Transforming the stories we tell about climate change: from 'issue' to 'action'

In media and popular culture, climate change is primarily conceptualized through 'doom and disaster' narratives—an existential threat to human society, the natural world and even the planet itself. In the first large-scale UK media analysis of climate change, Ereaut and Segnit (2006) wrote:

'Climate change is most commonly constructed [...] as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. This repertoire is seen everywhere [...] in broadsheets and tabloids, in popular magazines and in campaign literature from government initiatives and environmental groups. It incorporates an urgent tone [...] and uses a language of acceleration and irreversibility.' Little changed in the following years (Painter 2013, Painter et al 2017), and by 2020, highly evocative words like 'crisis', 'emergency' and 'breakdown' are used among large parts of the public to describe climate change (Bevan et al 2020). Opinion surveys show record levels of concern globally (Fagan and Huang 2019, Goldberg et al 2020)—which holds up even in times of COVID-19 (Gray and Jackson 2020). People's willingness to take up pro-environmental behaviors is flat lining, however (ibid.). Instead, feelings of powerlessness run high. 'But what can I do?'—is a question frequently asked but rarely answered satisfactorily (De Meyer et al 2019).

A common view among climate communication researchers and practitioners is that belief in, awareness of or concern about climate change are (or ought to be) drivers of climate-positive behaviors. Among some, this is combined with the recognition that in reality this is not happening much. In a review of climate communication research, Moser (2016) listed as one of the unresolved challenges for communication researchers and practitioners the question of 'how to move people from understanding, awareness and concern to action?' Likewise, Hornsey and Fielding (2020) speak of 'an urgent need to test strategies for increasing climate-related concern in the general public and then translating abstract concern into concrete action.'

There are several alternate versions of this view, each with different proponents and opponents. Some scientists and communicators continue to pursue an 'information deficit' approach, assuming that knowledge of the facts and future impacts of climate change will drive action (Pearce et al 2015, Seethaler et al 2019). Other communicators reject a focus on knowledge alone and speak of a need to connect to people's emotions. They are divided, however, whether the most productive emotional states are concern or worry (van der Linden 2017), fear and panic (Wallace-Wells 2019), or positive attitudes, like optimism and hope (see Hornsey and Fielding 2020 for a review). Despite their differences, what all these views have in common is the assumption that a certain mental state (knowledge, understanding, awareness, beliefs, values, positive or negative attitudes and emotions) is the key to unlocking climate action. So far, the evidence for this is in short supply. Be it beliefs about climate change (Hornsey et al 2016), concern (Gray and Jackson 2020), worry (Bouman et al 2020) or anxiety (Clayton and Karazsia 2020), in each case measures of the respective mental states are only weakly to moderately correlated with climate-positive behaviors (though the correlation with support for abstract climate policies tends to be stronger).

None of the questions, findings or differences of opinion in recent climate communication research and practice are surprising if one looks at the older research literature in environmental psychology and education, or the wider neuro-, psychological and social sciences. Two decades ago, environmental policy and education researchers were writing about an environmental 'value-action' or 'attitude-behavior' gap (Blake 1999, Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). Worse, the weak to moderate relationship between environmental attitudes and behavior was already evident in environmental education research from the late 1970s (Marcinkowski and Reid 2019). In social psychology more generally, the study of attitude–behavior gaps can be traced back even further, to Lapiere (1934). Elsewhere, psychologists have warned against seeing emotions as simple levers of behavior (Chapman et al 2017) or have explained why 'fear appeals' can be counterproductive and lead to apathy or denial instead of action (Witte 1992, Witte and Allen 2000, Aronson 2008).

If belief in and concern about climate change do not automatically lead to action, then what can be done instead? Starting with cognitive dissonance research in the 1950s, the realization emerged among some psychologists that belief, attitude change and emotional responses are often the consequence of behavior, rather than the causation of it. As Aronson (1997) wrote:

'Dissonance also changed the way we think about attitudes and behavior. Prior to 1957, the general wisdom among psychologists was that, if you want people to change their behavior, you must first get them to change their attitudes. [...] Contrary to the general wisdom, dissonance theorists brashly asserted that a more powerful approach [...] would be to induce people to change their behavior first—and their attitudes will follow [...].'

