The End of the Impact Narrative

The State of Climate Action 2025 report arrived like so many others before it—densely footnoted, sober in tone, filled with charts tracking the world’s failure to change course. Yet something about this one felt heavier, not because the data was worse (though it was), but because it seemed to mark the end of a particular kind of faith. Reading it, I realized that the belief sustaining so much of my own work—the idea that storytelling could help close the gap between knowledge and action—might finally be breaking.

For years, the impact narrative has became a go-to trope for storytelling. It told us that if people could just see—the fires, the floods, the faces—they would act. And they did see. Audiences donated, voted, marched. Yet global emissions rose, coal plants reopened, and forests disappeared at nearly eight million hectares a year. Halfway through what was once called “the decisive decade,” urgency is fading. The report’s authors admit as much: none of the forty-five indicators they track are on pace to meet 1.5 °C-aligned targets, and several are moving backward. Fossil-fuel finance has grown, not shrunk. Political will has withered in the face of short-term profit.

The report was meant to be a roadmap. Instead, it reads like a eulogy—for progress, for consensus, and perhaps for the notion that more stories, more data, more visibility will save us.

The Mirage of Impact

The impact narrative was born from optimism. It was the animating principle behind decades of campaigns, documentaries, and initiatives that sought to pair art with measurable outcomes. “Storytelling for change” became an industry, complete with metrics, funder dashboards, and theories of change. For a while, it worked. Films mobilized movements; communication shifted norms. Visibility itself was a form of power.

But the world changed faster than the story about changing it. Visibility no longer guarantees accountability. Empathy, once treated as an infinite resource, now feels exhausted. The same tools that once amplified voices now flatten them, scattering attention across endless crises. In an age of perpetual exposure, story no longer pierces—it scrolls by.

The State of Climate Action 2025 doesn’t say this outright, but it exposes the problem through its structure. Every figure, every chart, every “pathway to alignment” reveals the same dissonance: we know exactly what to do and exactly how little we’re doing. Data and storytelling now run on parallel tracks—one measures collapse, the other pleads against it. Neither has the leverage to turn the wheel.

“Visibility no longer guarantees accountability. Empathy, once treated as an infinite resource, now feels exhausted. The same tools that once amplified voices now flatten them, scattering attention across endless crises. In an age of perpetual exposure, story no longer pierces—it scrolls by.”

The Grappling

What, then, are we supposed to do with this? I’ve spent much of my career believing that film and story could bridge the gap between information and feeling—that emotion could spark movement where logic failed. But reading this report, I began to wonder whether the bridge itself has collapsed under the weight of repetition.

Maybe we have reached the end of the impact narrative, not because story has lost its beauty or truth, but because the systems it hoped to change have become impervious to beauty and truth alike. Storytelling can reach hearts, but hearts are not the engines of global policy or capital. The feedback loops of emotion are too slow for the accelerations of crisis.

Still, abandoning impact feels impossible. Storytelling is the only tool many of us know for meaning-making. So the grappling begins: if story can no longer save us, what can it still do?

Witness Instead of Weapon

Perhaps the function of storytelling now is not persuasion, but witness. When impact fails, record remains. Stories can document how it felt to live through this hinge in history—what communities did with what little time and agency they had. They can show not the macro sweep of climate policy, but the micro texture of adaptation: a teacher whose classroom floods each spring, a farmer rebuilding soil, a child learning that “normal weather” is a story older generations told.

This kind of storytelling doesn’t seek measurable outcomes; it seeks fidelity to experience. It’s slower, smaller, and more honest about limits. It trades ambition for attention. It recognizes that while global systems may resist transformation, local realities never stop changing. And sometimes, those nonlinear human stories—the ones that follow the S-curve of sudden breakthrough after long inertia—teach us more about resilience than any report.

If the impact era asked “How can stories drive change?” the post-impact era might ask “What deserves to be remembered?”

Living in the Gap

Maybe there isn’t a clean “beyond.” Maybe we’re inside the pause between narratives—the moment after belief, before reinvention. The impact framework is collapsing, but nothing coherent has taken its place. That space feels uncomfortable, but also real.

I don’t know what comes next. Maybe storytelling shrinks to smaller, more personal acts of record-keeping. Maybe it fractures into experiment and art. Maybe it just keeps going, out of habit and love, even when no one’s sure why. What matters, for now, is to stay in the work—to look closely, to listen, to keep noticing the world as it changes around us, even when change no longer feels possible.

A Closing Reflection

The State of Climate Action 2025 begins with a call for accelerated action and ends with a plea for alignment. Between those poles lies the collective exhaustion of a planet that has heard too many wake-up calls. Maybe what’s needed now is not another alarm, but an accounting. To stop performing urgency and start documenting consequence.

If the age of impact storytelling was defined by belief—in change, in audience, in the moral arc of awareness—then this new era might begin with honesty. We tell stories not because they will fix things, but because not telling them would mean looking away.

Maybe the end of the impact narrative isn’t failure. Maybe it’s the beginning of something truer: stories that no longer promise salvation, but bear witness to what it means to live, to lose, and still to care.