Keeping up with climate news has been hard recently, and not only because it is often buried beneath the screaming headlines of seemingly more immediate threats. Those who still do manage to pay attention to the climate news face another layer of anxiety as they are trying to make sense of a barrage of frightening graphs representing a world on the brink of what UN General Secretary António Guterres has called “the era of global boiling.”¹ In an article on “the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory,” climatologists warn of an imminent “point of no return,” and a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change alerts Europe to prepare for three degrees of warming by the end of the century.² In my mind, these words conjure images of punishing rainstorms, scorching heat, and blazing forests—conditions even more extreme than what we already experience, and perhaps impossible to live in. Meanwhile I learn that the Trump administration decided to “erase” the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment.³ While this doesn’t come as a surprise, I find myself staring at my laptop with something like numb panic as I try to imagine the future cost of that erasure. Then I get up and go to the kitchen for a calming cup of tea with an urgent desire to dream up a less threatening scenario.

“You can never really see the future,” writes journalist David Wallace-Wells in a 2022 article entitled “Beyond Catastrophe” in the New York Times, “only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.”⁴ This may be true, but the role such imaginings play in shaping the future we are creating deserves closer attention. Even if they are grounded in peer-reviewed research, imaginations of the future are bound to be idiosyncratic and unstable, producing different mental images and related emotional states over time. Wallace-Wells’s own shifting imaginations of the future are a prime example, ranging from the apocalyptic, in his popular science book The Uninhabitable Earth, to the cautiously utopian in more recent publications—in part fueled by the “astonishing declines in the price of renewables,” and in part a response to the criticism he received for disheartening people with his doomsday visions of a ruined planet.⁵

It is not only journalists like Wallace-Wells who have been judged by the affective register and supposed psychological impact of their narrative evocations of potential future environments. Novelists and filmmakers, too, have been confronted with the expectation that their speculative worlds should be useful in the fight against climate change.⁶ In order to cut through the noise, the argument goes, we need more engaging, hopeful, and solutions-driven storytelling, the underlying idea being that the stories we tell about the future matter because they shape people’s imaginations—and ultimately, their ability to act.⁷ Although rarely spelled out, this idea rests on our innate capacity to simulate what we read, hear, or see, in both mind and body. These embodied simulations, as the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese calls them, engage our emotions and might thus have the power to shape attitudes and behavior.⁸ Empirical research provides some evidence for such impacts but also suggests that the effects are culturally dependent and more complex than often assumed.⁹ As the calls keep multiplying for more diverse, more positive, more effective, and better imaginations of the future, we must therefore keep in mind the different modes, aims, and intended audiences of such speculative storytelling.

A novelist is first and foremost committed to telling a compelling story. “The danger of using a story to broadcast my own politics or treating it like propaganda or argument,” explains Karen Russell, “is that it can wind up sounding like a very bad Op-Ed.”¹⁰ Omar El Akkad, author of American War, insists that literature is art and that “trying to take a fundamentally rational approach to . . . writing the perfect climate novel that’s going to cause people to change their minds and fix the climate crisis, is nonsensical.”¹¹ Moreover, raising awareness or instigating climate action may simply not be the primary motive for writing fiction. Some novelists create dystopian visions of future environments—and their utopian alternatives—to better understand the climate crisis or to process their own emotions by immersing themselves in such imaginary worlds and sharing them with readers.¹² In El Akkad’s American War, that future environment takes the form of a United States that has lost the entire state of Florida to sea-level rise. Russell’s story “The Ghost Birds” is set in a severely degraded future environment in which the only birds that can be seen during a bird-watching trip are apparitions.¹³ Such distant echoes of the avian-extinction scenario in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring can also be found in James Bradley’s Clade and Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations.¹⁴ Other climate fiction imagines environments with a more utopian bend, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s glittering skyscrapers soaring above a flooded Manhattan in New York 2140 and the green urban landscapes found in much of solarpunk.¹⁵ While the latter has an overtly activist dimension, it is important to recognize that—as the novelist Jeff VanderMeer puts it—sometimes fiction just “reacts or reflects.”¹⁶ This does not mean that it cannot have measurable impacts.¹⁷ But it explains why writers who are confronted with expectations that telling the right story will help societies tackle climate change often balk at what they perceive as an implied instrumentalization of their craft.¹⁸ VanderMeer pointedly argues that “we don’t need fictional extrapolation . . . to do better—we need better strategic planning, more political will, and strict regulation to avoid the worst of climate change.”¹⁹

