What We Need Now to Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling

In this concluding chapter, we emphasize that the climate crisis deserves the use of all tools at our disposal to achieve the recommended mitigation and adaptation goals. Effective communication strategies are necessary to accelerate climate solutions at the required speed, scale, and scope, and they can be designed and implemented based on decades of research in behavior science. We elaborate on storytelling as a climate change communication and action strategy and highlight the power of narratives for social and behavioral change through popular entertainment. We especially advocate for the more rigorous approach of entertainment-education for social impact with better alignment across interdisciplinary partnerships, social objectives, narrative contents, communication platforms, linked resources, and program evaluations. Finally, we provide a tiered model with recommendations for actionable next steps to accelerate climate solutions.