The reports below ask a simple but difficult question: what actually helps climate messages land, and why?

I’ve pulled out the ideas, findings, and phrases that felt most useful, surprising, or unresolved. Thank you for being here. I hope you find something worth taking with you.

Caroline - 23 July 2026

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1 . The Library is open

This edition's pick: RARE | Speak Sustainability page. 

Speak Sustainability offers a growing library of quick-reference tip sheets and country briefs to help communicators craft climate and sustainability messages that stick. Built from the ground up on real data about beliefs, habits, and cultural dynamics, it’s a resource for climate communication to be more than just well-intentioned noise, resonating with Understories’ own approach to grounded, audience-specific storytelling.

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

• COMMUNICATIONS: The Climate Resistance Handbook, 350.org (2022)

• The handbook walks through five areas: dispelling myths about how social movements win, building campaigns, managing organizational growth, designing tactics, and sustaining movement participants emotionally over the long term. Its central analytical tool is the "upside-down triangle": power is not top-down but depends on many groups' ongoing cooperation. Link to the Handbook

  
  

• MOBILISATION: Mobilizing Society Through the Lens of the Imagination, ADEME (2024) 

• Mobilizing French society around the ecological transition depends less on scientific consensus or short-term public policy than on the transformation of collective imaginaries and narratives. The concept of “active” versus “contemplative” imagination assesses whether a message encourages the audience to become active participants rather than mere spectators of change. Read the report [in French].

  
  

• NARRATIVE: Climate Crisis Toolkit for Media in Tanzania, Thomson Foundation (2026)

• Tanzanian journalists across beats face persistent challenges when covering climate change, which impacts the accuracy, reach, and accountability of their reporting. At the same time, evidence from local case studies and practitioner testimony demonstrates that storytelling approaches, such as human-centered narratives and the strategic use of visuals, significantly improve audience engagement and comprehension. Access the Toolkit.

  
  

• PSYCHOLOGY: The Common Cause Handbook, Public Interest Research Centre (2011)

• Appeals to extrinsic values such as wealth, status, and image can undermine long-term social and environmental goals by strengthening counterproductive value sets. In contrast, engaging intrinsic values supports more durable, prosocial engagement. Explore the Handbook.

  
  

• PUBLIC OPINION: Climate Change Beliefs and Their Correlates in Latin America, Nature Communications (2023)

• Political ideology and socio-demographic factors (sex, age, income, education, religion, race) are weak and inconsistent predictors of climate beliefs in Latin America, contradicting patterns well-established in the US and Western Europe where these variables matter considerably more. Read more.

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

From the Washington Post’s “Climate Answers.” Not a flashy title, but an interesting signal: climate media is experimenting with formats that make expertise feel more usable and less gatekept. 

The tool searches the past eight years of Washington Post articles and ranks the results by relevance. It sits somewhere between journalism and an AI-assisted knowledge layer — a reminder that climate communication is increasingly about how information is organized. For communicators, the interesting question is less whether AI is present than how it reshapes authority, access, and trust. Worth a look.

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

It is from Kent Rogowski’s series Love = Love, after the realisation that jigsaw puzzle manufacturers often cut their different puzzles using the same templates.

His words: “Using only the flowers and skies from each of the puzzles, I created a series of entirely new compositions by recombining the puzzle pieces. These spectacular, fantastical and surreal landscapes sit in direct contrast to the banal and bucolic images of the original puzzles.” Words, sentences, messages, and pictures are definitely about patterns, recombination, or meaning from fragments. Read more on WePresent.

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Fortnightly, I’ll share short explainers, key findings, and data points from selected reports as they go live, plus exclusive content.