This essay begins by reviewing the theoretical debates within literary-critical “ecocriticism” over what Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer termed the “anthropocene” and what Jason Moore terms the “capitalocene.” It explains how those debates are implicated in recent climate fiction, which Daniel Bloom dubs “cli-fi.” These debates have direct implications for the possibilities and prospects for environmental education, insofar as both “high” literature and “popular” fiction remain important objects of educational practice. The essay proceeds to a critical account of the climate fictions of the Californian science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, arguably the leading contemporary Anglophone cli-fi writer, whose work regularly features in environmental education programmes.

Climate fiction (cli-fi) is widely assumed to have cognitive value for student and teacher understanding of climate change, often attributed to automatic mental processes based on trial and error. This study argues its cognitive value lies in systematic mental actions that transform cli-fi into school science problems for educational benefits to students and teachers. A guide, grounded in agentive activity theory, was developed to orient these actions and tested with three secondary school biology teachers. The participants worked with two excerpts from “The Ministry of the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson and another adapted from the article “Scientists at odds over wild plans to slow melting glaciers” by Hannah Richter. Think-aloud and retrospective interviews were used. Three key stages emerged: narrative immersion in cli-fi, problem structuring and editing/correction. The findings indicate that the guide supports teachers’ agency and self-regulation during the transformation process, although there is a limitation related to teachers’ content knowledge. It is concluded that the guide enhances teachers’ control over cli-fi transformations, and the educational cognitive value of cli-fi may reside in agentive activity.

In this paper we theorise climate fiction in the context of Dirrayawadha: Rise Up, by Anita Heiss (2024). Dirrayawadha: Rise Up is a literary novel that narratises historical truths in a dialogic encounter. Through an exploration of love, resilience and resistance, the novel recounts early moments of invasion while simultaneously revealing the links between colonial violence and environmental crisis. We examine four excerpts from the novel to illustrate how the narratisation of historical truths and usage of literary devices and language works. We also show how the translanguaging in the novel, where some sections shift between English and Wiradyuri, enable the text to transcend some of the limitations of English. The novel reveals how the genesis of environmental crisis in so-called Australia begins in the first moments of invasion. Heiss (2022) argues the need for settlers to read more First Nations writing as a form of truth-listening (Kwaymullina, 2020).

As climate change accelerates, its most devastating impacts fall on those already marginalised, deepening existing inequalities. This underscores the need for climate change education to attend not only to the scientific but also to social, cultural and ethical dimensions. Like science fiction, climate fiction (cli-fi) has often reinforced colonial, patriarchal and anthropocentric worldviews. However, some contemporary cli-fi narratives challenge these paradigms by offering alternative visions that centre climate justice and the voices of those most affected by climate change. In this paper, we examine two contemporary Australian cli-fi narratives — Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book — and their potential role in climate education. Integrating these cli-fi into a cross-disciplinary higher education curriculum can enrich climate change education by encouraging critical, ethical and imaginative engagement and prepare students to navigate and respond to the crisis in transformative ways. Not only do these texts critique climate inequalities but they imagine alternative ways of being, positioning characters in relational entanglements with climate, cultures and place. We conduct an ecocritical analysis, applying a critical posthumanist and ecofeminist lens, to examine how these narratives disrupt anthropocentric and patriarchal logics and advocate for relational, justice-centred approaches to climate issues. Climate change concepts that emerged from this analysis act as a guide for educators.

This article examines the representation of climate as hyperobject — described by Timothy Morton as something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press, p. 1) — in fantastique genres (inclusive of fantasy, speculative and science fiction, horror, supernatural and New Weird genres) that arguably characterised climate fiction’s beginnings. By positioning such climate fictions within “the literature of the impossible” (Boucher (2024) The specificity of fantasy and the “affective novum”: A theory of a core subset of fantasy literature. Literature, 4(2), 101–121), I investigate the difference between what might be considered more speculative climate fictions and the increasingly common, more realist and literary cli-fi narratives. In other words, I discuss what, now, is the “use” of the speculative and the fantastic in climate fiction when climate crisis itself is indeed real and far from “impossible.” Discussing N.K. Jemisin’s fantasy series The Broken Earth (2015–2017) and Jeff VanderMeer’s horror/New Weird series Southern Reach (2014–2024), I argue that “climate-fantastic” novels are well-positioned to narrativise climate change as a hyperobject due to the ability of speculative, fantastic genres to exceed the limitations of Western-capitalist-colonial storytelling practices. I also consider the role of speculative climate fictions in education, including the importance of reading, studying and writing into the speculative alongside the realist when it comes to climate crisis.

