Transforming the Stories We Tell About Climate Change: From 'Issue' to 'Action'

What the evidence shows

In this study, Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist and director of the UCL Climate Action Unit, argues that the dominant “issue-based” mode of climate communication, which assumes raising awareness, concern, or fear is a necessary precursor to action, is not well supported by evidence and may even backfire. Drawing on cognitive dissonance research, the authors argue that in real life, actions often drive beliefs rather than the reverse, and that self-persuasion (acting first, then justifying it) leads to deeper engagement than persuasion-based messaging.

Building on Bandura’s concept of “agency” (the concrete sense of knowing how to act), the authors propose an “action-based” storytelling model borrowed from entertainment-education and “positive deviance” traditions in health communication. Rather than centering stories on the problem of climate change, this model centers stories on positive outliers who have already found ways to act within specific place-based or professional contexts (their example prototype is a fictional entertainment-education series, “Rhythm and Glue”).

The paper also proposes infrastructure : a coordinated system of mapping, digital “markers,” physical nudges, and human curators (“glue”), to feed a constant stream of localized, action-based reference material to journalists, screenwriters, and educators, modeled loosely on the rapid-response coordination seen during COVID-19 communication.

Key Findings

• Correlations between climate beliefs/concern/worry/anxiety and actual climate-positive behavior are consistently only weak to moderate, across multiple independent studies cited by the authors.

• Attitude shifts produced by climate fiction, film, or news reporting tend to be short-lived: one cited study found attitude changes from reading climate fiction reverted to baseline within about one month.

• Research grant funding for climate change has been split roughly 95% natural science to 5% social science, reflecting an imbalance between “discovery” and “delivery” research modes.

Standout data points

• 5–25%: share of survey respondents who “always/often” took specific pro-environmental food-related actions.

• 3%: share of survey respondents actively campaigning to pressure officials on climate action.

• 95% to 5%: ratio of natural-science to social-science climate research funding.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Emotional resonance Cautions against overweighting fear/concern-based appeals as the primary emotional lever; suggests messages built around agency and self-efficacy instead.

• Hope Doom Balance reinforces that doom-heavy narratives are entrenched and largely ineffective at sustained behavior change.

• Solution focus Directly supports flagging “issue-only” messaging (problem without a modeled path to action) as lower-scoring.

• Beneficience The paper’s central thesis (build agency through modeled action, rather than manufacture fear or urgency) aligns closely with Understories’ goal of driving real behavior change rather than emotional engagement metrics.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

The authors describe what’s needed as “not the menus—but the recipes, cookbooks, and cooking classes of climate action.”

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Library entry updated: 15 September 2026