This is Understories’ Reading List, a fortnightly email for people who bridge climate science, narrative, and action. Each edition highlights one essential resource, five findings worth keeping, a link that matters, and a moment of beauty to carry forward.

If you’re here, you’re likely trying to make climate communication land better without losing rigor.

This is handmade, and suggestions to help shape Understories are welcome: caroline@understories.io

Thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing—whether it’s your first or sixth edition.

Caroline 

Thursday, 3 September 2026

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1 . The Library is open

This edition's pick is for those seeking rigorous, solutions-focused climate journalism that audiences and policymakers can’t ignore.

Covering Climate Now (CCN) is a global collaboration of 500+ newsrooms in 60 countries, co-founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation. Their mission? To elevate climate journalism—rigorous, solutions-focused, and accessible—so audiences and policymakers can’t look away. From training reporters to debunking misinformation, CCN empowers media to treat the climate crisis as the defining story of our time.

With a reach of 2 billion people, CCN’s free resources help communicators bridge gaps between science, policy, and public action. They offer guides, plain-language frames, myth-busting templates, and story structures that reduce abstraction and increase agency.

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

• COMMUNICATIONS: Communicating Climate Futures: A Multi-Country Study on IPCC Scenarios (2024)

  • This peer-reviewed study examines how mainstream media covered the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)—even as IPCC scientists flag scenario communication as a top challenge. For practitioners: avoid jargon-heavy scenario labels; anchor stories in concrete choices and near-term trade-offs people can see.

• MOBILISATION: Every Day Is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-Term Impact of Environmental Activism (2023) 

  • Using the original Earth Day (1970) as a natural experiment, this paper tests whether short-term volunteer activism produces measurable, lasting benefits. Takeaway for campaign designers: pair mass-moment mobilization with durable, local roles and repeated low-barrier actions to convert spikes of participation into sustained engagement.

• NARRATIVE: How Do Other Fields Think About Narrative? Lessons for Narrative Change Practitioners (2021)

  • Stepping outside usual climate references, this report asks what marketing, entertainment/narrative arts, psychoanalysis, and technology/disinformation experts know about storytelling that could help narrative-change work. For comms teams: borrow tested devices (character arcs, tension/release, identity cues) and pre-bunking tactics to make climate frames stickier and more resistant to counter-messaging.

• PSYCHOLOGY: Addressing Climate Change with Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries (2024)

  • This large-scale tournament crowdsourced 11 behavioral-science interventions and tested them head-to-head against a no-intervention control across diverse contexts. Practical implication: prioritize simple, socially visible actions (e.g., public commitments, norm feedback) and test locally—effects vary by culture and baseline beliefs.

• PUBLIC OPINION: Globally Representative Evidence on the Actual and Perceived Support for Climate Action (2024)

  • This study fills a gap in climate behavioral science by measuring both people’s actual willingness to bear personal costs for climate action and how they perceive others’ willingness. For messengers: correct the “support gap” misperception—show that pro-climate action is more common and costly-ready than people assume, which can unlock further participation.

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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

The Guardian's piece, "AI altering meaning of users' drafts on issues including abortion and climate, study finds”, on the Oxford and Potsdam study is exactly what journalists, academics, practitioners and policymakers need to be reactive to. Its finding? Drafting tools nudge posts toward the mainstream, quietly reshaping what gets said before it's even said.

The climate example is telling: a denialist post came back as a call for action once AI had polished it. Bias crept in even when the Oxford and Hasso Plattner researchers told the models — from xAI, Meta, Google, Alibaba and Mistral — to preserve the original sense. It's a problem we've been chewing on in Understories' FAQ — an ethical check and a public library are guardrails, among others, against suggestions carrying a hidden editorial point of view inside black boxes. What else would you add?

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

The photo is all steppe and sky — a horizon that doesn't end, grass moving under wind you can't hear, horses scattered across it. A scale that makes you feel small in a way that isn't diminishing.

But more than contemplation: the subject is B., 30, who herds yaks and goats, and gets her electricity from solar panels. When winter arrives, and the mercury drops to -50°C, that frugal setup turns into a different story: one where the panels run more than lights. There's compute in there. And AI.

Ottavia Brussino spent a week with B. and shared a fragment of it on LinkedIn: "Interesting times to be alive," indeed.

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