Understories Reading List #7

This edition surfaces one essential resource, five findings worth keeping from Understories’ Library, a link that matters whether or not you're deep into AI, plus a moment of beauty to carry forward.

This is the penultimate edition of the Reading List's Summer run before the beta version of Understories goes live again, with prior free access to the community of users and subscribers of the Reading List.

As always, questions and suggestions to help shape Understories are welcome.

caroline@understories.io

Thank you for reading,

Caroline 

Thursday, 17 September 2026

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1 . The Library is open

This edition’s pick is for those seeking a living, evidence-based map of what civil society actually knows, and is saying, about climate.

Climate Insights Directory is an open, machine‑readable index of 22,000+ reports, briefs and analyses published by 45 civil society organizations worldwide. Built by a small team of climate communications researchers, its mission is to make non‑academic climate evidence discoverable, comparable, and usable, so practitioners don’t have to rely on paywalled journals or scattered PDFs.

With coverage spanning energy transition, adaptation, finance, carbon pricing and more, the Directory helps communicators, advocates and journalists surface credible insights from NGOs and think tanks across regions. Its free, searchable interface and structured metadata offer topic filters, organization tags and document types that turn a sprawling evidence base into something you can actually work with. A plus? Its AI Transparency Notice!

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

• COMMUNICATIONS: Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about climate change (2017)

  • This study introduces inoculation theory applied to climate misinformation: pre-emptively exposing audiences to weakened forms of denial builds resistance to the real thing. One of the most cited studies in the prebunking literature. 

• MOBILISATION: Next Gen News 2: Anticipating the Audiences of 2030 and the Strategies to Meet Them (2025) 

  • KnightLab research on how younger generations consume, evaluate, and engage with news. Reframes assumptions about news avoidance and charts what kinds of journalism build trust with Gen Z.

• NARRATIVE: Transforming the Stories We Tell About Climate Change: From 'Issue' to 'Action' (2021)

  • This research paper argues that climate communications has been stuck in a problem-issue frame and proposes a shift to an action frame rooted in agency. Offers a practical narrative architecture for campaigners.

• PSYCHOLOGY: Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus (2017)

  • Demonstrates that cultural identity, not lack of information, drives climate scepticism. People filter scientific evidence through their worldview — a finding that fundamentally challenges deficit-model approaches to communication.

• PUBLIC OPINION: Climate change and energy in the Indonesian mind (2024)

  • Yale's look at climate opinion in Indonesia — the world's fourth most populous country, probing everything from policy support to how Islamic charitable giving could fund the energy transition. The headline: Indonesians barely recognize the term "climate change," yet once it's briefly explained, belief, worry, and policy support all run high.

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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

Climate Advocacy Lab has just published a new report, “AI Usage and Attitudes in the Climate Movement”. It opens with questions that will feel familiar: How are climate advocates contending with the emergence of AI? Who’s using it, and who isn’t? How are they navigating the ethical and strategic dilemmas it presents?

The data is telling: only 40% of respondents work in organizations with AI policies, even as 71% say their teams are discussing negative impacts. Among daily users, 64% still flag environmental concerns, and nearly half rate themselves as beginners or having no AI experience—pointing to a movement-wide capacity gap around using these tools efficiently, sustainably and responsibly.

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

It’s by Canadian photographer David Burdeny who shot it from a zodiac, about 100 feet from its base, handheld with a Phase One digital back. He titled it Mercator's Projection because the iceberg and its shadow split the frame into four near-perfect quadrants — a visual echo of the map projection that famously distorts the poles while centering navigation.

It belongs to his North/South series, which documents fragile shorelines and monolithic ice formations in Antarctica and Greenland. Burdeny’s website hosts other series: Salt, Tulips, Italy, where his architectural training shows, mingling geometric rigor with natural forms.

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