Climate movies/films are mainstream or independent films that include significant references to human-caused climate change. Climate may be the central theme or one of several themes. Narrative climate films tell a fictional story involving climate change. Documentary climate films tell a creative nonfiction story involving climate change.
Narrative Climate Films | Documentary Climate Films
More Climate Mentions in Film
Climate Film Festival
Improving Climate Representation in Film
Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change
Climate Reality Check
Narrative Climate Films
- Beasts of the Southern Wild. Faced with both her hot-tempered father’s fading health and melting ice-caps that flood her ramshackle bayou community and unleash ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy must learn the ways of courage and love.
- Don’t Look Up. Two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humankind of a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth. The comet serves as an allegory for the climate crisis. [Treesong’s Review of Don’t Look Up]
- Snowpiercer. In a future where a failed climate change experiment has killed all life except for the survivors who boarded the Snowpiercer (a train that travels around the globe), a new class system emerges.
- The Day After Tomorrow. Jack Hall, paleoclimatologist, must make a daring trek from Washington, D.C. to New York City to reach his son, trapped in the cross-hairs of a sudden international storm which plunges the planet into a new Ice Age.
- How To Blow Up A Pipeline. A crew of young environmental activists execute a daring mission to sabotage an oil pipeline in this taut and timely thriller that is part high-stakes heist, part radical exploration of the climate crisis. [Treesong’s Review of How To Blow Up A Pipeline]
Documentary Climate Films
- Merchants of Doubt. A documentary that looks at pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities as they speak about topics like toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and climate change.
- An Inconvenient Truth. Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim follows Al Gore on the lecture circuit, as the former presidential candidate campaigns to raise public awareness of the dangers of global warming and calls for immediate action to curb its destructive effects on the environment.
More Climate Mentions in Films
This list focuses on films where climate change plays a significant role. For a longer list of films that mention climate change, check out The Ultimate List of Cli-Fi Films.
Climate Film Festival
The Climate Film Festival is New York City’s first film festival with a focus on climate change. In addition to the annual festival, the organization has year-round programming and provides educational resources in New York City.
Improving Climate Representation in Film
Good Energy is a nonprofit story consultancy for the age of climate change. They aim to make it as easy as possible to portray the climate emergency on-screen in entertaining and artful ways, in any storyline, across every genre.
Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change
Good Energy offers an open-source Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change: a digital guide to portraying climate change on-screen, including story inspiration, cheat sheets, character profiles, solutions, and projections into the future.
Good Energy and the USC Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project produced A Glaring Absence, a groundbreaking report that analyzed 37,453 TV and movie scripts from 2016-2020. Their findings confirm what we all suspected: there is a glaring absence of climate change in scripted media.
Climate Reality Check
Good Energy and the Buck Lab for Climate & Environment have also developed the Climate Reality Check. The Climate Reality Check is a simple tool to evaluate whether the climate crisis is being represented in films, TV shows, and other narratives. It’s inspired by the Bechdel-Wallace Test which measures gender representation.
The Climate Reality Check asks two simple questions:
- Does the story acknowledge that human-caused climate change exists?
- Does a character know that it exists?
According to their research, out of the 250 popular films that they studied, climate change was rarely even present. Only 9.6% of those 250 films passed the Climate Reality Check. Climate change existed in the story world of only 12.8% of the films.
Even when climate change was mentioned in a film, it was rarely mentioned more than once. Climate change was mentioned in two or more scenes in only 3.6% of all films. This means that 96.4% of the films either didn’t mention climate change at all or only mentioned it once in passing.