A range of lab-based and real-world experiments provided evidence for the behavior-induced attitude change which cognitive dissonance theory predicted (Aronson 1997, Petty and Wegener 1998, Crano and Prislin 2006). The 'general wisdom' which Aronson referred to proved harder to dislodge, primarily because there seems to be so much evidence (empirical and anecdotal) in favor of it. To cut short a long and experiment-driven debate among psychologists, the conventional view ('beliefs drive actions') holds when attitudes are strong, and the available actions feel doable and meaningful. The converse ('actions drive beliefs') happens when attitudes are weak, we face a difficult choice, or do something that threatens our identity and self-image (the view we have of ourselves as smart, competent, ethical, kind, loyal, etc). Under these conditions, an initial decision or action—perhaps taken without conviction at first—can initiate a cycle of self-justification which leads to further action and self-justification, meanwhile strengthening our attitudes, beliefs, feelings and knowledge about the issue. This gradual process of self-persuasion generally leads to deeper engagement, and to more profound behavior change and attitude change than what communication and persuasion can achieve (Aronson 1999). That in real life action often precedes ideology and commitment to a cause has also been noticed by social movement researchers (Munson 2008) and political campaigners (Goldsworthy 2020).

Between the 1970s and 1990s, research in environmental psychology and education, influenced by social psychology and dissonance research, occasionally experimented with the idea that actions drive beliefs. In more recent climate and environmental communication research, the conventional view is again pervasive. We found only one recent experiment testing the notion that environmental behaviors might change attitudes (Ertz and Sarigöllü 2019). Why is this so? On a high-stakes issue like climate change, examples abound of passionate advocates who believe strongly in what they do. On the surface, this seems to support the view that to change people's behavior, we need to change their attitudes. However, communication campaigns which focus on building awareness or concern do not lead to the same deep engagement as self-persuasion, nor do they necessarily set people on a path of self-persuasion. What is needed for that is the opportunity and capability to engage in action which is experienced as meaningful. For many people both of these are missing when it comes to climate change.

The second concept of importance is agency, which was developed by social psychologist Albert Bandura (1982, 2006, 2018) as part of his social cognitive theory. It means 'knowing how to act in order to bring about an intended effect' and is a fundamental aspect of human functioning. Agency is exercised in three forms (ibid.): individual agency applies to someone's personal sphere of control; proxy agency applies to situations where people try to influence others to act on their behalf; collective agency happens when people pool their knowledge and skills to act in concert.

In social cognitive theory, an important source of agency is social learning (ibid.), meaning that we often develop our own agency as we learn from the actions and experiences of others. Social learning, agency and its related concept self-efficacy (the belief one has in one's ability to act) have been very influential across the social sciences; for example, in the study of work-related performance (Stajkovic and Luthans 1998), or to structure interventions promoting positive health behaviors (World Bank 2015). However, they are rarely applied in the context of climate change, a few recent exceptions notwithstanding. For example, Doherty and Webler (2016) found efficacy beliefs to be strong predictors of various types of public climate action (voting, protesting etc).

Self-persuasion is a double-edged sword. It has led many intelligent and good people to become stuck in unhelpful or harmful ideas (Tavris and Aronson 2020). However, in its positive forms, as one action inspires the next, it is accompanied by a deepening of one's agency and efficacy in dealing with a situation. Both the cycle of actions someone engages in as part of a self-persuasion process and the agency which develops as a consequence tend to be concrete and specific. For instance, self-efficacy which follows from easy water conservation behavior can result in people taking on harder water conservation actions (Lauren et al 2016). However, an action like using reusable shopping bags does not automatically lead to unrelated actions like energy conservation (Poortinga et al 2013). Self-persuasion and agency do not make one a master of tackling climate change in the abstract—but only in the concrete, through the types of actions one engages in.

