Two years ago, I wrote here in Forbes that a new industry had arrived at Climate Week: entertainment.

Film and television people were suddenly appearing alongside the traditional Climate Week crowd of policymakers, scientists, financiers and sustainability professionals. I welcomed that development, because as I argued then, the power of imagination, storytelling and compelling narratives should sit alongside policy and science.

This year, something bigger is happening.

At Climate Week NYC 2026, narrative change is becoming a serious climate discipline in its own right. There are events about journalism and media as might be expected. But also gatherings dedicated to horror movies, reality TV, novels, corporate communications, nature, comedy, political messaging, marketing, music, fashion and children’s emotional responses to extreme weather.

There are workshops teaching people how to tell stories, research into who is telling them, discussions on which stories reach different audiences and a growing recognition that communication itself can be a climate solution.

As well as celebrating this, I’m also whispering ‘at last’ under my breath. I’ve long argued that storytelling and communications should sit alongside, and equal to, other climate solutions like renewables technology and regenerative agriculture. Because narrative is a systemic tool for transformation with a longer history of effectiveness than any other.

Stories are the programming language for human beings. If we don’t get that right, the rest of our efforts may be in vain.

And I’m pleased that Climate Week NYC has caught up with that in the transformative way it always does!

Look at this tiny taster of what’s happening across New York this September:

September 20: The Story Begins

Before the week even officially starts we have:

The Climate Film Festival’s Media for the Planet: Legacies of Goodall, Redford, and Turner and the Next Wave brings together film, journalism, conservation and philanthropy to examine the extraordinary influence of Jane Goodall, Robert Redford and Ted Turner.

That same day, Environmental Writing for Climate Week NYC 2026 begins an experiment at the opposite end of the scale. Anyone, anywhere, can spend time observing their immediate environment and write about what they notice. It deliberately grounds climate in lived experience rather than abstraction.

September 21: Narrative Change Gets A Summit

The day-long Narrative Change Summit , part of the Climate Film Festival, brings filmmakers together with entrepreneurs, studios with creators, journalists with philanthropists, and scientists with communications and marketing leaders.

The programme is fascinating precisely because it doesn’t assume there is one thing called a “climate audience”, a few sessions really jumped out:

Reaching Unexpected Audiences Through Unscripted Reality , asks whether the growing insurance crisis can reach people who have already tuned out conventional climate messaging.

It’s A Scream: Horror, Comedy, And The Golden Age Of Climate Genre explores the increasingly blurred relationship between comedy and horror and why those genres may be unusually powerful vehicles for climate stories.

Journalism Is An Effective Climate Solution , presented with Covering Climate Now, makes an argument I hope we hear much more often: strong reporting can itself be a solution, by exposing wrongdoing, building public understanding and holding institutions accountable.

All three sessions, and the full Summit programme, can be found at the Narrative Change Summit event page .

Also on Monday, Stories That Move spends an entire day connecting journalism, documentary, immersive media and oral history with environmental justice movement-building. Its starting point is particularly important: communities experiencing environmental injustice are too often absent from the narratives that subsequently shape public understanding, investment or policy.

The other major home for this conversation is Solutions House NYC , which my colleagues at Futerra and I have created around a simple principle: climate solutions have to move from the margins into the mainstream.

Full disclosure: I’m involved and will be hosting some of the sessions! But even allowing for my magnificent lack of objectivity, the range of storytelling conversations taking place there tells us something about how much this agenda has expanded:

Who’s Really Talking About Climate? , launches the new Talking Climate Collaborative alongside the first landscape assessment mapping climate communicators across the US and Canada. The assessment found that 97% of communicators surveyed believed they could do more with the right support.

At Worldbuilding Better (Or Worse) Worlds , Grist’s Tory Stephens will join novelists to ask why writers can convince readers that dragons, interstellar empires and alternative histories are plausible, while society struggles to imagine an economy running differently from the one we have today. He’s be joined by bestselling novelist Jo Piazza, and I’ll be there too, celebrating the US publication of my climate-adventure novel Godstorm , so consider this another disclosure of extreme bias.

September 22: From Stories To Strategy

The YEARS Project’s Climate Storytelling: A Masterclass goes directly into craft, bringing experienced storytellers together to teach how narratives can move people rather than merely inform them.

Flavors from Our Earth: Food Memory Story Booth invites people to record short personal stories about recipes and ingredients that connect food, culture and ancestry, building a living archive of traditions being reshaped by climate change

Solutions House goes full in on storytelling on Tuesday:

Big Storms, Big Feelings digs into how entertainers, storytellers and educators help young children process the extreme weather they are increasingly experiencing. With an in-person visit from Elmo!

The Jargon Detox turns the spotlight on one of our movement’s oldest bad habits: speaking a language almost nobody outside the climate world would voluntarily use. The Climate Week calendar rather wonderfully describes this as a session on “how not to talk about climate”.

And for a NSFW close, Can Sex Sell…Climate? , from Yellow Dot Studios, examines whether comedy, shock value and sex appeal might reach audiences that carefully worded institutional communications never will.

September 23: Business And Journalism Join In

At Antenna House, The State Of Climate Storytelling brings together journalists to examine how climate journalism is changing in a period when “net zero” is disappearing from some corporate and political language and the economics of clean technology are becoming increasingly central to the story.

In the evening, Grist celebrates a decade of its solutions journalism with Rewriting The Climate Story: 10 Years Of Solutions . The event brings together people who have actually reshaped industries, influenced policy and changed communities.

September 24: Creativity Becomes Collective Power

I’m particularly looking forward to Creative Climate Forum at Pier 57 which devotes an entire day to culture, creativity, justice and public imagination.

There are sessions on dismantling harmful narratives, culture as a catalyst for action, reconnecting people with nature and climate storytelling in an age of disinformation.

Also Winning Climate Communications asks: if politicians, media organisations and institutions are increasingly talking less about climate even as people experience worsening extreme weather and energy costs, what communications strategies can build durable public support now?

September 25: Hand People The Camera

Climate Captured: Fireside & Story Booth turns participants themselves into storytellers.

The virtual session brings together youth leaders, diplomats, policymakers and storytellers before putting participants through a rapid story booth where they record their own two-minute climate story with coaching on framing and structure.

This isn’t a definitive list. It’s missing events I know about, and speaking at and looking forward to! I deliberately chose just a few examples to demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of subjects, formats and communities now working on narrative change.

Taken together they show how climate storytelling is moving beyond awareness.

Two years ago, I wrote that the entertainment industry had joined Climate Week. This year, Climate Week has discovered the power of story.