On a hot and humid pre-monsoon evening when my skin felt like a wet towel, I reached Soho House, Mumbai, not for a glitzy film screening, but for a ‘huddle’. A gathering of some of the most creative minds in Indian cinema—25 top screenwriters and filmmakers—brought together by Climate Culture Collective of ASAR (Asar Social Impact Advisors), and Civic Studios, in collaboration with screenwriter Sumit Roy and Avinash Kumar Singh of Turtle on a Hammock Films. The goal of the huddle was simple: make climate mainstream.
As a climate journalist who has spent over 25 years ground-truthing stories, from fishing villages along the coastline of Tamil Nadu and Kerala to the thinning glaciers of the Everest Region, I’m used to a different kind of audience. Usually, I talk to policymakers, grassroots activists, media practitioners, and college students.
But there, I was in a room full of architects of our collective imagination. The message to be delivered was simple: Climate change isn't a genre. It’s the world we live in, and it’s time our popular cinema caught up.
Climate Culture Collective is already working in that direction. It is designed to bridge the massive gap between climate science and popular culture. While scientists have the data, storytellers have the hearts of the people. Climate Culture Collective is building a community where filmmakers, artists, and creators brainstorm how to weave the climate crisis of our time into the stories we already love to consume.
Mainstreaming Climate in Cinema
At the huddle, I shared human interest stories that usually don’t make it to a Bollywood script or an OTT web series. I talked about the terrifying link between extreme heat and intimate partner violence.
Did you know that even a degree rise in temperature is linked to a significant increase in intimate partner violence (IPV)? Global studies indicate that for every 1°C increase in average temperature, there is approximately a 4.7 per cent to 6 per cent rise in cases of IPV. Extreme heat increases psycho-social stress and confinement, leading to higher rates of abuse. Rising heat, hence, it’s a domestic thriller, a social drama, a tragedy—all waiting to be told with the nuance it deserves.
Extreme heat disproportionately affects women, often with more severe physical, social, and economic consequences compared to men. Women are also at higher risk for heat-related illness and have higher death rates than men during heat waves due to physiological differences. I spoke about the terrifying, silent struggle of pregnant women during heat waves and extreme temperatures.
Extreme heat is linked to pre-term babies, low-birth babies and stillbirths. It isn’t just about the mother's discomfort—high temperatures increase fetal heart rates and can predispose babies to chronic diseases later in life.
It gets even more granular and heartbreaking. 'Temperature and sex ratios at birth', a new study led by researchers at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides new evidence that higher temperatures can influence the sex ratio at birth.
Based on high-resolution climate data with information on approximately 5 million births in 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and India, researchers found that extreme heat during pregnancy is associated with a decrease in male births.
And the impact doesn’t stop at birth. For the children of the poor, the climate crisis is a thief of potential. Extreme heat is linked to learning disabilities—kids can’t concentrate, they can’t memorise, and their cognitive development slows down. This means a child born into a heat-stressed, low-income family already has their future job prospects dimmed before they even enter the workforce. It’s a cycle of poverty reinforced by every degree the mercury rises.
We also discussed industrial disasters. Most in the room had seen The Railway Men, a web series on the Bhopal gas tragedy, India’s worst industrial disaster. But I pointed out that as temperatures soar, these accidents are set to become more frequent. Our industrial infrastructure wasn't built to function in the extreme, prolonged heat we are seeing now. A boiler blasting or a chemical cooling system failing or a short circuit during a 48°C heatwave isn't just an ‘accident’—it’s a climate-induced industrial disaster.
I also believe that the climate is already there in our cinematic DNA. Take Lagaan, a timeless classic movie released in 2001. To me, that is the ultimate climate film. Having reported on droughts for decades, I see the desperation for rain in every frame.
Even this year, as we face a below-normal monsoon forecast, the famous song from Lagaan—Ghanan Ghanan— isn’t just a melody; it’s a survival anthem for millions of farmers as about 51 per cent of country's net sown area, which accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the total food production, depends on rainfed farming.
Similarly, films like Kedarnath—an inter-faith romance set against a Himalayan disaster—expose the link between rising temperature and extreme weather events, which are already on a rise in the hills.
Climate Stories Need to be Entertaining
But, the huddle wasn’t all gloom and doom. We also had fun discussion and group exercises. The screenwriters were split into groups and tasked with taking an existing popular film or web series and “smuggling in” a climate angle. Sumit Roy shared ideas on how this "smuggling" can happen seamlessly. Other writers suggested subtextual tactics, comic beats, and small gestures that make the theme stick without weighing down entertainment.
The creativity was infectious! One group took Stree, a Hindi-language comedy horror film, and brought in the angle of rising heat in a Himalayan town where ghosts and villagers join forces to protect a local forest from mining mafia. Another group turned around Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani and brought in fast fashion and the ick factor.
The evening at Soho House ended on a note of hope. Climate stories need not be doomsday scenarios. People are tired of being scared; they want to be empowered. We can build in simple, positive messages: a protagonist who carries their own water bottle, characters who use public transport, or the simple act of upcycling clothes—something our grandmothers did all the time without calling it sustainable fashion.
The screenwriters in the room were keen on humour and romance as vehicles for climate ideas because these genres reach mass audiences and can normalise sustainable choices as attractive and modern.
The huddle was a reminder that climate change is everywhere —in what we eat, when the rains arrive, how we work, and how we feel. It is high time cinema stopped acting like it lives in a vacuum. If we can smuggle the truth into our entertainment, we might just inspire a generation to act before the credits roll.
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