Storytelling in Climate Communication at the AUN-EEC Conference

Ten minutes to present, five for questions. At the AUN-EEC Conference that was the whole slot.

I spoke there on 28 August 2025. The conference ran on 27 and 28 August at Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, and also online. AUN-EEC stands for the ASEAN University Network programme on Ecological Education and Culture. Its 2025 theme was “Current Responses and Action in Climate Change Education.”

My paper was “Culturally Intelligent Storytelling in Climate Communication: A Southeast Asian Lens on Resonance, Care, and Representation.” At the AUN-EEC Conference it ran in Parallel Session 5 on day two, under the heading Climate Change Education in Media and Classrooms.

What a storytelling framework was doing at a climate conference

Climate communication usually reaches for data. Charts, degrees, deadlines, projections. And none of that data is wrong.

But the data has been public for decades. Behaviour has not moved at the speed the numbers imply. People rarely act because a figure is large. They act when the thing at risk is theirs.

So that is a storytelling problem before it is a science problem. Southeast Asia makes the point sharply. The region carries heavy climate risk, and its climate stories are often told from outside, in the language of damage rather than in the language of the people living there.

Ten minutes at the AUN-EEC Conference is a discipline

The AUN-EEC Conference gave each paper ten minutes. That sounds punishing. But a short slot forces a decision that a long one lets you avoid.

You cannot walk a room through a whole framework in ten minutes. You can make one claim and show one thing. So most of the preparation was subtraction, not writing.

That turned out to be useful practice. A framework that only works at full length is not much use to a creator on a deadline. If it cannot survive ten minutes, it will not survive a pitch meeting either.

The AUN-EEC Conference sat between Tokyo in June and London in September. But it was the one that put the framework in front of climate educators rather than storytellers or scholars of culture.