While the latter is true, the capacity to imagine human life in a future affected by climate change may nevertheless be crucial in bringing about such political will and much-needed policy changes. It can also be helpful in supporting the population adapt to the impacts of climatic changes that are already locked in for the coming decades. Many disaster-risk-reduction campaigns use storytelling to promote risk reduction in the context of climate-related disasters as well as recovery efforts.²⁰ Fictional extrapolation—a narrative technique that takes current risks and extends them into the future to imagine plausible scenarios—can be useful in such efforts. Examples of this include the comic book series L’attimo decisivo (Italian Civil Protection Department) as well as the educational video games Max und Flocke (German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance) and Disaster Master (US Department of Homeland Security), all of which aim to help children and young people prepare for future disasters in a playful way without scaring them.²¹

Despite their different affective registers and visions of the future, both films were successful in engaging viewers. After conducting a survey at a screening of The Age of Stupid in Edinburgh, sociologist Rachel Howell reports that “respondents emerged from the film with an increased motivation to take action, and an increased belief that they could do something to prevent climate change getting worse, along with the sense that they are not already doing everything they can.”²⁷ A survey that my colleagues and I conducted at a screening of 2040 within the context of our “Visions of Sustainability” project in Freiburg, Germany, illustrated that viewers also responded to Gameau’s affective strategies, which aimed to instill hope in them.²⁸ Ninety percent of respondents did feel hope in response to the film and 68.3 percent a “drive to action,” with some viewers stating that the utopian extrapolations had made them feel hopeful. We also observed an attitude shift toward more hope regarding ongoing climate-mitigation efforts, and the vast majority of respondents (85 percent) said watching the film had encouraged them to do more to protect the climate.²⁹ While the results cannot be generalized due to the exploratory nature of our study, they offer further evidence that imagining future environments in response to storytelling can—at least in the short term—impact attitudes and action intentions. 

As I struggle to stay atop of climate news without becoming submerged by my emotional responses to it, storytelling thus not only helps me envision future environments and ways to live in them. I also appreciate the role it can play in improving how we communicate on climate change and related risks and opportunities. In one of his recent speaking engagements, David Wallace-Wells appeared to acknowledge as much as he wondered whether the world has “given up on fighting climate change” only to tell an “encouraging story” about Pakistan where people started installing rooftop solar panels from China during the global energy crises caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, thereby doubling their country’s electricity capacity within a year. It is a factual story that might be called a sequel to the one—also about microgrids in Bangladesh—that excited viewers who watched Gameau’s 2040, and Wallace-Wells similarly upscales and extrapolates it into the unknown future when he speculates that other developing countries are “poised to embark on exactly the same path . . . a rapid expansion of their green electricity.”³⁰ The US-Israeli war in Iran and the related blockage of the Strait of Hormuz will likely accelerate this development. By themselves, such stories cannot save us from political failures and their effects on environments, lives, and livelihoods. But their ability to engage the imagination is nevertheless a valuable tool in climate-change adaptation and mitigation efforts. We cannot see the future. But how we imagine it shapes how we prepare for it—and perhaps even what it becomes.

Acknowledgement

_{Research for the “Visions of Sustainability” project (2024–26) was funded by the Baden-Württemberg
Ministry of Science, Research and Arts at the Sustainability Innovation Campus (University of Freiburg and
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in Germany.}

