"Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis."
The climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination - and imagination is what we do best.
PlanetNarratives is a non-profit initiative empowering filmmakers to use their stories for our planet’s future.
Workshops
We organise climate fiction workshops for scriptwriters.
Panels & Discussions
We host panels for industry decision makers with high-profile speakers in science, activism and storytelling.
Guidance & Research
We support storytelling projects with research and consultancy, from first draft to finished script.
Why we’re in need of new narratives
The climate and biodiversity crises are real, they’re threatening our future, they are already impacting our lives today, and we can only stop them if we work together.
That’s reality – a reality that is largely absent from the stories we tell as filmmakers. Neither the devastating storms, floods, draughts and wildfires are part of our narratives, nor are the dried-out gardens and the dying forests. More importantly: Apparently, the characters within our stories don’t share the worries about the future that actual people outside those stories are living with every day.
A Study by MaLisa Foundation about the presence of climate and biodiversity issues in German TV concludes that a mere 1.8% of total airtime minutes references climate topics, while 62% of the audience wish to see more climate-related content on TV. A Glaring Absence, a comparable US-based study presents similar results, concluding that large parts of the US audience feel that their own worries about the future are not adequately depicted in the characters they see on the big screen.
The reluctance to include these everyday concerns in the stories we tell increasingly leads to an estrangement of film and TV from the lived experience of their audiences, depriving our stories of much of the power they could have.
Including the climate in our storytelling thus lies in the best artistic and economic interest of an industry that can’t but rely on authentic, relatable narratives and characters to truly reach its audiences.
Maybe even more importantly, it is our responsibility as storytellers to leverage the power and reach of well-told stories to do our share and contribute to the socio-economic transformation. Film as a medium can be a powerful agent of societal change. With the images it creates, it can make us understand complicated, unwieldy facts about the world both emotionally and rationally that have seemed unimaginable before, growing the muscles of the imagination we are in dire need of.
By talking about solutions and positive scenarios, by centering what we might be for instead of what we are against, by creating stories of aspiration instead of stories of fear, we have the power to guide our viewers out of their perceived individual helplessness into a new sense of collective self-efficacy.
This superpower we have as filmmakers – the power to tell a gripping story that reaches and touches many – is one of the strongest forces we can mobilise in the fight to prevent the loss of a livable future.
Team
Nicole Zabel-Wasmuth is an expert in media and environmental law with years of experience in the film industry. Lars Jessen is an award-winning film director and producer. They have a shared passion for good stories – and a shared unease about the fact that narratives about our future don’t really play a part in the stories we tell.
With PlanetNarratives and its high-caliber network of experts on film, TV, climate science, climate, psychology, and climate communication, they set out to change this situation: By empowering storycrafters to tap into their huge potential for spinning thrilling yarns to pull us into a better future by.

Nicole Zabel-Wasmuth

Lars Jessen
"Few things can change us as deeply as a well-told story can."
Network
PlanetNarratives is part of non-profit initiative Mission Value.
In developing our content and implementing our events, we collaborate closely with leading experts in the fields of climate and transformation science, climate communication, climate psychology and storytelling.
Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf is a climate scientist and one of the leading authors of the fourth IPCC report. He is one of the most-cited researchers globally in his area of expertise.
Prof. Maren Urner is a neuroscientist and professor for media psychology at the Cologne Media University for Applied Sciences. In 2016, Urner founded the first ad-free online magazine for constructive journalism “Perspective Daily”. She is a columnist for German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, and her books “Schluss mit dem täglichen Weltuntergang” (Enough with the daily apocalypse) and “Raus aus der ewigen Dauerkrise” (Get out of the eternal crisis) are both bestsellers.
Samira El Ouassil is an actress, musician and author for Übermedien and Spiegel, among others. With Friedemann Karig, she wrote “Erzählende Affen” (Storytelling apes) – a book about the ambivalent power of stories, about which kinds of stories are a threat to us today and about why we need new ones.
Katharina van Bronswijk is spokesperson at Psychologists and Psychotherapists for Future, and as such, she is an expert for the complex interplay between environmental crises and mental health. In this field, she regularly gives talks and interviews and has written two books: “Climate Action – Psychologie der Klimakrise” (Psychology of the Climate Crisis) and “Klima im Kopf” (Climate on your mind).
Silke Zertz has written scripts for over fourty feature films and series in German TV. For her work, she was awarded both the Deutscher Filmpreis and the Bavarian Filmpreis, two high-profile TV awards. For many years, she has been promoting in theory and practice the acknowledgement and use of the power of popcultural narratives to fight the climate crisis.
Dr. Insa Thiele-Eich is a meteorologist, scientific coordinator at Bonn university’s meteorological institute and a candidate to be the first female astronaut in Germany.
Moritz Vierboom is an actor and co-founder of Changemakers.film – an initiative that contributed significantly to making the film industry more sustainable by establishing ecological standards for filmmaking.
"What we cannot imagine, cannot come into being."