Summit (2020), a full-day virtual event produced by our partners, Young Entertainment Activists. Rewrite the Future’s panel was the top-viewed segment from the Summit—with over 7000 views on Facebook and an additional 1200 views on Twitch.

In the wake of the sea-change Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, we partnered with the Producers Guild of America Green initiative (Production Green Guide, 2020) on a panel that featured Reverend Yearwood of HipHop Caucus speaking with TV showrunners about the opportunities for depicting the outsized effects of climate change on frontline communities of color as well as how to draw inspiration from real-world environmental justice leaders who stand up against corporate pollution.

Moving beyond the general climate storytelling panels intended to introduce the subject, at the 2021 virtual Sundance Film Festival, Rewrite the Future produced the first in a series of deeper dives into more focused topic areas, starting with a panel on climate futures called Beyond Apocalypse: Alternative Climate Futures in Film and TV (NRDCflix, 2021). Futurist storytelling is one of our target advocacy areas since the vast majority of Hollywood sci-fi depicts apocalypse and dystopia, sometimes with reference to climate change as a cause of the social collapse but more often by some other calamity. Studies have shown that although such representations, if correctly attributed, can attract people’s attention to climate change, fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating personal engagement (O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009).

To address these issues, the Beyond Apocalypse panel proposed that our imagined future narratives should include the healthier society our children might inherit if we succeed in significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Panelist Christiana Figueres, a leading architect of the Paris Climate Agreement and author of The Future We Choose, Surviving the Climate Crisis, offered two contrasting future visions: the dystopian future of environmental and social collapse if we do not meet the Paris targets; and the promising future of clean cities, social justice, economic stability, and ecological and human health if we choose the path of equitable decarbonization. The entertainment storytellers on the panel (Sarah Treem, Dorothy Fortenberry, and Rosario Dawson) then reflected on the possibilities for depicting change-making presents and positive futures in TV and films.

The conversation was aimed at entertainment-makers and framed in the language of screenwriting. For example, Sarah Treem described her creative process when devising a 40-years-in-the-future storyline for her critically acclaimed show The Affair. While it was important for the writing team to be well-versed in regional climate impacts at the story’s setting of Montauk, NY, she related that creative inspiration came primarily from imagining the main character’s emotions, especially loss and anxiety (NRDCflix, 2021):

… what’s interesting to think about when incorporating climate change into narratives is that people are very worried about climate change, it’s a real anxiety hanging over all of us, and we’re all kind of in denial about it because it’s too scary to think about. It involves the legacy of our children, it involves the world that we’re leaving them, we don’t think we have any control over it, and … that kind of anxiety is a real character motivator, like anything else that a character is in denial about or doesn’t want to see but is significantly motivating their actions … is something that you could incorporate into character.

The event was well received, with an engaged 500+ live audience at the premiere stream and over 5000 YouTube views at the time of press. The panel has been cited by a number of our industry allies as formative to their thinking on climate storytelling and useful in leveraging further engagement up their studio chains of command.

From our retrospective vantage point, it is clear that Rewrite the Future and our partners’ public-facing events have both contributed to, and reflected, a groundswell of interest in climate change content in Hollywood. They contributed to creative decisions by writers and studio executives. In addition, the wide net cast by events and their subsequent coverage in the press successfully piqued the interest of influential industry professionals such as studio executives and TV showrunners who’ve approached us for a deeper dive into climate storytelling.

Studio Presentations

In response to queries from studios and other industry professionals, we developed a presentation outlining the urgency of the climate crisis and how filmmakers might leverage their uniquely influential product toward accelerating climate solutions without sacrificing their entertainment mandate. It presents an abbreviated version of the theory of change outlined above, including a brief review of narrative persuasion as it applies to entertainment-education and the success of experiments in other issue areas (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A block diagram with title, Story telling changes hearts and minds. The interacting blocks are, 1. Narrative transportation, 2. Character identification, and 3. Parasocial contact.

NRDC rewrite the future’s theory of change

Full size image

We then ask the next logical question: How might these outcomes be learned from and applied to the climate issue by, say, modeling sustainable behavior change in stories or by depicting the social benefits of transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy in favor of healthier environments and communities? If we make a fossil-free future look attractive on screen, might that help reduce public bias against status quo nostalgia and resistance to change? This introductory section transitions to climate storytelling tips by sharing our informal industry research findings, including commonly stated concerns about tackling climate in scripted stories (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
A word map with words of different sizes. The words that are large are, Complicated, Depressing, Dry and Boring, and Divisive. The medium sized words are, About weather, Preachy, Impersonal and Distant. The small sized words are Abstract, Big global issue, Alienates advertisers, and Educational.

