Story. Narrative Change. Now What?

More climate stories than ever. Record emissions. What's missing?

I have attended at least ten Climate Weeks over seventeen years. This one had more sessions on storytelling than ever before, though the word has changed. The hot term today is "narrative change." Rooms were full. The energy was real.

What is the goal of all these stories?

If the goal is that climate stories show up on screen, consider the campaign a success. A decade ago, under 10% of top films even acknowledged climate existed. This year, 31% of eligible Oscar nominees did. There are now consultancies, funds, fellowships and tests devoted to getting climate into scripts. Clearly it's working.

If the goal is climate action, the numbers are far less successful. Emissions hit a record 57.7 gigatons in 2024, growing at four times the recent average. Even if every national pledge were kept, we are headed for roughly 2.3 to 2.5°C. The UN's own language: the new pledges "barely moved the needle."

So the question for our field is not whether we need more stories or better stories. It's whether audiences are doing anything with the ones they already have.

Here is what happens today. A viewer finishes a film, or a MrBeast video, or an episode with a climate thread written in. They feel something. Then the feed serves the next thing, or the second screen in their hand pulls them away. That open window of opportunity lasts a few seconds. If the viewer does go looking, they often land on a search engine or a social platform where the first result may be wrong, hostile, or selling something. The film loses attribution. The cause loses the viewer.

But creators feel great. Millions of views, strong reviews, an award. Do they know what in the story moved anyone to act? Do they know what their audience wanted to learn next, or what they misunderstood? No. Not because they don't care, but because nothing captured their audience's emotion.

The New York Times ran a guest essay this week from Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, and Rajiv Shah of the Rockefeller Foundation, arguing that video is what makes kindness go viral. Their proof was a school-building video watched 82 million times. I believe the 82 million. I'd like to know what the 82 million did next, and so, I suspect, would they.

Chip Giller at Agog, which funds immersive media, said something in Forbes last month, in a piece on Harbor Fund's $100 million bet on social impact films, that should be pinned to every funder's wall: "Despite many efforts over the years, it's always been hard, if not impossible, to measure the impact of journalism and other forms of communication with precision." His point, as I read it: for all the effort, communications impact remains close to impossible to measure with precision, and funders still lack a framework and reliable data.

A story needs an immediate, aligned action menu: a place attached to the content itself where a viewer can ask a question, find a resource, give, volunteer, or say what they intend to do. And it needs measurement on the other side: who acted, what they wanted to know, where their knowledge gaps were, and which moments in the story sent them. Recently, one of our national streaming releases tracked more than 55,000 documented viewer actions. It also gave the filmmakers something they had never had: evidence of what worked.

Views can be bought. Impressions can be faked. A completed action can't be either. In a moment of deepfakes and doubt, measured audience response is the most credible thing a story can produce.

If we don't give people a chance to learn and do in the moment the story moves them, all of this effort, the panels, the funds, the tests, the tripling of climate on screen, evaporates 60 seconds after the credits.

Story, then what? That's the question. We'd like to help you answer it.