by Sarah Wesseler, Yale Climate Connections
September 14, 2026
Stuck in his New York apartment during the pandemic, tech worker Alec Turnbull began thinking more and more about climate change, ultimately deciding to build a career in the field.
After vaccines became available, he began meeting with people working on climate solutions. Coming home, he would tell his wife J. English Cook, an art historian writing a dissertation on cinema, about the worrying disconnect between the problem-solvers he was encountering and the doom-and-gloom tone of climate conversations he was used to.
This led the couple to wonder whether filmmakers were documenting the kinds of solutions they were learning about. “Where are these stories being told?” he recalls wondering.
To bridge this gap, Turnbull and Cook launched the first iteration of the Climate Film Festival during Climate Week NYC in 2023.
Having screened more than 100 films about climate change and the environment to thousands of audience members in the years since, Turnbull has become an expert in the genre. As the 2026 festival kicks off this week in New York, he offers his top streaming recommendations for people who can’t attend in person.
The White House Effect
While it’s hard to imagine a Republican presidential candidate taking a pro-climate-action stance today, in the late 1980s, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush vowed that if he were elected, he would counter “the greenhouse effect” with “the White House Effect.” Using archival footage, this documentary examines the political and economic forces that led him to abandon that pledge once in office.
Watch on Netflix.
Yanuni
Watch the trailer.
“A really amazing documentary about Indigenous leaders in the Amazon, backed by Leo DiCaprio,” Turnbull said.
The film’s protagonist, Juma Xipaia, has survived multiple assassination attempts as a result of her environmental activism, which began at age 13 when her community in the Brazilian Amazon was threatened by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. The documentary traces her continuing struggle to protect the rain forest as an adult, including her work at the country’s newly formed Ministry of Indigenous Peoples.
Watch on YouTube.
Emergent City
Filmed over a 10-year period, this documentary spotlights a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood contending with climate risk, gentrification, and a legacy of environmental damage. It patiently reveals how different people and organizations react to a developer’s plans to turn Industry City, a vast former industrial site, into an “innovation district.”
“I think it’s for a particular type of urbanist nerd, but if you are that type, it really scratches an itch of showing how the sausage gets made, of the back and forth between city and activists, and being able to find collaborations going forward,” Turnbull said.
Watch on Kanopy.
Erin Brockovich
Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of legal clerk-turned-environmental activist Erin Brockovich in this 2000 film. The Climate Film Festival showed a newly restored version last year to celebrate the movie’s 25th anniversary.
“Twenty-five years after its release, the story of groundwater contamination and corporate accountability remained an unusually direct example of environmental harm entering popular cinema through character, humor, and legal drama,” the organizers wrote.
Watch on Apple TV.
Canary
This documentary tells the story of Lonnie Thompson, a scientist who has spent his career traversing glaciers around the world to collect ice cores revealing how Earth’s climate has changed over the centuries. “Sort of a real-life Indiana Jones adventure story,” Turnbull said.
Watch on Apple TV.
The Wild Robot
Watch the trailer.
A 2024 DreamWorks film, “The Wild Robot” stars Lupita Nyong’o as a robot in a postapocalyptic world who gets stranded on an uninhabited island and forms an unlikely bond with a baby goose. Although the movie doesn’t explicitly discuss global warming, its depictions of flooded cities and extreme weather allude to a world shaped by climate change.
Watch on YouTube.
Groundswell
Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell have produced three celebrity-packed documentaries about regenerative farming, which seeks to sequester carbon in the earth and improve soil quality. The latest, Groundswell, came out this year, following 2020’s Kiss the Ground and 2023’s Common Ground. “It’s really about making some of these topics more accessible and engaging,” Turnbull said.
Watch on Prime Video.
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