On climate change, there are two domains in which a sizable minority of the public have undergone self-persuasion behavior change and developed a degree of agency. The first domain is the reduction of one's own carbon footprint through changes in the consumption of goods and energy. As an example of the adoption of this kind of behavior, a recent US opinion survey showed that, on a number of food-related choices, on the order of 5%–25% of participants 'always' or 'often' took certain pro-environmental actions, such as buying local food products or from companies which take steps to reduce their environmental impacts (Leiserowitz et al 2020). The second domain is climate activism, which can take several forms: from lobbying politicians to non-violent direct action. In a US survey on activism, 3% of respondents reported they were 'currently participating in a campaign to convince elected officials to take action on climate change' (Leiserowitz et al 2019). Beyond such isolated data points, it is not possible to provide comprehensive numbers for who is doing what. Public opinion research tends to focus on attitudes (e.g. support for a certain policy) and intentions to act, but rarely asks about actual behavior. What is important, however, is that the actions which people become engaged in through self-persuasion (be they certain consumer actions or activism) are easily rejected as not doable or meaningful by others—even if by those who share a high degree of concern about climate change. The often-heard question 'But what can I do about climate change?' may flummox those who are engaged in some form of action. However, this is the nature of self-persuasion. What comes to feel doable and meaningful to one person does not automatically feel so to others.

This problem goes beyond the sphere of personal consumer choices or civic engagement. In our work, we frequently encounter people who say, 'I am very concerned about climate change personally, but I cannot see how I can do anything about it in my work or professional context.' Some—perhaps surprising—professional communities we have heard this sentiment from were creative writers, journalists, teachers, architects, business consultants, health professionals, lawyers, pension fund managers, senior managers in oil companies and even elected politicians. These individuals may have plenty of agency in their job context, but it does not extend to climate action.

What is needed to break through this lack of agency is a systematic approach to support the development of new, concrete ways of 'knowing how' to act on climate change. Rather than telling people what to do, they need to be supported in discovering how to bring climate action into the personal, professional and civic forms of agency, the social roles and identities they already have (De Meyer et al 2019). Instrumental to this context-dependent broadening of climate action is Wenger's (1998) 'communities of practice' idea. He defined it as groups of people who have a shared concern or passion and become better at tackling a situation through learning from each other, as a community. Here, we propose that both place-based, localized action storytelling, and practice-based action storytelling have a role to play in expanding climate agency. As examples of the latter, for creative writers and journalists the required agency would be about knowing how to make action on climate change part of their stories; for architects, how to bring climate change into building design; for teachers, how to teach about climate action within the constraints of the curriculum; for fund managers, how to bring climate risk into their investment decisions; for health professionals, to support the creation of place-based community systems that respond to the health impacts of climate change. These examples of communities of practice provide different opportunities and challenges to expand the notions of climate action beyond the current notions of consumer choice and activism. Others have started to apply a 'communities of practice' lens to the creation of climate agency, e.g. for health professionals (El Amiri et al 2020) or weathercasters (Maibach 2020). We will return frequently to this concept below, as it is an important lever to build agency in communities of people with shared expertise and concerns.

There are different aspects to creating agency, as 'ability to act' requires both 'opportunity' and 'capability', and there is more than one way to foster either of these. In this article we focus on one way to operationalize the idea: by telling stories about people discovering how to act within a specific place- or practice-based context. In the following subsection, we will describe some of the evidence demonstrating that stories of 'people taking action' can create agency in others.

Bandura's ideas about social learning as a vehicle for the development of agency became the foundation of entertainment-education (Singhal and Rogers 2002). It is an integrated communications approach that uses a fictional story (frequently broadcast via television or radio) as one piece of a larger strategy to build audience engagement around important topics of public concern, usually in the domain of health or social development. Despite having a fictional component, entertainment-education stories deliver reliable content from reputable sources. They model desired changes through the actions and experiences of the story characters. With a strong focus on entertainment value, there are many examples of projects which have been commercially successful, while also having large positive effects on public behaviors such as enrollment in adult literacy classes, adoption of family planning methods, and gender equality (Nariman 1993, Singhal et al 2011, 2013). The approach has proliferated over the past 40 years to thousands of projects globally, becoming an influential health promotion strategy (Kincaid 2002, Moyer-Gusé 2008, World Bank 2015). In recent years, entertainment-education projects have also become transmedia—coordinating stories across multiple platforms, including social media (Lutkenhaus et al 2020).

