On a cool February night, I was taking a walk with a friend in my neighborhood of the coastal Indian city of Panjim. The hollowed-out ruins of the apartment buildings we walked past, whose ground-floor kirana stores had once been the mainstay of my everyday life, filled me with sadness. “Gentrification,” my friend muttered, before adding matter-of-factly, “This will all be underwater one day.” As the words tumbled out of her, the street before me turned into a river of black water—an unsummoned image, like a half-remembered nightmare. A report I dug out afterwards provides details of the science behind such concerning projections of sea-level rise in Panjim. It should have provoked a reaction, especially in someone whose work has focused on producing evidence-based research to shift policy, but I struggled to connect with it. The image of the street-river and the emotions it awoke in just a split second—shock, fear, and then relief as I returned to reality—are what stayed.
When evidence meets emotion
What if we made space in the climate movement for the messiness of our emotions and our human experiences of the warming planet, instead of pushing them to the margins? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that evaluates the science of climate change, has been producing periodic assessments since 1988. The process of assembling these analyses is an impressive feat spanning many months and involving contributors from around the world. The final assessment typically comprises three separate working group reports, a synthesis report bringing together the findings of the working groups, and a summary that is included in the synthesis report for review and approval by governments. The most recent assessment, from 2023, is a nearly 10,000-page monument to facts, projections, and scientific models related to climate change.
But without centering the human experience, statements such as “increasing weather and climate extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity” can collapse into abstractions. Despite incontestable evidence of the irreversible costs of climate inaction, most countries’ global emissions targets fall well below what is needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees, and only a handful of countries met the February 2025 deadline to submit their revised targets as per the terms of the Paris Agreement. If climate science intersected with the emotions and experiences of those heavily impacted by the climate crisis, it might provoke deeper empathy and action. Establishing a collective of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and other creatives to document stories from the frontlines, as part of the IPCC’s assessment process, could be one way to add emotional truthfulness and immediacy to the important work being done by climate scientists. This pairing of science and art could perhaps prompt more ambitious target-setting.
A literary approach to climate change
It was on David Naimon’s excellent literary long-form podcast, Between The Covers, where I first learned about the imaginative undertaking represented in the text Creature Needs. Describing itself as “a kaleidoscopic literary exploration of extinction and conservation, inspired by the latest scientific research,” the collection brings literary works together with excerpts from the scientific articles that informed them. It made me curious about translating this approach into other contexts—whether, say, the “key findings” of climate science reports like the IPCC’s could act as literary prompts or provocations for writers, journalists, and poets. The creative works that emerge from this process, whether science fiction stories, creative non-fiction, or poetry, could be the basis of a “companion piece” that injects life and urgency into the IPCC’s data. This could perhaps be used as a mobilization tool for activists and advocates to raise public awareness around climate data and demand more accountability from our leaders.
In 2021, the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was invited to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow to share his predictions of the world in 2050. Robinson’s novel, The Ministry for the Future, released the year before, was lauded for its deft examination of the technical questions confronting the climate crisis. Set in a world hurtling toward but ultimately avoiding catastrophe, the novel resonated deeply with political leaders. “These are deeply researched, plausible futures he’s writing about,” remarked Nigel Topping, the high-level climate action champion who invited Robinson to the summit. Robinson’s work is said to be emblematic of “Hopepunk,” a genre in science fiction which has loosely been defined as “solution-based storytelling about what could go right.” The impact of Robinson’s novel within diplomatic circles invites us to consider the rich possibilities for using film and television to tell hopepunk stories about climate change. What if production companies and studios directly involved climate diplomats and policymakers in the screenwriting process? How might such creative endeavors transform the way leaders view the world and their role in engineering a better, more just future?
Hopepunk aside, sometimes even the most apocalyptic and bleakest of stories, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I am currently reading, is filled with piercing moments of humanity. “Apocalypse and utopia: the end of everything, and the horizon of hope. Far from antipodes, these two have always been inextricable,” the science fiction writer China Mieville argued in The Limits of Utopia. The interplay of hope and despair, utopia and dystopia, is where uncertainty, and therefore possibility, lives. As Rebecca Solnit argues in her joyfully clear-eyed manifesto, Hope in the Dark: An Untold History of People Power, hope is “an account of complexities and uncertainties with openings.”
In a similar vein, the musician Nick Cave says, “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” But where are the voices of the broken-hearted in this conversation? The stories of those most afflicted by climate grief, anxiety, and rage, but who nevertheless remain improbably driven by optimism, need to find their place in the pages of scientific reports and the corridors of power. Through their stories, we can start to shift the center of gravity from binary-based thinking (either “everything is fine” or “all is doomed”) to nuanced emotionality that inspires action.
A new way forward
What if the United Nations Climate Change Conference institutionalized processes for diplomats to really listen to the stories of people disproportionately impacted by the crisis? While storytellers from Indigenous communities and affected regions in the Global South often find a space to share their stories during the conference’s “side events,” which take place alongside formal diplomatic negotiations, opportunities for more direct and sustained dialogue with diplomats are less common. Not every storyteller will willingly take on this mantle—nor should they be expected to. As Kim Stanley Robinson said half-jokingly in a speech following his participation at COP26, “I am an English major and a science fiction writer, and that’s all I am, so if somebody is actually coming to me to find solutions to climate change, then we’re in terrible trouble.”
A storyteller is an observer of the self and others who feels something deeply and expresses it through narrative. From that unique subjective worldview emerges a universality that connects to the subconscious of others. Injecting emotionality into climate diplomacy to unlock empathy and justice is perhaps just what the climate movement needs.