The Climate Action Almanac brings together top science fiction authors with researchers, artists, scientists, and advocates from around the world to share visions of positive climate futures. These works of fiction, nonfiction, and art chart pathways toward a vibrant, decarbonized future. They are grounded in real science and honor local particularities, insisting upon equity and justice and imagining efforts that could be scaled out for coordinated global change.
The Almanac is presented by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, in partnership with the MIT Press, and supported by a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation. The book is edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, with illustrations by João Queiroz.
Visit our About page to learn more about our partners, and about the history of this project.
Stories are a powerful tool not just for imagining possible futures, but for shepherding them into being. The fiction and essays in this section dramatize how stories about who we are, and how we fit into the places we inhabit, can evoke new definitions of community and catalyze efforts for concrete change.
Societies across the globe are urbanizing at a dizzying rate. As we contend with the consequences of the climate crisis and coordinate to react, adapt, and mitigate its worst effects, we will need to use our cities as engines of change and laboratories for sustainable living at scale. In this section, our contributors explore how transformations in architecture and the built environment can help us adapt to a world of more extreme and dangerous weather, and instill a sense of wonder and civic pride by channeling human ingenuity into climate action.
As we reach for visions of the future where climate action helps us build a verdant, thriving world, we also need to process our grief about all that we have lost, and will continue to lose, to climate chaos. The stories and essays in this section reflect on individual and collective trauma, and consider how it might motivate efforts to build a better future for ourselves, our human communities, and the broader nonhuman world.
Transforming carbon-intensive economies and societies to ones powered by clean energy is an absolute necessity in the face of the climate crisis, but the process of transition will be rocky, especially in places shaped by the economics and cultures of fossil-fuel extraction. In this section, our contributors envision pathways to clean-energy communities in Scotland, Norway, and southern Nigeria, imagining new political coalitions and modes of governance and decision-making.
The pieces in this concluding section grapple with the violence and messiness of the past, considering how much we ought to look back as we press forward with climate action. They ask: How can we learn from and engage the past productively as the foundation for a better future?
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The Climate Action Almanac is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). We hope that you will read it and share with colleagues, students, friends and family, and members of your communities.