1. Ajit Niranjan, “‘Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived,’ Says UN Chief as July Set to Be Hottest Month on Record,” The Guardian, 27 July 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2023/jul/27/scientists-july-world-hottest-month-record-climate-temperatures.
2. William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Nico Wunderling, Jillian W. Gregg, et al.,, “The Risk of a Hothouse Earth Trajectory,” One Earth 9, no. 2 (2026): 101565, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101565.
3. Lisa Friedman, “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change,” The New York Times, 12 February 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html.
4. David Wallace-Wells, “Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming into View,” The New York Times, 26 October 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/climate-change-warming-world.html.
5. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7312/asme18999-010; Wallace-Wells, “Beyond Catastrophe.”
6. Sarah Hall, “Blue Sky Thinking: Why We Need Positive Climate Novels,” The Guardian, 16 August 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/16/blue-sky-thinking-why-we-need-positive-climate-novels; Cynthia Littleton, “Is Hollywood Doing Enough to Fight the Climate Crisis?,” Variety, 10 September 2019, https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/climate-crisis-hollywood-environment-movies-tv-1203329390/.
7. Anastasia Denisova, “Climate Doomism Is Bad Storytelling—Hope Is Much More Effective at Triggering Action,” The Conversation, 28 March 2023, https://theconversation.com/climate-doomism-is-bad-storytelling-hope-is-much-more-effective-at-triggering-action-202401; Christof Mauch, “Slow Hope: Rethinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 1 (2019): 1–43, doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8556.
8. Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Wojciehowski, “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology,” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), https://doi.org/10.5070/C321008974.
9. W. P. Malecki, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Aino Petterson, Małgorzata Dobrowolska, and Jagadish Thaker, “The Role of Hope and Fear in the Impact of Climate Fiction on Climate Action Intentions: Evidence from India and USA,” Poetics 108 (2025): 101960, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2024.101960; Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Abel Gustafson, Anthony Leiserowitz, Matthew H. Goldberg, Seth A. Rosenthal, and Matthew Ballew, “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction,” Environmental Communication 17, no. 1 (2023): 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2020.1814377.
10. Emma Pattee, “On the False Promise of Climate Fiction,” Literary Hub, 14 November 2023, https://lithub.com/on-the-false-promise-of-climate-fiction/.
11. Omar El Akkad, American War (Knopf, 2019); Pattee, “False Promise.”
12. For pertinent examples, see the acknowledgements section of Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations (Flatiron Books, 2020) and Michelle Nijhuis, “A Sci-Fi Writer and an Environmental Journalist Explore Their Overlapping Worlds,” Grist, 22 February 2008, https://grist.org/article/bacigalupi/.
13. Karen Russel, “The Ghost Birds,” The New Yorker, 4 October 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/the-ghost-birds.
14. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962); James Bradley, Clade (Titan Books, 2017); McConaghy, Migrations.
15. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (Orbit Books, 2017); Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Solarpunk,” Utopian Studies 35, no. 2–3 (2024): 467–89, https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.35.2-3.0467.
16. Jeff VanderMeer, “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, 19 April 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.
17. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “‘Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (2020): 337–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa020.
18. VanderMeer, “Climate Fiction.”
19. Ibid.
20. Jenny Hou, “Storytelling for Disaster Resilience and Community Engagement: A Practical Guide,” QUT Centre for Justice Briefing Papers 67 (2024): 1–4, https://eprints.qut.edu.au/254595/.
21.  “L’attimo decisivo,” Dipartimento della Protezione Civile, accessed 10 June 2026, https://www.attimodecisivo.gov.it/en/; Max und Flocke, online game, Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe, accessed 10 June 2026, https://www.max-und-flocke-helferland.de/DE/Home/home_node.html; Disaster Master, online game, US Department of Homeland Security, accessed 10 June 2026, https://www.ready.gov/kids/games/data/dm-english/index.html.
22. An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Paramount Classics, 2006).
23. Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Emotions of Consequence? Viewing Eco-Documentaries from a Cognitive Perspective,” in Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, ed. Alexa Weik von Mossner (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.51644/9781771120036.
24. Film as a Force for Change: 2025 Annual Impact Report (Redford Center, 2025), https://redfordcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/TRC-2025-Impact-Report.pdf.
25. The Age of Stupid, directed byFranny Armstrong (Spanner Films, 2009); 2040,directed by Damon Gameau (Good Things Productions, 2019).
26. Other films focusing on ongoing mitigation and adaptation efforts include Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent’s Demain/Tomorrow (Mars Distribution, 2015) and Manon Turina and François Marques’s La Belle Ville/Green City Life (Dao Production, 2023).
27. Rachel Howell, “Lights, Camera . . . Action? Altered Attitudes and Behaviour in Response to the Climate Change Film The Age of Stupid,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 1 (2011): 177–87, p. 184, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.09.004.
28. “Visions of Sustainability,” Visions of Sustainability Project, accessed 10 June 2026, https://visions-of-sustainability.de/.
29. Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Thomas Heintz, “Empirical Ecocriticism,” in Live Handbook Environmental Humanities, ed. Evi Zemanek and Timo Müller (J. B. Metzler, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70886-6_18-1.
30. David Wallace-Wells, “Has the World Given Up on Fighting Climate Change?,” New York Times Magazine, 2 October 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/climate/climate-forward-david-wallace-wells.html.