Earthrise Antidote Series Connects Climate Change to Human Health
Antidote is a three-part digital short-film series produced by Earthrise Studio in association with BBC Studios Natural History Unit and Wellcome Trust, published in the United Kingdom in April 2024, that examines how climate change directly endangers human health through air pollution, heat stress, and infectious disease.
The series forms the centrepiece of #OurPlanetEarth, a digital impact campaign developed jointly by BBC Studios and the Wellcome Trust. Inspired by the themes of BBC's Planet Earth III, Antidote extends the flagship natural history franchise into explicitly human territory, arguing that safeguarding the planet and protecting public health are inseparable objectives. Each of the three episodes addresses a distinct health threat — wildfire smoke and air pollution in episode one, heat stress in episode two, and infectious diseases in episode three — before turning to the innovative solutions rising to meet those challenges.
The campaign launched in the United Kingdom ahead of Earth Day on 22 April 2024, a deliberate scheduling choice that positioned Antidote within a globally recognised moment of environmental awareness. Earthrise describes its editorial stance as radically optimistic, meaning each episode acknowledges crisis while foregrounding human ingenuity and systemic solutions. Series presenter and executive producer Joi Lee anchors every episode, providing editorial continuity across what is otherwise a wide geographic and thematic canvas. The partnership between Earthrise, BBC Studios Natural History Unit, and the Wellcome Trust represents the first formal collaboration between all three organisations, marking a significant institutional alignment between impact-driven independent media, public broadcasting infrastructure, and global health science philanthropy. Antidote carries a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100, reflecting strong creative intent, institutional credibility, and meaningful thematic ambition within the public service category.
Earthrise identifies a strategic gap between climate science communication and public health messaging. The two disciplines have historically operated in parallel rather than in dialogue, producing audiences who understand rising temperatures in ecological terms but rarely connect that knowledge to personal health risk. Antidote is designed to close that gap by making the consequences of climate change viscerally immediate — wildfire smoke in the lungs, heat overwhelming the body's capacity to regulate temperature, disease vectors expanding into new geographies.
In the United Kingdom, environmental media has become an increasingly competitive space. BBC Earth and its parent infrastructure hold an estimated twenty-five to thirty-five percent share of the relevant impact-media set, according to Streaming Media, making BBC Studios Natural History Unit both a formidable market incumbent and, through this partnership, a strategic amplifier for Earthrise. National Geographic and similar documentary brands represent additional competitive reference points in the premium environmental content space, with distribution scale that independent studios cannot easily match organically. By aligning with BBC Studios and the Wellcome Trust, Earthrise gains institutional reach that offsets that asymmetry. The Wellcome Trust's mandate — advancing science and its application to human health — gives Antidote scientific authority that distinguishes it from purely advocacy-driven environmental content.
European digital advertising reached €118.9 billion, equivalent to 67.2 percent of total European ad spending, according to ICAS Global, underscoring the structural shift toward digital channels through which a series like Antidote reaches its audience. In the United Kingdom specifically, television advertising totalled £5.27 billion, up 3.8 percent year over year, per ICAS Global, contextualising the hybrid broadcast-and-digital distribution logic that underpins the #OurPlanetEarth campaign. Earthrise's own platform — more than 3.6 million YouTube subscribers across 45 countries, as reported by Earthrise Studio — provides an independent distribution spine that operates alongside, rather than through, traditional broadcast gatekeepers.
Joi Lee serves as executive producer and series presenter of Antidote. Her dual role is structurally significant: she is simultaneously the editorial decision-maker shaping what each episode argues and the on-screen figure through whom the audience processes those arguments. This is not a conventional documentary presenter arrangement, in which a host interprets material assembled by others. Lee's executive producer credit indicates direct creative ownership of the series, a model consistent with Earthrise's founding philosophy of integrating activism, filmmaking, and editorial authority within the same individuals.