Word map of commonly stated blocks to climate storytelling

Full size image

The bulk of the deck then explores, with specific examples, some of the many creative opportunities, or “story angles,” for engaging with climate in TV and film scripts (Fig. 3). We emphasize the screenwriter’s entry point of character because stories are not about issues per se but about people experiencing those issues in their lives.

Fig. 3
A radial diagram with the title, Climate story telling possibilities. The block named, Character and setting forms the hub which is surrounded by six blocks named, Reflect our climate reality, Solutions and Agency, Climate Justice, Climate stories need not be divisive, Foreground or background, Most genres have a climate angle.

Chapter headings for climate storytelling angles

Full size image

To address the cultural narrative of climate avoidance, we suggest that a top-level guideline, especially for present-day stories, simply be to reflect our climate reality. There are myriad ways to approach this overarching suggestion and we detail several of them in the subsequent slides.

We start with the climate reality of environmental racism and the fact that all climate impacts are not equal, hitting lower-income and people of color hardest. We also give examples of how frontline communities take control of their destinies with innovative climate resilience and mitigation programs. Stories of empowerment have the potential to inspire viewers to action.

Next comes character development, a rich and diverse entry point for climate storytelling. We explore character, and setting thought-starter questions like “What is the character’s job?” and “Where do they live?” discuss climate-affected regions and sustainability jobs from the real world and examples portrayed on film and TV.

“How does the character feel?” begins a section on climate psychology and emotion, an area that stories are particularly well-suited to explore. As Sarah Treem pointed out, culturally relevant stories can engage with our climate reality by capturing how people feel and talk about the crisis—from fear, anxiety, and anger to compassion and engaged response (Fig. 4). The information we present is based on insights and research from climate psychologists.

Fig. 4
A curve of emotional arcs. The curve begins with Shock, rises to Denial, drops slightly to Frustration, further drops to Depression, rises to Experiment, then to decision and Integration.

Kubler-Ross “Stages of Grief”: an example of an emotional “arc”. (Kübler-Ross E, 1969)

Full size image

A solution section includes various actions characters can take in their personal lives (reducing food waste, EVs and bikes, renewable energy, etc.) to real-world system innovations like regenerative farming and eco-industrial design that might inform world-building for stories set in the future. We posit that focusing on “solutions in storytelling” (De Meyer et al., 2021) can inspire ideas for how viewers might act on their concerns about the climate crisis.

We offer ideas based on best practices in climate communication about how to tell climate stories that speak to a range of audiences without being divisive or political, including ideologically diverse characters, settings, and jobs and inspirational spiritual attitudes about nature. We explore a number of environmental examples from different genres of TV and film to show how climate topics are fair game in any present-to-future story, from sitcom to satire, sci-fi and fantasy to procedural drama, and unscripted reality shows. Finally, we make the business case for climate storytelling. Despite the product being entertainment stories, Hollywood is still a business. It is unrealistic to rely on altruism, ethical social activism, or even creative opportunity as a call to action.

A primary business case rests in the cultural relevance of entertainment and the fact that the climate crisis is underrepresented on screen despite having an increasingly dominant presence in many people’s lives. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports 72% of Americans are aware of climate change, and 63% on average are worried about it (Marlon et al., 2020), though those data go up when cutting by demographics: 62% of young adults (18–38) “support climate activists” (Ballew et al., 2020b), and Latino (37%) and Black (27%) Americans are more “alarmed” about climate change than white Americans (22%) (Ballew et al., 2020a). These are important segments that studios are eager to court. More content that reflects our climate reality, including the explosion of “green” product choices, could attract new viewers from the climate-concerned. In our current media landscape of streaming providers jockeying for market share, leveraging a competitive edge is the key to success.

We also report on various environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments in the industry, where media corporations have long had sustainability programs, but are now starting to step up with more ambitious corporate goals, such as Netflix’s recent Net Zero + Nature commitment (Stewart, 2021). Our studio allies have informed us that exposure to what their competitors are doing can serve as a strong incentive to act.

Our basic presentation is adaptable to different applications and audiences. If we’re presenting to a group of screenwriters, such as we did at our webinar kicking off the NRDC/Black List Climate Storytelling Fellowship, we will highlight the climate storytelling section and lowlight the business case, and vice versa for presentations at studios and talent agencies.

