How Positive Storytelling Can Impact Climate Change

The 78th annual meeting for the United Nations Goals House event took place in mid-September in New York City to discuss how nations across the globe can contribute to meeting sustainability goals intended to be achieved by 2030.

Present at the convention was Ritual Arts' founder Farhoud Meybodi at an event that featured a screening of the film Earthbound: Nzambi Matee, which features a new spin on a devastating trope: positive storytelling for climate change.

Meybodi wanted to change the dark and cynical narratives plaguing climate change marketing culture and rebrand what was once bad press for environmental causes into a story that promoted humor and positive characters. In the film, a young entrepreneur is posed as the documentary's protagonist as viewers follow her adventurous and joyful journey of turning plastic waste into sustainable goods.

"Fear isn't a long-term motivator for behavior change," said Meybodi. "Howard Levanthal wrote about this back in the 1970s. Love and opportunity offer a much more sustainable and effective pathway for inspiring long-term action in climate mitigation and adaptation."

While Meybodi is not a neuroscientist, his instincts may be acutely attuned to the latest science of storytelling when it comes to battling stressful life events.

According to a meta-analysis published in 2021, storytelling is largely beneficial for changing human behavior, combatting misinformation and stereotypes by offering a more realistic view of life, even if it's in narrative form.

With climate change, specifically, individuals often feel powerless to combat something so global. In one climate change study, researchers asked subjects to write down memories that connected their personal narrative to the broader social context regarding climate change. In provoking emotional associations with the topic, storytelling was a powerful way to touch people. In doing so, it eased the anxieties of these participants about the looming effect of climate change.

But perhaps more hard-hitting is a 2020 study published in Environmental Research Letters that attempted to investigate the latest theories of neuroscience and psychology on how negative storytelling creates the opposite of the intended result, which is action against climate change.

According to the researchers, changing beliefs involves changing behavior first. People rationalize their decisions. Self-justification is indicative of a narrative strategy that confirms their new beliefs. Over time, this action-then-justification process works to persuade the individual to the point of recognizing their own agency. By repeating actions that contribute to the development of the intended behavior, people can slowly reason and persuade themselves into the idea of personal agency, which grants them a choice to make decisions more aligned with their views.

One way this is achieved is by watching the behavior of others. The researchers advocate for storytelling in climate change narratives to reveal how people are positively impacting climate change through their hopeful and uplifting actions. They propose that campaigns transcend climate "change" into climate "action" by modeling behavior from positive climate activists in hopes that it will motivate people to become more action-oriented themselves.

And that's exactly what Earthbound: Nzambi Matee did for its audience. By featuring a healthy, happy, young activist, perhaps the film will positively inspire others to take action towards climate change in the years to come.