We co-designed a bee sequence with a specialist primary science teacher at an Australian government school. Year 6 students learned about European honeybees and Australian native bees, including through Cli-Fi. In this paper, we explore the pedagogical power of providing students with opportunities to create Cli-Fi about bee futures in the Anthropocene. We present and thematically analyse examples of students’ bee Cli-Fi to argue that they generated these narratives to express how we ought to value bees and how we ought to conduct ourselves towards bees to realise more desirable futures. We propose that these students were futuring as normative myths. Students generated dystopian views of bee futures in adopting a human perspective, but also present were glimmers of hope for a more positive outlook that embraced more-than-human perspectives. We adopt a pragmatist semiotic approach to propose that these young people’s bee Cli-Fi constituted normative claims about the future of bees, as they outlined the aesthetics (how and what we ought to value) and ethics (how and in what way we ought to act) of humans caring for bees in an epoch of polycrisis. We suggest that Cli-Fi ought to be an integral part of climate change education in empowering students to assert their agency.

This article explores how pedagogy focused on affective possibilities of narrative genres can suggest new directions for climate fiction, potentially challenging the dystopian dominance in the climate crisis imaginary. We analyse a corpus of work produced by first year creative writing students. The students were given the task of “mashing” climate fiction with another genre (romance, horror, crime or any other genre of their choice) and asked to reflect on how this changed the emotional affect and tone of their narrative. Many students were still drawn to dystopian visions, reflecting how climate fiction has become entangled with this particular mode of storytelling, but the focus on reader affect resulted in the students adding layers of hope and agency. Many made use of the possibilities offered by genre: the whimsical allegory of fantasy, the critical thinking of realism, the active fear of horror and the comic potential of satire. By giving students the freedom to embed climate change into their preferred genre, and by asking them to consider the affective consequences of their choices, we offer challenges to the dominance of dystopian climate fiction, suggesting a different path to narratively engage with the climate crisis without descending into hopelessness.

Robin perches on a branch overlooking small humans below who are sat around a campfire. Robin notices. Robin responds. What happens when we notice Robin noticing us?

I land with a thud on the floor of the school and scurry off behind a chair, climb the walls, move away, camouflaging. I sense in ways intangible, magical, unknown.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of Posthumanist Climate Fiction (Posthuman Cli-Fi) by proposing practice-as-research-as-pedagogy for educational futures. This practice involves a generative, relational process of creative writings with more-than-human collaborators in everyday encounters in educational settings. Situated within the entangled realities and speculative futures of climate change, Posthuman Cli-Fi challenges the anthropocentric tendencies of traditional Climate Fiction by decentring human experiences and foregrounding relational ontologies. Drawing on our research in two distinct educational contexts—an urban forest school in London and a wall-less school in Bali—we explore how creative writing practices can engage with the stormy contours of living and educating with pastpresentfutures. Posthuman Cli-Fi offers a situated practice that creates possibilities for attuning to and attending to our shared worlds, offering pathways towards more response-able educational futures.

For Indigenous peoples, all stories begin with Country. And as climate change reveals, all stories will end with Country too. This paper re-examines popular framings of the climate fiction (cli-fi) genre, and the ways ancient and contemporary First Nations realities disorganise colonial and western conceptions of what we call climate stories. For context, I’ll first illustrate how my research project Laying Down the Lore re-organises speculative fiction (spec fic) genre theory more broadly in an indigenous cultural sense.

Reworlding (Haraway, 2016, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke University Press) underscores the significance of Indigenous cosmologies that perceive time and place through circular, recursive and reciprocal relationships. This recognition acknowledges the perpetual regeneration and transformation of the world, which flourishes through novel ways of worlding. Moving away from dystopian-utopian binaries in climate fiction (Cli-Fi), genres of hopepunk and solarpunk align with the collective and affirmative ethos of reworlding and its near-future grounded relationality. Climate Change Education (CCE) is situated in relation to the impacts of climate emergency on cities through urban play, opening up an opportunity for collective and collaborative live-action futuring for better worlds by reworlding together. These methods were developed through the design of a climate action game experienced through live-action role-play in a Carlton street closed for two days in Naarm Melbourne. The game design responds to cascading impacts of the climate emergency on the city in 2050 as it becomes a megacity of 8 million residents. Thematically, this fiction explores how we might live well together while players are invited to experience this scenario by learning how to reworld a neighbourhood together. Through this case study, the capacity of Cli-Fi and CCE to dream alternate social imaginaries are explored via urban role-play.