Expanding Clientele and Building Trust

Our private presentations serve our educational purpose of “expanding Hollywood’s understanding of what climate storytelling can be,” while also cultivating potential “clients” for the next level of climate engagement, which are our customized story consultations. The presentation format usually includes a discussion period where attendees can reflect on applying the information to their specific slate of projects, and often this will serve as an entree to a relationship on a particular show or film.

The progression from public events to private presentations to writers’ room consultations is a deliberate process of building trust in an industry notorious for its “gatekeepers.” Before creative executives allow us access to their storytellers, we need to establish our usefulness to the primary business—telling entertaining stories that attract viewers, with a possible beneficial side effect of generating social norm influence. We can’t interfere with the former to accomplish the latter. We communicate that by positioning ourselves as experts only in climate impacts, solutions, and the story opportunities that might be found there, being clear to cede expertise on effective storytelling to the professionals.

Through this funneling process, we have developed trusted relationships with a number of insider allies who have expressed strong interest in the climate storytelling project. An ally in the executive class is a point of access both up and down the chain—up to content buyers and down to content creators. An ally in the writers’ room, particularly a TV showrunner or head writer in a position of authority, is our imprimatur to the writing team.

Rewrite the Future Climate Story Consulting

Entertaining stories speak to universal themes through the specificity of character, setting, event, and detail, and each story’s unique milieu will offer different angles for climate and sustainability. The more closely we can work with creatives, the better we can help curate the details that both fit with the story and have the potential to influence our cultural climate narratives.

Outreach Strategy

We have two goals in our consulting strategy that serve to cover a range of projects. For the quickest impact, we aim to encourage climate storylines in the most popular TV shows already running. This is the fastest road to the screen, but because the show premise and characters are already set, we are usually limited to more shallow placements. Usually, we are looking at a single episode of a procedural series, a subplot of an episodic drama or comedy series, or various small but meaningful mentions: one-off lines of dialogue or actions in a scene. The second approach is to work with new shows and films in development that have a high likelihood of being produced. Usually, that means they have established talent attached, but even that is no guarantee, and these projects may have a long road to the screen. However, they offer opportunities for more significant story integrations.

In both cases, we want to intervene in the writing process as early as possible, for example, when the creative team is still determining the plots for the season’s episodes. While we feel any accurate depiction of climate reality is useful, we aim for the “highest value” characters (i.e., protagonists) and central storylines, because they will most influence the viewer. But we are also happy to offer consultations on completed scripts to ensure accurate and useful content and opportunities for the insertion of meaningful mentions. In particular, we look to correct the “climate cliches” that reflect unhelpful cultural tropes, such as mocking green behaviors, perpetuating attitudes like “it’s too late, we’re doomed,” or blaming regular people for the crisis instead of the powerful entities most responsible.

Research-Based Process

We rely heavily on our research, which is guided by the story’s setting and characters. Is this a story about first responders in Texas? Farmers in India? Federal agents in Washington, DC? We familiarize ourselves with the show or film through available materials such as existing episodes, scripts, treatments or synopses, and then look for promising climate and sustainability angles pertaining to that region and character set. In the research phase, we rely heavily on interviews with NRDC’s deep bench of science, legal, and policy experts working in the field to understand and mitigate climate impacts, often with community-based partners.

Our research inevitably unearths a wealth of specific detail that can be mined for stories. We will select, shape, and present this information to the creative teams through writer-friendly research memos as well as creative conversations where options are evaluated and new ideas are unearthed. Climate topics of greatest interest are identified, and we may conduct further research in an iterative, collaborative process with the creative team.

A story consultation can start in a variety of places and proceed by a variety of paths. It can be a one-off script review, an ongoing relationship on a series, or a yearlong engagement with a film through development. The following case studies demonstrate three different pathways for climate story consultation. Because none of these films or shows has been released, we are required by a confidentiality agreement to keep certain information private.

Case Study #1—Family-Friendly Feature FilmFilms in Development

After one of our public events, a small production company specializing in social impact entertainment approached us about a proposed feature film about a teen changing global climate policy through ingenious methods. We felt the story touched promisingly on some of our key communication goals such as contrasting alternative climate futures (NRDCflix, 2021), linking those futures with the choices we are making now, bringing attention to climate impacts on the ocean, and modeling self-efficacy and informed action through a young woman protagonist who teams with diverse friends and allies to make a difference. Moreover, the story offered a co-viewing experience suitable for the whole family. The co-viewing experience is salient because research has shown that children, and especially daughters, can inspire climate concern in their parents, especially fathers and conservative parents (Lawson et al., 2019).

