Positive climate futures, crafted by an international group of contributors, grounded in real science and in the complexities of diverse human and physical geographies.   

When we think of climate, the stories we tell about the future are bad: megastorms, crop failures, and heat waves loom over us, sending a signal that the problem is so vast, so complex, that it’s out of our control. That narrative is compelling for some, but leaves others feeling hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned. Even the most ardent champions of decarbonization sometimes focus more on sounding the alarm than on imagining and mapping out what success might look like. Without positive climate futures, visions of climate adaptation and resilience that we can work toward, it’s much harder to motivate broad-based efforts for change in the present.

The Climate Action Almanac seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world. This book features perspectives on climate futures from authors based in a diverse range of places, each with their own unique opportunities and challenges for climate action: from China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, and the United States, and more.

We need hopeful stories about how collective action, aided by scientific insights, culturally responsive technologies, and revolutions in governance and labor, can help us make progress toward inclusive, sustainable futures. These visions should center on how we can create a vibrant, thriving, interconnected global society that celebrates local variations and solutions while achieving the international coordination and shared values we need to meet the challenges of climate chaos. The writing and art in this Almanac are experiments in creating these types of future visions: ones which catalyze action now, when the window during which we can stave off the worst consequences of the climate crisis is closing rapidly.

The Almanac grows out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021. The fellowship was funded by a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation, and presented in partnership with the United Nations High-Level Climate Champions and TED Countdown. The fellowship brought together four science fiction authors to create compelling visions of positive futures shaped by climate action: Libia Brenda, Hannah Onoguwe, Gu Shi, and Vandana Singh.

To kick off the fellowship, we hosted a number of public conversations to explore possible configurations of climate action, to expand our imagination about climate futures, and to consider how to tell compelling stories about communities in flux. During these conversations—many of which were recorded, and are available to watch in the Videos section of this digital book—our fellows interacted with scholars, policymakers, and students from around the world. The conversations unfolded largely in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland in the fall of 2021, including two activities at the TED Countdown summit for climate action: a TED talk by our fellow Vandana Singh and a workshop on climate storytelling with Vandana and Kim Stanley Robinson, our project’s senior advisor.

These interactions shaped the stories that our fellows crafted for the project, and have informed the essays in this book, which explore topics ranging from clean-energy transitions and urban design to gardening, the ethics of air travel, the psychic toll exacted by climate-accelerated disasters, the challenges of forging relationships with nonhuman species, and the long history of data gathering and monitoring of Earth’s climate.

We hope that these science fiction stories, essays, and artworks serve as an invitation for readers to imagine their own climate futures—to feel both agency and responsibility for defining a possible future that spurs us to take action today.

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.  

The book is presented by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, along with the ClimateWorks Foundation and the MIT Press.