Impending doom. Fire, drought, floods. This is the image of the environmental future our young people are shown and often set the challenged of “What are you going to do about it.” This is an enormous quest. It is directionless ambition without structure. It is the illusion of agency for change. This article showcases the design decisions of curricula and reflections on using of range of cli-fi and concludes with a set of continua that may help fellow educators in developing cl-fi learning activities including storytelling cards, design sprints, and sci-fi prototyping. They are iterations in the reflective approach to creating experiences that envision positive outcomes. These activities draw on research from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plants for Space (P4S), which explores sustainable agriculture in extreme environments, like lunar habitats. P4S operates at the intersection of plants, people, technology, and sustainability, fostering critical and creative thinking. By framing sustainable futures in space context, we aim to alleviate environmental anxiety, encourages optimistic, innovative thinking, unconstrained by biological and societal norms. Climate fiction becomes a tool for imagining and realising new technologies, enabling students to create and critique possibilities beyond Earth’s current limitations.

The signals and consequences of, and currently overall eco-socio-cultural inadequate responses to, the pressing climate and biodiversity crises of the Anthropocene foster a landscape of repression, hopelessness and anxiety among many, not least young people. As young people today seem to primarily encounter dystopian future narratives, this article tells a story about how playing an open-ended, solarpunk, character-driven cli-fi tabletop roleplaying game together with young people might nurture non-dystopic engagements. Designed as both a research and educational playspace, the game invites participants to become co-researchers and co-narrators engaged in imagining life-friendly futures, attempting to push the boundaries of environmental and sustainability education research. In conversation with the theoretical inspirations of the game — post-Anthropocene pedagogy, climate literacy research and SF multispecies storytelling — the article discusses insights from the first prototype playtests. When the game flows, it produces engagements with speculative futures and understandings of hope’s relational and complex character. When it halts, it reveals challenges around participation, social context and setting, pointing to directions for further research and game alterations.

Many young people feel distressed about climate change, and pessimistic about what the future holds. Gaps in education about climate change contribute to limited understanding of opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation, and to a pervasive “discourse of doom.” Here we describe a “game for change” co-designed by climate and education researchers and young people, that aims to shift narratives about climate changed futures toward an active, adaptation-oriented focus.

The Heat Is On is designed to be played by high school classes. Set in 2050, the game takes place on a fictional island called “Adaptania.” Teams of students play the role of town councillors in communities facing the same challenges that Australian towns are experiencing as the climate heats up, including flooding, heatwaves, bushfires, inequality, health issues and economic challenges. By focussing on decision-making for adaptation and resilience, The Heat Is On enables participants to envision climate-changed futures in which communities can thrive. Students learn how to plan and collaborate to prepare for diverse and cascading impacts of climate hazards. We explore the potential for games in climate education, focussing on The Heat Is On as a case study, and share initial learnings from its development and implementation in schools.

This article explores multispecies climate fiction as a mode of inquiry that speculates-with other-than-humans. To explore cli-fi’s potential in research, I position speculative fiction in the field of research-creation, a praxis that combines artistic exploration with scholarly inquiry. Adopting a research-creation approach, I wrote the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley. The story emerged from the Multispecies City Lab project, a participatory research project that invited participants to imagine multispecies life in urban areas affected by climate change. I engaged creatively with the research findings of the Multispecies City Lab project, using participants’ imaginaries as a proposition to write the cli-fi story. In this article, the story Canopy of the Hidden Alley is presented alongside methodological reflections on speculative fiction and research-creation, as well as theoretical conceptualizations of what it means to speculate-with other-than-humans in climate fiction. This article discusses the potentiality of speculative fiction as a form of research-creation, demonstrating how creative writing enabled deeper engagement with issues of identity and positionality, social and relational hierarchies and the interplay of multiple temporalities, which guided toward new understandings of multispecies entanglements in the context of climate change and speculative climate futures.