Lee has spoken directly about the creative ambition behind the series. As she stated: "Collaborating with BBC Studios Natural History Unit and the Wellcome Trust has always been a dream of ours." She further described the editorial logic of the project in terms of expansion rather than repetition: "Antidote is building on some of the themes explored in BBC's Planet Earth III, namely the link between public health and climate change, by adding new voices, perspectives, and stories." That framing positions Antidote not as derivative content riding the Planet Earth III wave but as a genuine extension of the conversation into terrain the flagship series did not fully occupy.
The production aesthetic reflects Earthrise's established visual language — immersive, character-led, and deliberately accessible without sacrificing scientific rigour. Each episode constructs a narrative arc that moves from threat to solution, a structure that serves both editorial and emotional purposes: it prevents the audience from disengaging into climate fatalism while still communicating the genuine scale of risk. The three-episode format allows the series to develop cumulative momentum without demanding the sustained attention commitment of a feature-length documentary. Production credits beyond Joi Lee's role are not fully publicly documented for Antidote, though the production is confirmed as an Earthrise Studio production in association with BBC Studios Natural History Unit.
No comprehensive third-party verified performance data for the Antidote campaign is publicly available at the time of publication. The available YouTube engagement figure — partially documented in the source material — indicates early audience traction consistent with Earthrise's established platform reach, though a complete and independently verified view count across all three episodes has not been confirmed.
What the structural evidence does confirm is meaningful. The #OurPlanetEarth campaign represents the first formal partnership between Earthrise, BBC Studios Natural History Unit, and the Wellcome Trust, a trilateral institutional alignment that signals significant credibility within the United Kingdom's public interest media landscape. Earthrise's prior campaign record reinforces the platform's capacity to generate substantive impact: the 2021 Seat at the Table series, documented by Earthrise Studio, generated 5.7 million views and raised $343,000 in the lead-up to COP26, providing a meaningful benchmark for what the studio's presenter-led format can achieve with institutional backing.
The Earth Day 2024 timing in the United Kingdom provided Antidote with an earned-media window aligned to peak public interest in environmental themes, extending the campaign's organic reach beyond its owned channels. The Wellcome Trust's global health science authority and BBC Studios' distribution infrastructure represent compounding amplifiers that an independent studio of Earthrise's size could not replicate independently. In 2023, Alice Aedy, Jack Harries, and Finn Harries were named in Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for social impact work, as reported by Forbes, establishing the founders' reputational standing as a measurable marker of the organisation's growing influence in environmental media. Antidote's Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 reflects these structural strengths while acknowledging the limits of available quantified performance data at this stage.
Antidote is a three-part digital short-film series by Earthrise Studio examining how climate change threatens human health. Produced in the United Kingdom in April 2024 with BBC Studios Natural History Unit and the Wellcome Trust, it covers air pollution, heat stress, and infectious disease, showing that planetary health and human health are inseparable priorities.
Joi Lee serves as executive producer and series presenter of Antidote. Earthrise Studio was founded by Alice Aedy, Jack Harries, and Finn Harries, who were recognised in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2023 for social impact work. All three founders shape the studio's editorial direction across its impact-driven environmental media output.
Antidote is inspired by BBC's Planet Earth III and forms part of #OurPlanetEarth, a digital impact campaign by BBC Studios and Wellcome Trust. It builds on Planet Earth III's exploration of climate themes by adding new voices focused specifically on human health consequences, including air pollution, heat stress, and infectious disease.
The Wellcome Trust partnership gives Antidote scientific authority in global health, complementing Earthrise's editorial voice and BBC Studios' production infrastructure. This is the first collaboration between all three organisations, representing a strategic alignment of independent impact media, public broadcasting, and health science philanthropy within the United Kingdom's public interest content sector.
Antidote published in the United Kingdom in April 2024, timed to Earth Day on 22 April 2024. The scheduling placed the series within a globally recognised moment of heightened environmental attention, maximising organic reach and earned media. The Earth Day window gave the #OurPlanetEarth campaign a natural platform for its planetary health messaging across digital channels.
Antidote holds a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative intent, institutional credibility through partnerships with BBC Studios Natural History Unit and the Wellcome Trust, and meaningful thematic ambition in the public service category, balanced against the limits of fully verified quantified performance data available at this stage of the campaign's lifecycle.
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