Study finds climate change rarely featured in modern fiction

Climate change, one of the world’s most urgent challenges, is largely absent from contemporary fiction, according to a study by researchers at Rice University and Colby College.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Communication, found that more than 90% of short stories published in The New Yorker between 2014 and 2023 did not meaningfully address climate change or other major environmental issues.

Researchers examined 474 original short stories using the Strategic Environmental Narratives codebook, a framework developed to assess how environmental themes are represented in fiction.

Only 10.1% of the stories meaningfully referenced climate change, while 20.9% mentioned broader environmental issues such as pollution, deforestation or biodiversity loss, the study found.

When environmental topics did appear, they were often brief and rarely linked to human activities or potential solutions.

Lead author Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an associate professor of English and creative writing at Rice University and director of its Program in Environmental Studies, said the findings point to a gap between contemporary storytelling and one of the defining issues of the modern era.

“Climate change exacerbates economic, political and social problems, including inequality, migration and political instability,” Schneider-Mayerson said.

“Avoiding, marginalizing and minimizing the climate and nature crises in popular storytelling makes unimaginably catastrophic futures more likely,” he added.

The researchers said fiction plays an important role in shaping how people understand society and imagine the future, making the limited treatment of climate change particularly significant.

“In an era saturated with narratives across media, it is the collective presence or absence of environmental content that exerts the most powerful and lasting impact on public attitudes, beliefs and behavior in relation to climate change and other environmental challenges,” Schneider-Mayerson said.

The findings surprised the researchers because The New Yorker is widely known for its extensive reporting on climate change and environmental issues.

The study found climate change appeared in the magazine’s fiction at nearly the same rate as in mainstream films during the same period. Unlike previous studies of films, however, the researchers found no evidence that climate-related themes became more common in the magazine’s fiction over time.

“We found that the presence of climate change was nearly the same in the overlapping years,” Schneider-Mayerson said. “One of the major takeaways from the film study was that the rate of inclusion increased significantly over time. Surprisingly, we did not see that trend in the short stories. The trend was flat.”

The researchers said fiction need not become overtly political or instructional to contribute to climate awareness. Instead, they said, authors could incorporate environmental realities into everyday narratives by depicting sustainable lifestyles, acknowledging environmental consequences or reflecting the effects of climate change in ordinary settings.

“Our results suggest that contemporary fiction is failing to even acknowledge what is happening to and around us,” Schneider-Mayerson said. “If literature continues to largely ignore the climate and nature crises, it is, at best, distracting readers from the real world and, at worst, deluding them about it.”

The researchers said integrating environmental realities into cultural narratives could help shape public understanding as climate change increasingly affects societies through extreme weather, food insecurity, migration and biodiversity loss.