This article examines the transformative potential of the 2CG® (Content- and Context-specific Generic Competency Coaching) method in advancing climate education across disciplines, hierarchies, and cultures. Drawing on case studies and theoretical insights, it demonstrates how this multi-method approach deepens emotional engagement through imagination, challenges entrenched behaviours, and supports the development of climate-responsive competencies. By integrating polyphonic storytelling, poetry, the arts, and climate fiction, the 2CG® framework empowers learners to critically engage with ecological issues and adopt climate-conscious behaviours. Central to the approach is the co-creation of climate imaginaries — transformative narratives that interweave human and more-than-human perspectives to foster deep reflection, relational awareness, and contextually grounded action. Overall, this pedagogical model cultivates the cognitive, emotional, and dialogical capacities learners need to navigate complexity and contribute meaningfully to just and regenerative transitions.

These excerpts from Inbetweenness, an upcoming hopepunk novel, intertwine eco-social justice narratives and Indigenous education through climate fiction. Inbetweenness challenges Western-centric paradigms by highlighting diverse voices and posthumanist perspectives, focusing on the tension between contemporary environmental crises and Indigenous knowledge systems. It features characters like Joanne Penderwith, a graduate student navigating social justice, ecological connection, and decolonial praxis, inviting readers to reflect on allyship and positionality within activism. The novel also juxtaposes human-centric actions with the voices of other-than-human entities, using multi-species ethnography to embody ecological storytelling. A pivotal segment details Joanne’s transformative experience at a salmon ceremony led by the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations, showcasing the resilience of Indigenous practices and their potential to guide sustainable futures. Inbetweenness uses fiction-based research methods grounded in 20 years of transdisciplinary research. It critiques performative allyship and advocates for authentic relationships with Indigenous communities, proposing a hopeful approach to environmental education and climate action.

We resonated with the idea that dreaming is important, and that climate fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. A well of resistance lives in art collaborations around the world which harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and twist, bend, and dance them into alternative hopeful pasts, presents and futures. Engaging with other people and more-than-human lives, through creative collaborations have led us to understand complex and unfamiliar perspectives in ways that are unreachable alone, regardless of how much academic study we do. This story emerged from online meetings that crossed time zones and oceans: Vancouver to Istanbul. Our climate fiction surfaced from improvised, spontaneous story creation. It was as if the story was waiting for us to find her, if we acted with care and love while facing directly our own dark shadows and fears about climate catastrophe. This story of Cassandra, alongside our interpretations of its emergence, invites the reader to draw from any evoked confusion or other feelings as well as their own learnings to reflect on burdens of knowledge not acted upon. Leaning into confusion is a way to open up to the power of uncertainty for environmental education.

This paper presents a pedagogical experiment in the form of a fictional podcast episode that “aired” in January 2025, featuring Tim Winton’s climate fiction novel Juice (2024). Emerging from a dialogical reading collaboration between three interdisciplinary “scholars, resisters and ordinary grafters” (Winton, 2024, p.116) — Rumen Rachev, Jo Pollitt, and Emma Nicoletti — the paper and podcast operate together through a method we term papercast, centring on three key themes: clouds, atmospheric frictions, and the significance of critically engaging with climate fiction, specifically Juice, amid ongoing climate instability. Simultaneously paper and podcast (papercast), we invite the reader to “listen” visually to the printed material that follows. Through discussion and excerpts from Clouds Running Out of Juice, a creative non-fiction episode of the fictional Ecosophic Generator podcast, the work incorporates AI-generated responses from “listeners” who inhabit the liminal space between present imaginings and future realities. This papercast emerged through asynchronous reading practices and collaborative dialogue, culminating in a three-way conversation that traverses multiple theoretical terrains. Rachev’s investigation as an atmospheric economist into the future-proofing of clouds, Pollitt’s choreographic exploration of everyday weather and experiences of weathering instability, and Nicoletti’s examination of human-atmospheric binaries collectively generate productive tensions between scientific knowledge and creative uncertainty.

Climate change impacts and stresses young people and although their pro-environmental behaviours have been studied their perspectives have not been widely heard. This creative output is a lo-fi comic engaging with themes of imagined alternative futures in climate fiction. It was constructed to provide an example of a multimodal text with a low barrier to entry for use in the classroom, to complement the study of solar punk texts. The methodology of an autoethnographic art provides a tool for reflection and provides a suitably rebellious outlet for their perspectives, a departure from factual poster assignments on environmental issues. This particular perzine discusses the challenges faced by young people in addressing environmental issues and sustainable practice with limited personal agency.