Understories Reading List #8

This one's a bit special. 

First, because Understories is now live: you can try it and Test Your Message. 

Second, because it is the last issue of the Library series.

Inside: UNESCO's hub for environmental reporters, five new reports in the Library, a Forbes Communications Council roundup on what AI can do for comms beyond drafting, and a closing on code and textile.

A new series, Narrative, starts at the end of October. 

Thank you for joining along. Stay tuned.

Caroline Prak,

Thursday, 1 October 2026

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1 . The Library is open

For this series' last pick, I wanted a globally grounded and trustworthy resource. UNESCO's Reporting the Environment: Resources for Journalists fits. It's the companion hub to a 2026 practical manual from UNESCO and the OSCE, built for newsrooms but useful well beyond them.

The UNESCO resource hub collects treaties, data and mapping tools, training guides and investigations, organised chapter by chapter. It helps surface credible, rights-based angles across beats and borders. Whether you're investigating carbon markets, covering climate displacement, or navigating environmental defamation laws, it turns a technical landscape into something you can actually use.

2. Five new reports in the Library, and what they found

• COMMUNICATIONS: Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science-Action Gap (2011)

  • A foundational audit of why climate science fails to produce public action, examining the gap between what scientists communicate and what audiences receive. An important reading for anyone designing climate messaging from scratch.

• MOBILISATION: Blueprint for a Multiracial, Cross-Class Climate Movement: The Report on Coalitions (2025) 

  • Most advice on coalitions focuses on tactics. This report focuses on culture. It offers a new framework centred on ‘Strategic Culture’, along with hard-won lessons on subgroup governance, funder influence, and conflict.

• NARRATIVE: A Theory of Narrative Empathy (2006)

  • Why does a story move you when a statistic doesn't? Suzanne Keen's foundational theory maps how narrative empathy works: bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast strategies.

• PSYCHOLOGY: The Psychology of Climate Change Communication (2009)

  • The reference guide for climate communicators, covering cognitive biases, emotional processing, social norms, and the psychology of risk perception. Dense with actionable principles drawn from behavioural science.

• PUBLIC OPINION: Britain Talks Climate & Nature 2025 (2025)

  • Updated edition of Climate Outreach's signature UK segmentation study, mapping where British publics stand on climate and nature in 2025. Essential for UK-facing communications strategy.

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Want to stay ahead of the curve? Join the Reading List.

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3 . A link on AI & [climate] comms worth watching

Forbes Communications Council published a useful antidote to the idea that AI's main job in communications is to produce more words, faster. In 20 Ways AI Can Transform Comms Workflows Beyond Content Creation, council members make the case for AI as a tool for institutional memory, signal detection, message testing, and navigating the approval maze, not simply drafting posts.

The phrase worth keeping is Amanda Simonian's "context without the archaeology": instant access to what an organisation has said before, why it said it, and what changed. Another contributor adds the other half: catching your old position before a journalist does. The piece is about corporate comms, not climate, but for communicators working on complex, contested issues, the use case travels.

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

As I spent the last six weeks programming the code for Understories, my research naturally shifted from a prototype where threads were everywhere to a codebase governed by a different logic. 

That’s how I came across the work of Anna Lucia Goense, who reveals, like Ada Lovelace before her, the kinship between code and weaving: both are binary systems, built on grids of yes/no, stitch/no stitch, 1/0. In an overwhelming digital and artificial world, wondering if the first programmers weren’t engineers but weavers makes sense. Goense, a civil engineer turned generative artist, bridges digital and tactile worlds by translating textile logic into algorithms, then back into embroidered fabric using programmable machines. Amazing.

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