Climate Content for all Ages

Climate Content

A story doesn’t have to be about climate change to include climate content. Content that supports a world able to survive climate collapse can be about values, love of nature, or normalizing better behaviours. Incorporating climate into your on-screen content can start with a few simple approaches, regardless of genre, audience, or budget.

• Discuss it early: Consider the planet, the environment and sustainability at the outset, rather than adding it later. The natural world and climate change open up vast opportunities for storytelling, but many work best only if they're part of early creative conversations, rather than shoe-horned in later.
• Build sustainability into characters:  The concerns of climate change are ultimately about the impact it will have on people and communities. Characters can carry climate values through their choices, desires, relationships, worries, and actions. Consider using relatable characters (not stereotypes!) and narratives to model environmentally positive actions and support environmental awareness.
• Make it part of the world:  The environment and nature, can be part of your world either in the foreground or background. Where appropriate for the story, consider incorporating background elements (e.g., recycling, sustainable habits, ecosystem details) to normalize environmental behaviour without requiring explicit messaging. Consider the story potential of something happening in the environment and how it might impact the lives of your characters in a way that serves your story.

Use our Tipsheet: Climate Storytelling for Animation Creatives for a list of questions worth asking early — in development, in the writers' room, in the design phase — before the world is locked and the opportunity has passed.

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Children and Youth Audiences

Animation can do something no other medium can. Unbound by physical reality, it can put a child inside a melting glacier, give a forest its own interior life, and make the abstract challenge of climate change visible, tangible, and emotionally real.

That matters because children are not passive audiences- hey are developing their understanding of how the world works, what is worth caring about, and what kind of future is possible. For a generation growing up with climate anxiety as a backdrop to daily life, animation has a unique opportunity to shape not only awareness, but hope and agency.

What the Research Says

Research shows that environmental storytelling can have a lasting impact. A peer-reviewed study published in The Journal of Environmental Education found that watching WALL-E measurably improved children's understanding of the relationship between human behaviour and the natural world. Another study from the Journal of Children and Media found that watching a single episode of the PBS Kids animated series Nature Cat shifted children's emotional relationship with the natural world, making them significantly more concerned about environmental issues. 

These findings tell us that stories about the environment reach children at a deep level, and it underscores that how we tell these stories matters enormously. Content that raises alarm without offering agency, understanding, or hope risks leaving young viewers more anxious and less equipped.

The Children's Media Gap on Climate

Despite this potential, climate remains largely absent from children's media. In 2022, the Aspen Institute's This Is Planet Ed initiative reviewed 664 episodes of educational and nature-themed children's television and found only nine with any direct reference to climate change—just 1.4% of those reviewed. None of the twenty most popular family films of 2021 featured climate-related themes.

Yet demand exists. An NPR poll found that 84% of parents believe children should learn about climate change, while only 45% have had that conversation with their children. Children's media can help bridge that gap by providing an engaging starting point for families.

The Aspen Institute identified Molly of Denali as one example of climate storytelling done well. The Peabody Award-winning series, co-produced by Vancouver's Atomic Cartoons, was recognized for its age-appropriate, solutions-focused approach, connecting children to the environment through Indigenous knowledge and lived experience rather than fear.

The opportunity for producers is significant. By weaving environmental themes naturally into the worlds they create—not as lessons, but as part of compelling stories—they can inspire curiosity, connection, and optimism while creating content that resonates with children, families, and the realities of the world they are inheriting.

Climate Content Across the Ages

Research tells us that children who encounter climate content without a sense of agency or resolution can come away more worried and less equipped, while adults generally respond better to stories that emphasize relevance, solutions, and collective action

Preschool (2–5): Wonder before Worry 

Young children aren’t ready for climate facts, they are ready for building  relationships with the natural world. Stories that inspire curiosity about forests, animals, seasons, or outdoor play help build lifelong environmental values. Bluey (name producer, network) illustrates this approach, making nature - backyards, insects, mud - feel joyful and worth exploring without ever mentioning climate change.

Early elementary (6–8): Agency before Alarm

As children begin to understand cause and effect, they also need to see what they—and the characters they admire—can do.  Keep it concrete, keep it local, and keep the emotional register hopeful. Molly of Denali is the model here: connecting its young protagonist to a vivid, living landscape, showing that paying attention, caring, and taking action are all important and within a child's reach.Molly notices the world around her. She acts within it. She belongs to it. A child watching learns, almost without realizing it, that the natural world is worth knowing and worth protecting.

Middle grades (9–12): Complexity before Catastrophe

This is where the conversation can open up. Children at this age are developing abstract thinking, civic awareness, and genuine scientific curiosity. They are also, increasingly, already anxious about climate change — they've heard about it, thought about it, and formed feelings about it. 

Older children are ready for bigger conversations. They can engage with systems thinking, civic awareness, environmental justice, and collective action, but still need stories that show challenges are solvable. Rather than shielding them from difficult realities, help them understand where they fit within them.

Teens (13+): Honesty before Hope

The teen bracket is where you stop protecting and start respecting. The research is clear — teens are already informed, concerned, furious, and deeply attuned to condescension. They don't need environmental issues simplified or moralized. They respond best to honest, nuanced stories that acknowledge uncertainty while connecting people to action, community, and meaningful change. 

Adults

Unlike children's programming, adult animation is rarely designed to teach specific lessons. Its strength lies in reflecting the complexity, humour, contradictions, and lived experiences of adult life. In a Yale study on climate communication, research suggested that audiences are generally more engaged by stories that connect environmental issues to familiar relationships, identities, and everyday experiences than by information alone. That might mean a family navigating rising food costs brought on by drought and tough growing conditions, neighbours rebuilding after a flood, a farmer adapting to changing seasons, coworkers debating an office sustainability initiative, or friends sharing their experiences of switching to electric vehicles. Rather than positioning climate as the subject of the story, creators can weave it naturally into characters, settings, workplaces, and communities—making environmental change feel like part of the world audiences already recognize. With adult audiences, the goal is not to persuade through messaging, but to tell compelling stories that reflect the realities of a changing world while leaving room for hope, humour, and imagination.