From the Opening Ceremony onwards, something felt different at Climate Week NYC this year. For ten years, Climate Group CEO Helen Clarkson has opened the week with a list of the record-breaking floods, fires, heatwaves and other climate disasters of the previous twelve months.

This year she noticed she was repeating herself. Then pivoted to the answers!

As always, Helen has caught the mood of the week:

The solution is becoming the story.

This is a welcome development in a movement that has been adept at ringing the warning bell, but less vocal on how to put out the fire.

At Grist’s Rewriting the Climate Story: 10 Years of Solutions , the protagonists weren’t climate impacts. They were the “makers, doers, builders, movers, and dreamers” who had turned ideas into changes in industries, policy and communities.

Vogue’s assessment of Climate Week identified a striking change in mood from 2025. Where last year’s week had “veered toward doomism”, this year’s defining characteristic was described as “defiance”. Imagination and optimism kept recurring across the week.

I should declare an interest here. Solutions House is built around this philosophy with a motto of “Answers Only”.

We took that seriously for our Climate Solutionists Hiding In Plain Sight event with Project Dandelion . Five emerging voices were given five minutes to answer one question: What do you see as a climate solution that the rest of us might be missing? The premise behind the event was that our job isn’t to tell the next generation what climate leadership looks like. It is to hand them the microphone and discover what they have been seeing all along.

Elsewhere, Exponential Roadmap Initiative, Oatly and Beyond Meat asked how we make climate solutions not merely available but normal. Their session Solutions Exist: Make Them The Default deliberately reframed the transition “from restriction to possibility”, moving from what businesses must surrender towards what they can build, scale and make ordinary.

Climate communication has traditionally made the problem vivid but the solution technical. We have starving polar bears but “nature-based solutions”. Burning forests but “electrification of end-use sectors”. Making the solutions simple is an excellent new mantra. But it wasn’t the only one.

We are finally distinguishing messaging from storytelling

Another change is that “narrative” is becoming a more sophisticated word. At Solutions House, our Big Narrative Debate , with TED Countdown and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, began with a frenzied argument.

Everyone says climate needs a new narrative. But do we mean better messaging or better storytelling ? Messaging is the territory of framing, arguments, facts, persuasion and trust. Storytelling works through character, desire, conflict and imagination.

A beautifully framed message about heat pumps is still a message. A television character casually owning a heat pump is something else. One asks an audience to consider an argument. The other helps make a different reality feel normal.

A major Carnegie Endowment report published just before Climate Week argues that the old communications system, in which institutions could reach the public through newspapers, television and other gatekeepers, has fundamentally changed. Social platforms, podcasts, Substacks, creators and messaging apps now form what the authors call the “market for ideas”. Their warning to expert organisations is stark: communicating through traditional media is “no longer sufficient”.

Different messengers need different stories.

Climate communication is becoming infrastructure

Perhaps the most important research for communicators came from the new Talking Climate Collaborative .

Researchers led by Dana R. Fisher at American University mapped the climate communications ecosystem across the US and Canada, surveying 210 leading communicators. It is an hugely useful attempt to understand climate messaging not as a collection of campaigns but as an actual field.

They found that scientists, business people, health experts, faith leaders, teachers, athletes, journalists and creators are all communicating about climate, but too often they are operating separately.

For me, the most worrying part of the survey was that a third of communicators work entirely alone. Creativity and communication have always broken through when a team of folks spark ideas off each other. The loneliness of climate communicators might be part of what’s leading to repeating messaging.

The research found (to no ones suprise) that six in ten haven’t received funding for climate communications in the past five years, despite nearly eight in ten doing the work at least weekly. And we’re still mostly talking to ourselves. Communicators targeting particular sectors named government, policymakers, energy and environment more than five times as often as faith or manufacturing for example.

But we are getting one thing very right . Most of these communicators aren’t trying to change people’s minds about climate itself anymore, Persuasion ranked surprisingly low among goals. Instead, we’re trying to inform people and help them act.

Hopefully, new messengers will help us do exactly that!

Elmo understands something we don’t

One of my favourite moments of Climate Week was the huge honour of interviewing Elmo!

During Big Storms, Big Feelings , Sesame Workshop shared new work on how children and families experience extreme weather. Among parents who had experienced extreme weather, 78% worried about its impact on their children . In the new Storm on Sesame Street , Elmo and his friends prepare for a storm, experience fear, learn how to calm themselves, notice the people helping and discover things they themselves can do.

Elmo told me his big learning was, “So long as you’re with the people you love, you’ll be home. And that’s true in any weather.”

Then he made a room full of hardened climate professionals tear up saying “Elmo loves you!”

Looking forward from solutions to imagination

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the trend came towards the end of the week when UN Climate Change unveiled its new strategy for Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action, ECCA.

I sit on ECCA’s current Steering Committee, so again, declare my bias. But the institutional change is significant. The strategy explicitly connects entertainment and culture with Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, under which governments committed to educating, empowering and engaging the public on climate action. Its ambition is for culture to become an integrated pillar of international climate action, with work spanning film and television, music and visual arts.

UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said something at the launch that I would have struggled to imagine hearing at the centre of international climate diplomacy a decade ago.

“Creative and cultural sectors reach people in ways no communique, report or negotiation text ever could.”

“Climate action does not just need policy and investment. It needs imagination.”