The landscape and demand for climate stories are shifting. For a very long time, the conversation around climate change and the environment has been led by circles of scientists and policy and law makers with artists, storytellers, and BIPOC communities being largely absent from the conversation until recently. Independent film is breaking the cycle of the dominant film industry voices that have controlled which stories are told (and not told), how they are told, and who gets to tell them. Stories are helping to humanize and depoliticize the issue of climate change, providing complex and nuanced perspectives to audiences and building bridges over once-polarizing waters. The independent film industry is helping pave the way for a more environmentally aware and engaged future, but there’s still work to be done.

Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices. A large majority of U.S. adults (82%) say they often or sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 49% who say they do so often. This is similar to the 51% who said they often got news from digital devices in 2021, but lower than the 60% of those who said the same in 2020. When asked which of these platforms they prefer to get news on, about half of Americans say they prefer a digital device (53%), more than say they prefer TV (33%). Even fewer Americans prefer radio (7%) or print (5%). Among digital platforms, news websites or apps are also the most preferred source for news: About a quarter of U.S. adults (23%) prefer to get their news this way, compared with 13% who prefer social media, 12% who prefer search and 4% who say they prefer podcasts.

Climate fiction is an opportunity to imagine a future built on sustainability, inclusivity and justice. This second-annual short story contest invited writers around the world to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. The 12 finalists are featured in this collection, including the winning entry written in Jamaican patois.

Various climate groups have recently used messages invoking “climate anxiety” to spur grassroots action. Science Moms and Action for the Climate Emergency have joined the Environmental Defense Fund and Climate Emergency Fund in running Facebook and Instagram ads about climate anxiety in recent weeks. A group called RepublicEn has been running Meta ads using conservative messengers like evangelicals, military figures, and elected officials to create a permission structure for Republican voters to support climate action. The dominant narrative about climate change or energy on social media last week concerned a report showing that some of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve was shipped to countries like China. Pages like Breitbart and Tucker Carlson seized on the news to accuse the Biden administration of “treason”, but their content went mostly unchecked by progressive pages.

Delivering more political information to voters makes them vote more. COURIER’s unique method of boosting news on social media had a positive, statistically significant impact on voter turnout in the 2021 Virginia state election. There were two kinds of news tested on voters: local coverage of the Virginia 2021 gubernatorial race and candidates and localized coverage of federal policy solutions. These kinds of localized political news increased voter turnout by 0.2%. This experiment was tested on a pool of roughly 1 million Virginia voters on social media from September to November, 2021.

Broadcast TV news mentioned a “socially marginalized community” in just 12% of its segments on environmental impacts or regulations in 2021. CBS aired the most environmental justice segments (13), followed by NBC (4), and ABC (2). The majority of environmental justice segments focused on government action (14) and the health impacts of pollution or chemical waste (9). National TV news shows missed key opportunities to apply an environmental justice lens to important national stories such as the 2021 Texas winter storm, a toxic wastewater leak in Florida, and the Colonial pipeline hack. Even segments about obvious environmental justice stories, such as the lead water crisis in Benton Harbor, Michigan, were mostly shallow and lacked important context.

Good Energy is a story consultancy for the age of climate change which knows that facts don’t change people—stories do. This webpage exists to support writers in portraying the climate crisis in any storyline, across every genre, to create relevant, authentic, and, above all, entertaining stories. Good Energy’s webpage includes many resources for facilitating telling more climate stories, such as “Climate character psychology,” “Climate storytelling cheat sheet,” “The villain’s backstory,” and many more.

When writing an op-ed, you need an audience who is open to change and willing to drive a narrative out to other people. Your base, including activists and members, may be part of your audience, but op-eds typically try to find an audience beyond your base. Identify this audience by doing the following: clarify the people who have the ability to take action and change behavior based on the argument you want to make, get to know them and meet them where they are, learn how they most effectively communicate, and get their feedback. This resources describes the op-ed writing experience of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC), an Oakland-based organization focused on organizing power in communities of Black, Brown and low-income people, when running police reform campaigns in Alameda County. This article also lists many other resources to check out for the various steps in the op-ed development process.

State Voices' 2022 Tools & Tech Guide has the latest digital tools and vendors, including texting services, cell-compliant dialers, digital organizing, online fundraising, relational organizing, digital marketing, advocacy, and bill tracking. This resource is the result of multi-year research from State Voices' Data and Technology Department. You can also learn more about technology recommendations for essential items like office chairs, laptops, webcams, docking stations, headphones, scheduling tools, computer monitors, and security software.

Coverage of climate solutions in 2021 reflected and reinforced a pervasive and interrelated sense of social, environmental, and public health crises. Coverage seems to accurately describe the origin of the many natural disasters that marked the year: of 1,431 instances of messaging about natural disasters, 65% linked the cause to climate change. Across coverage of renewable energy, water, and food systems, when a person was referenced or quoted in an article, it’s more likely that person was a woman. This suggests that media covering climate solutions is equitably reflecting women spokespeople. Across the issue areas covered in this report, articles that mentioned communities of color were slightly more likely to focus on solutions than articles that did not. In 1,418 articles that referenced communities of color, 50% focused on solutions; in 5,785 articles that did not mention communities of color, only 46% focused on solutions. Natural disasters, along with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, provided opportunities for advocates and lawmakers to highlight needed policy and infrastructure changes, especially because these crises disproportionately affect frontline communities, in particular, Black and Indigenous Americans.