We consulted with the creative team over a year through their development process, including connecting them with NRDC oceans expert Lisa Suatoni, whose knowledge informed important plot points. We reviewed multiple drafts of the story from the outline through several script drafts to identify inaccuracies, suggest new angles, and discuss story choices with an eye to both fact integrity and our mutual goals for audience takeaways (Fig. 5). The screenwriter revised story points based on that feedback.

Fig. 5
A text graphic consists of many rewrite the future script review questions. Some questions are, First, is it entertaining?, Does it get stuck in disaster?, Does it attribute disaster to human made climate change or leave it to the viewer to make that connection?, Will it alienate some audiences because of its treatment of climate?, Does it mock climate deniers? and others.

Rewrite the Future typical script review questions

Full size image

The producers were keenly interested in making an accessible adventure drama with the potential to inspire audiences of all ages to make informed climate action, and while we all agreed that the film’s storytelling was the primary positive influence, we also discussed furthering its impact with an audience engagement campaign upon the film’s release. When the creative team felt ready with their script and supporting materials, we continued our support of the project by helping to build an attractive package to go out to studios for financing. We introduced them to an experienced producer who came on as a partner, and we brought it to production company allies who have expressed strong interest in climate stories. We also introduced the project to an Oscar-nominated actress within NRDC’s orbit to gauge her interest in taking one of the two lead roles and/or becoming a producer of the film. The film is now being considered for financing, and we will continue to do what we can to help bring it to fruition.

Case Study #2—Scripted TV Series from a Major Studio

The mission of one Rewrite the Future funder is to persuade politically center-right Americans of the urgent need for climate action—an appealing strategy given the fate of proposed federal climate legislation over the last two decades. Rewrite the Future developed a plan with the funder to identify popular TV series that reach a center-right audience, to attempt to gain access to the writers and/or showrunners of those programs, and to help them identify and tell climate change and environmental stories appropriate for their shows. The challenge is to connect with viewers who may be disengaged, doubtful, or even dismissive about the issues. The opportunity is to engage them within a “safe space:” a familiar fictional world populated by characters they already like and trust.

Reliable TV viewership data are not freely available, so identifying TV and streaming series that reach center-right viewers initially posed a problem. We solved it with help from three other Rewrite the Future allies (a funder, a talent agency, and a university) that provided access to viewer data from Nielsen and other sources. That trove of information allowed us to compile a short list of target shows. It also confirmed our hunch that several first-responder, and legal and medical procedural shows, reach large center-right audiences. These shows have a lot of potential for dramatic climate storylines given our new normal of killer heatwaves, superstorms, and year-round wildfire seasons. They also open the door to stories about environmental injustice in urban settings.

We realized we were already acquainted with a writer for one of the shortlist’s highest-rated shows. He accepted our request to meet and we made our pitch: We found several compelling, real-world stories about climate change and environmental injustice that fit naturally with the premise and setting of the show. We offered to do the research and produce a story memo, and the writer agreed to share the memo with his colleagues if he thought it added value. We began by conducting interviews with seven NRDC subject matter experts from the fields of climate, environmental justice, clean energy, and water. The interviews helped us identify promising stories specific to the story’s location. We then did extensive desk research and several follow-up interviews to flesh them out.

The resulting 4500-word memo is based entirely on real-world events and characters that illustrate the dramatic impacts of climate change on people’s health, lives, and livelihoods. These specific details can become points of access for the writers to inspire fictionalized plots and character developments that are both organic to the show and that highlight climate issues and solutions. The memo calls particular attention to the scourge of environmental racism (“the expendability of Black and Brown bodies,” as one activist called it) and the fact that the hardships of climate change tend to fall disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color and to compound other forms of social injustice. Our research also revealed how historically oppressed communities are taking control of their own destinies through community organizing, putting them in the vanguard of the climate fight. The show writer’s first response to the memo was, “I am super impressed – there are some terrific and very concrete ideas in here … let me know if you want to plot next steps.” At the time of press, the writer had pitched the showrunner and producers one of the stories we proposed, and we were working with him to organize a climate storytelling presentation for the rest of the show’s creative staff.

Case Study #3—Episode of a Docu-Series from a Major Studio

Rewrite the Future consults for several streamers and film studios, regularly reviewing fiction and nonfiction content at various stages of development through our particular lens of climate and environmental storytelling. For each review, we engage relevant NRDC subject matter experts to help with fact-checking and to evaluate framing, balance, and representation.

In 2021, we received a request from a major streamer to review an early outline for an upcoming episode of a docuseries, before any footage had been shot. The outline explained the issues to be explored and identified the interview subjects who would appear. The episode focused largely on a country in the Global South, long exploited by industrial nations for its natural resources, including oil and gas, and beset by political corruption and poverty.

