Web Summit x COLLINS

Convening Voices

Decades of accurate climate science have failed to generate adequate action. COLLINS partnered with Web Summit to examine whether this represents a failure of information or a failure of narrative—convening voices from fundamentally different storytelling traditions to test a hypothesis about communication itself.

The Partnership

This collaboration combined our distinct capabilities: Web Summit's network of technology leaders driving scalable solutions and COLLINS' understanding of how stories shape behavior at civilizational scale. Together, we examined how the climate movement's communication strategies might be limiting its own effectiveness—and how different stories could unlock different possibilities.

The Framework

The conversation centered on the concept that multiple climate futures remain achievable, and that the stories we tell about energy transition, justice, and technological possibility directly influence which future emerges. Rather than accepting defeat or relying on apocalyptic motivation, participants explored how to craft narratives that make climate action feel both urgent and attainable.

The Voices

Rather than convening another panel of climate experts, COLLINS assembled voices from fundamentally different storytelling traditions to examine why decades of accurate climate science have failed to generate adequate action. The hypothesis: climate communication requires voices that understand narrative transformation, not just environmental expertise.

Bill McKibben represented the foundational voice—the writer who first translated climate science into public consciousness and has witnessed three decades of communication evolution. Sage Lenier brought a pedagogical perspective on how justice-centered narratives create different emotional relationships to climate action than fear-based messaging. Manik Suri and Jeffrey Sprau contributed to the entrepreneurial challenge: how to make technical innovation compelling to investors and consumers who are saturated with climate messaging.

This combination was designed to surface a specific tension: the gap between those who understand the crisis intellectually and those who must act on it practically.

The Result

The collaboration revealed that climate communication's primary obstacle isn't denialism or apathy—it's narrative fatigue. Audiences have become desensitized not to climate change itself, but to the stories we tell about it. The most sophisticated environmental messaging often reinforces the very psychological distance it seeks to overcome.

The breakthrough insight emerged from comparing Lenier's teaching methods with Suri's investor pitches: effective climate communication requires abandoning the expert-to-audience model entirely. Instead, it demands what we termed "narrative plurality"—allowing multiple, sometimes contradictory climate stories to coexist rather than insisting on singular messaging frameworks.