A crucial aspect of entertainment-education narratives is that they are structured to facilitate the development of agency through social learning. A story character (called the 'transition' character) models a desired change of attitudes and behavior against a backdrop of support and opposition of other story characters (modeling 'positive' and 'negative' attitudes and behavior, respectively). Viewers or listeners, through their identification with the transition character, develop their own sense of agency and efficacy with respect to the change the transition character experiences.

Singhal and Dura (2009) integrated another health communication practice into the entertainment education story structure: positive deviance (Marsh et al 2004). Positive deviance starts from the premise that every community (place- or practice-based) has individuals or groups who are positive outliers—who on their own account have developed novel solutions or behaviors to deal with certain problems (Singhal and Dura 2017). Entertainment education narratives incorporating positive deviance thus start from existing knowledge of what works in a given community, rather than assuming that information needs to come from outside experts.

Putting together the ideas of self-persuasion and agency with the established practices of entertainment education and positive deviance, we propose to apply 'agency as a story structure' to climate change storytelling (see figure 1). In this narrative structure, stories need to start from where people are; be tailored to a particular place- or practice-based context; be action-based; and follow a structure of 'iterative goal setting' (Coren and Safer 2020), showing individuals and communities solving concrete climate-related challenges one short-term goal at the time. Many such storylines may be interwoven to produce stories with rich and complex parallel plots (ibid.). Modeling the behavior of the positive outliers in each community ensures that actions are perceived as realistic, doable and meaningful by others. Stories can be fictional but do not have to be. They can also be the factual accounts of real people. What is crucial, however, is that they are not simply issue-based. They do not have as their prime objective the raising of concern as a precursor to action. Instead, they would take climate change as given. Against the backdrop of this reality, they model opportunities for people to engage in concrete actions to solve a specific challenge in a local context or in the context of a specific community of practice. Despite its prevalence in health communication and social development, this kind of storytelling has not been formally applied to climate change. One exception is 'Rhythm and Glue', a prototype developed by one of the authors (Coren and Safer 2020). We will describe this in more detail in section 4.2. In the first instance, this approach can focus on generating agency among people who are already concerned about climate change but do not know what to do—providing them with opportunities to take their first steps of a self-persuasive process that enables them to develop their own agency.

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Adopting this approach for climate storytelling resolves the three problems outlined in section 1. By creating stories which embed climate action into a wide variety of societal contexts, it resolves the poverty of stories. By focusing on the development of agency, it resolves the lack of agency. Finally, by focusing on developing agency that fits with different place- and practice-based contexts, it expands the range of opportunities for citizens to engage in climate action.

One of the authors (CS) works closely with creative professionals (e.g. TV screenwriters) in the entertainment industry, having recently co-founded 'Rewrite the Future', a new climate storytelling capacity building initiative (NRDC 2020). The program aims to help entertainment professionals see that they, uniquely, can answer the question 'What can I do about climate change?' with their creative work—the stories that writers and producers choose to pitch and develop, and those that the studio executives choose to greenlight.

We have found that getting Hollywood professionals interested in inventing and programming climate stories is requiring a shift of thinking within an industry that has heretofore resisted climate content. While there is growing interest in social impact entertainment (SIE)—that is, content and promotional campaigns that add social impact 'surplus' to a product's entertainment value (UCLA Skoll 2019)—it has been primarily focused on social justice, diversity and inclusion and remains a small proportion of the entertainment landscape. Our content advocacy is therefore partly educational—exposing content creators to the large range of possible climate angles that can be mined for stories; and partly aspirational—calling upon the industry to embrace and leverage the powerful cultural influence they have toward elevating climate action and justice in the Zeitgeist.

The entertainment professionals we have spoken to have, without exception, expressed great concern about climate change. However, it either has not occurred to them that their stories could engage with the topic, or else it has, and the prospect is perceived as too daunting, off-putting or unrelated to their current portfolio. More than once we have heard 'I'd love to tell stories about climate, but I do not know how'—exemplifying the lack of agency discussed earlier. Content creators express worry that they may impair their story's entertainment value by focusing too much on the issue of climate change which they equate with didacticism, fact-based dullness, or polemic.

