Formal agendas of climate summits can provide a rich source of material for creative writers. The craft of imaginative storytelling can help cut through jargon and render the ecological stakes more immediate, relatable and urgently felt.

Every year, I facilitate an intensive university course on reimagining climate futures through eco-focused creative writing. In 2024, that short course coincided with the UN climate summit, Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. That was a controversial choice for climate talks, as the host nation stated it intended to expand its gas production by up to a third over the subsequent decade.

The goals of my creative writing workshop were to write with climate realism in mind, deliberately steering clear of worn, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world tropes.

The group was varied, ranging from younger undergraduates interested in climate activism to seasoned eco-poets and students from unrelated disciplines such as natural sciences. To ground our discussions in live events, I used several breaking news reports concerning Cop29 alongside extracts from official agendas documents and programme overviews as prompts for creative writing.

I was genuinely struck by how riled the students became when responding to the commitments outlined in Cop29 and broader international environmental policy. The participants were deeply critical of these promises. The interesting thing was how this fuelled and filled the room with lively, topical discussions, driving them to produce creative work that pushed boundaries.

The second part of the course coincided with a severe weather warning labelled a “danger to life” by the Met Office. We sat and watched streetlights swaying dangerously outside the classroom window in Liverpool as Storm Bert battered the country in late November 2024.

Just a week earlier, I had shared a UK government emergency preparedness brief as another writing stimulus. We had read the short story Outage by fiction writer Ian Critchley, about an older couple facing disability and struggling to cope in a power cut. I asked students to imagine a character forced to navigate that exact official guidance amid an unfolding crisis.

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As a point of reference, we examined Megan Hunter’s novel-turned-film The End We Start From, starring Jodie Comer. The narrative follows a heavily pregnant protagonist, in labour and frantically calling emergency services as her London home fills with water – but, because of the widespread flooding, she finds there is no assistance. Those scenes highlight the worrying limitations of standard advice to simply “call for help” during the world catastrophes that Cop summits seek to address.

A creative springboard

Policy jargon, though often dense and alienating, can serve as an effective springboard for discussing difficult realities. It can give writers an accessible entry point, and a climate summit can provide a tangible event to focus on. The official Cop29 agenda, along with local council contingency policies, directly inspired more than ten distinctive poems and short stories.

The emotions evoked by these policy frameworks are more than enough to encourage creative writing that capture both the fragile hopes and real fears bound up with our climate present and future. While decision-makers may not always prove reliable narrators of our shared future, the institutional platforms they command do provide raw material for those of us who want to tell the true human and more-than-human stories.

Global summits can provoke a radical reimagining of ecological futures. As Cop31 takes place this month in Antalya, Turkey, the world public must examine these official pledges, especially those that falter or remain unfulfilled. These contested spaces represent the very realities writers must capture and hold at the front of their minds.

As the author Amitav Ghosh has questioned in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where is the serious fiction about climate change? Writing through a postcolonial lens, Ghosh highlights that contemporary literature still suffers from a shortage of narratives addressing environmental crises beyond the dominant western perspective.

Because UN climate summits bring together delegations from across the globe, they offer vital opportunities to register and articulate multiple perspectives from frontline populations, from low-lying small island developing states to large industrial nations.