TIPSHEETS & GUIDES
FROM GREAT FACTS
COME GREAT STORIES
Tips, tools and resources to
do-it-yourself
Want a hands-on guide to how your story can creatively and effectively represent climate change and sustainability? These resources offer character ideas, questions to consider, and most important, inspiration.
Sustainability on Screen: Character Choices, World Building & Settings
Information on real world sustainability topics to inform and inspire character and story design.
PDF Link
NRDC’s Rewrite the Future Tip Sheet
From NRDC’s Rewrite the Future, resources for storytellers and narrative questions to consider for your project.
PDF Link
Good Energy’s Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change
An open-source digital guide to portraying climate change on-screen, including story inspiration, cheat sheets, character profiles, solutions, and projections into the future.
Albert's Telling Climate Stories Guide
A practical pocket guide for including sustainability in any genre.
PDF Link
The Stories We Need: Climate Spring's Storytelling Guide from Apocalypse to Regenerative Futures
Climate Spring's comprehensive climate storytelling guide sets out what makes a good climate story, by shifting narratives from apocalypse to regeneration. It was written with and for screenwriters, aiming to open up the ideas of the many shapes that climate storytelling can take.
The Climate Reality Check
A Bechdel-Wallace Test for a World on Fire, published by Good Energy and Buck Lab for Climate & Environment, Colby College
BBC Environmental Sustainability Topic Guide
This guide covers a wide range of climate change topics as well as information on nature and biodiversity. Its purpose is to provide accurate information on the featured topics, based on the best scientific evidence available.
PDF Link
Futerra’s Stories to save the world guide
Futerra’s guide to the 9 climate story frames, from earned dystopia to messy utopias.
Habits of Waste: Easy Swaps for Sustainable Scenes
Habits of Waste’s suggestions for swapping in sustainable options on-screen.
Hollywood Climate Summit Tip Sheet
Climate storytelling tips from the Hollywood Climate Summit.
PDF Link
Rare entertainment lab Climate clips archive
A library of the growing number and diversity of climate mentions showing up in film and TV, from comedy to drama to science fiction.
Clips Library Link
Reality of Change: ABCs of Climate Storytelling for Unscripted TV
Reality of Change’s digital tip sheet on framing climate & sustainability within unscripted television, including the ABCs of Climate Storytelling and advice from Rare on how to incorporate high-impact sustainability behaviors into new and existing shows.
PDF Link
Rewiring America’s Electrify On-screen Tipsheet
Guidance from Rewiring America on how to make electrification normative so that what people see on their television and film screens inspires them to electrify their own lives.
PDF Link
Storyline Partners: WRITING ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS, WORK, WORKERS AND CARE
Storyline Partners guide to writing about the intersection of the climate crisis and worker’s issues.
PDF Link
USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health & Society Tipsheets
Tipsheets from Hollywood, Health & Society on varied climate and environmental topics.
PDF Link