Entertainment value often corresponds to how well the narrative imaginatively transports the viewer into the world of the story (Carpenter and Green 2012). In a successful story, any information has to be required by the story, not tacked on by some desired educational outcome. In response to these constraints and opportunities, we start with the assurance that storytellers should lead with their usual aims to entertain the audience with 'good stories well-told.' Good stories are about people, not issues. For a writer it can be overwhelming to think about telling a story about something as vast, issue-based and seemingly impersonal as global warming. The antidote is to invite creators to do what they do best—keep telling stories about people. People made the climate crisis, people are impacted by it, and people can act on it too. In our workshops and story consultations, we unpack climate storytelling as the innumerable specific ways that people interact with situations of crisis and their solutions, including intersections with social issues that may be easier for a writer to personalize, like racial and economic injustice, women and families, immigration, national security, and health.

We offer lay-language information such as climate storytelling tip sheets and customized memos that may include narrative case studies, data visualizations and profiles of activists, thought leaders and sustainability innovators. In rare cases these real-world stories may be optioned for adaptation to the screen; mostly they provide inspiration for fictional characters, events, plots and subplots that weave through storylines of existing shows or inform new projects in development.

We create frameworks and relationships that allow a writer's imagination to freely engage with the information we provide about green jobs, climate psychology, regional impacts, or the range of possible climate futures. We provide individual consultations, both with writers on specific projects, and in meetings with executives to help grow a buyer's market, as well as industry panels and workshops. These various forms of content education are meant to creatively explore the various climate angles that are available to almost any genre and time frame of story, from recent past to contemporary to near and far future fictions. Our intention is not just to support more meaningful climate entertainment but to nourish a community of climate story practitioners who bring their experience and knowledge into every writers' room and project. At some point we expect the industry to become self-educating.

The entertainment-education series Rhythm and Glue was developed by one of the authors (EC) as a prototype example of a health communication strategy with multiple, parallel climate interventions. The story is based on audience profiling following the Global Warming Six America's audience segmentation (Goldberg et al 2020) to mimic perspectives from each of the six groups (from 'alarmed' to 'dismissive') in proportionate representation to match the intended audience.

Set in Los Angeles, Rhythm and Glue tells the story of a community of twenty-somethings growing into adults as they learn to collaborate, sharing their skill sets, to build a safer city. The story follows the characters through multiple parallel behavioral interventions at individual and collective levels. Slapstick, romantic entanglements, and career advancement anchor the story. Real-time participation would drive audience engagement with climate topics. Each season presents an overarching climate change issue. Season 1 tackles transportation and the current health effects of climate change, with subsequent seasons addressing; energy, water, food and waste. The show highlights the day-to-day realities of climate change and models realistic solutions and behaviors that citizens can take to mitigate those effects, for themselves and their communities.

Figure 2 shows the multiple interwoven story arcs for season 1. These different storylines model different types of agency, from personal agency to make lifestyle changes, to agency for climate action in community, professional or civic contexts. Storyline A (yellow) models iterative goal setting where one friend guides another to learn to navigate active and multimodal urban transport. Storyline B (blue) is the introduction to social-emotional skill building for the character Sarah, who by season 5 of the show grows from a computer programmer into a community leadership role eventually getting elected to local office. Storyline C (purple) demonstrates local health impacts for a variety of community members in a medical procedural setting. In storyline D (green), air quality conflicts in a residential setting lead a climate skeptic to collaborate in solar panel installation in his apartment complex due to his support for energy independence.

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As a prototype, Rhythm and Glue was developed to demonstrate how the storytelling approaches of entertainment-education can be applied to action-based storytelling for climate change. A range of stories following this structure can be designed for a variety of regionally and demographically specific groups, then linked together through transmedia platforms. The transmedia approach provides the opportunity for facilitating a broad conversation from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. Improving the coordination between programs through a transmedia interface can help them 'click' into a coordinated series synchronizing the real-world responses and the digital storytelling. This strategy would result in a much more intentional storytelling format that can work in conjunction with climate journalism programs focusing on actions and solutions.