Rewrite the Future brought in the energy policy manager for NRDC’s International Program to help review the outline. In addition to offering detailed information and resources about the region and its socio-environmental problems, she illuminated the episode’s over-representation of Global North interview subjects, under-representation of Global South and NGO subjects, and the omission of subjects from the nation at issue. She explained how this unrepresentative cast would distort the episode’s discussion, elevating global market considerations over those of equity and self-determination. She then proposed an alternative cast of subjects from the affected region, offering personal introductions. The filmmakers took her advice, incorporating interviews with the suggested subjects into the episode and reframing the story to center on equity issues. This case illustrates the importance of early intervention—beginning the environmental review as early as possible in the show development process to help catch oversights, inaccuracies, and problems with balance, representation, and framing.

NRDC/Black List Climate Storytelling Fellowship

In service of Rewrite the Future’s aim to encourage more and varied climate storytelling in popular entertainment, we developed a first-of-its-kind fellowship program to support new voices in climate storytelling. To complement our work with established Hollywood writers, we sought to reach a broader audience of aspiring screenwriters by partnering with The Black List (n.d.), a respected platform within the entertainment industry for early career writers to showcase their film and TV screenplays, to launch the inaugural NRDC Climate Storytelling Fellowship in April of 2021 (The Black List, 2021). The Redford Center and CAA Foundation, organizations in the entertainment industry focused on using the power of storytelling to create positive change, partnered with Rewrite the Future and The Black List to support the Fellowship.

To qualify for consideration, a script had to include climate in the story meaningfully, involving a major character(s), events, and plot or subplot(s). We encouraged writers to engage with climate themes in ways that reflect the reality of the climate crisis, depict solutions, and imagine a just and equitable future. The Rewrite the Future team also identified a set of story prompts to help writers expand their idea of what climate stories could be.

In June of 2021, Rewrite the Future, The Black List, and the Redford Center hosted a virtual public event to promote the Fellowship: “Climate Screenwriting to Save the World.” This event provided an opportunity for the Rewrite the Future team to deliver our Climate Storytelling 101 presentation to a large audience of early-career writers and emphasize the many ways to effectively integrate climate and sustainability topics into screenplays. Following the event, one writer shared, “[...]Turns out I have the perfect project, just going to revise and resubmit... That’s why I attended but it’s not what I walked away with. To hear climate change spoken of as a given in our day-to-day life — of course it is, but of course it should be in the work we write.”

We selected the three fellows from over 240 applicants in September of 2021. Their scripts include a feature film biopic about Rachel Carson that serves as a compelling climate allegory, a feature film mystery/suspense story about the early stages of a global pandemic caused by climate change, and a TV pilot about climate refugees from a ravaged future who come to the present to alter history. In addition to awarding a stipend to support the fellows’ revision process, the Rewrite the Future team is providing significant creative feedback to develop the climate angles of their stories through our consultation process outlined above. We also paired each of the Fellows with professional screenwriting mentors Scott Z. Burns (Contagion), Naren Shankar (The Expanse), and Sarah Treem (The Affair), who have tackled climate themes in their own work, to provide feedback and guidance on the Fellows’ scripts. At the end of this revision process, we will bring the completed scripts to our allies in the industry who are looking to develop climate content. We intend to make the Climate Storytelling Fellowship an annual program and find ways to bring together this community of climate storytellers throughout the year.

Conclusion

Stories that address the climate crisis are underrepresented in entertainment film and TV by any reasonable measure. Hollywood has been reluctant to tell climate stories for fear of losing advertisers and boring or alienating audiences. It has been creatively stymied by the breadth and complexity of the issue and, likely, by the psychological inhibitions we all experience when confronted by a seemingly overwhelming problem.

Rewrite the Future has been working in Hollywood for 2 years to highlight the void of stories about the climate crisis and to help the creative community tell more varied stories about it. We believe that the ship is beginning to turn. This is evident in the growing demand for Rewrite the Future’s consulting services from large entertainment companies, in the strong response to our Climate Storytelling Fellowship, and in the number of writers, executives, and other creative professionals seeking advice and resources. It is also evident in the growing number of TV shows and films beginning to tell climate stories.

We believe that the change is driven by a desire among many Hollywood creators to use their art to help heal the planet. Increasingly, it is also driven by their dawning recognition that the climate crisis is a rich and largely untapped vein of dramatic material. Hollywood wants to tell climate stories and is beginning to realize that it needs to tell them in order to remain relevant to its audience.