Bridging Science and Storytelling: How CGIAR’s Climate Security Research Is Reaching Wider Audiences
CGIAR 28 October 2025
Science is powerful when people can see themselves in it.
This year, the United Nations revealed a sobering fact: fewer than 5 percent of its reports are downloaded more than 5,500 times. One in five never break 1,000. Evidence, it turns out, too often lives and dies in PDFs, admired by experts, unseen by those whose lives it aims to improve.
The CGIAR Climate Security team took that as a challenge. In 2025, our researchers made a deliberate shift from publishing findings about people to communicating with them. Through partnerships with journalists, filmmakers, and broadcasters, we worked to bring scientific data into public dialogue, bridging the gap between climate models and lived experience.
Partnering with Media Storytellers
In the Honduran fishing villages of Cedeño and San Marcos, climate change has already become personal. Rising tides, erratic rainfall, and shrinking catches are not abstract phenomena; they’re choices to adapt or to leave.
CGIAR researchers studying these dynamics worked with Climate Tracker Latin America to integrate their findings into a short documentary, Cuando el mar se lleva algo más que la tierra, (“When the Sea Takes More Than the Shore”). Told through the voices of residents and CGIAR Climate Security researchers, the documentary traced how families balance their ties to home against the slow violence of climate change. A follow up guest post on Climate Tracker shared how communities are finding ways to protect livelihoods and dignity amid environmental and social pressures, turning abstract research into compelling storytelling.
The story didn’t stay in Honduras. Bloomberg later cited CGIAR’s evidence in its feature Trump’s Deportations Are Driving a Remittance Boom in Latin America, weaving local climate data into a broader economic narrative. Revista Mutante, a Colombian platform known for immersive storytelling, published Expulsados por la sequía: migración climática en Honduras, merging CGIAR’s analysis with first-person testimonies under the viral hashtag #HablemosDeLaMigración.
Science, it turned out, could travel faster than the scientists themselves if someone gave it a human voice.
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