The Climate Reality Project's 2013 'What I Love' film, narrated by Demi Moore and directed by Matthew L. Lloyd, makes climate change personal for US audiences.
ARCHIVEThe Climate Reality Project Puts Personal Stakes at the Heart of Climate Change
'What I Love' is a 2013 public-interest film created for The Climate Reality Project in the United States that invites viewers to identify the people, places, and things they value most, then reveals how climate change threatens each one directly.
The Climate Reality Project launched 'What I Love' in October 2013, positioning it as a departure from the abstract, data-heavy climate messaging that had characterised much of the preceding decade. Rather than marshalling statistics or invoking distant catastrophe, the campaign builds its argument around personal attachment. A guiding line structures the entire work: 'To love a thing means wanting it to exist.' From that premise, as noted on clapboard.com, the film asks audiences across the United States to picture whatever defines their lives — family, landscape, ritual, community — and then confronts them with what a warming planet stands to erase. The campaign contained a single media asset: one film, built to carry the full weight of the message.
Production was handled by agency B-Reel, with direction by Matthew L. Lloyd, according to adstasher.com and confirmed by clapboard.com. Narration was provided by actor and activist Demi Moore, whose voice lends the film an intimacy that aligns with its emotional strategy. The Climate Reality Project described the intent plainly, stating, per clapboard.com, 'We designed our new tool to bring simple truth home and make climate change a personal reality for people everywhere.' In the United States, where public discourse on climate had grown increasingly polarised, that pivot toward the personal represented a considered strategic choice. The Clapboard Score for 'What I Love' stands at 64 out of 100, reflecting a campaign with genuine creative clarity and purposeful emotional construction, offset by the limited reach of a single-asset public-service release without a documented paid distribution strategy.
ARCHIVEThe Climate Reality Project built 'What I Love' on a specific consumer insight: that abstract threat fails to motivate action, but the prospect of losing something already loved does.
By 2013, the organisation had accumulated years of experience translating climate science for general audiences. According to climaterealityproject.org, the Climate Reality Leadership Corps had been training climate communicators internationally since as early as 2007, operating across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, China, India, Mexico, and Spain. That infrastructure informed a sophisticated understanding of where mass-awareness messaging succeeded and where it stalled. Earlier Climate Reality communications, also per climaterealityproject.org, had focused on making climate science understandable and challenging scepticism during Congressional climate legislation debates — a posture that proved effective for advocacy but less effective at generating emotional investment among general audiences.
'What I Love' responds directly to that limitation. The campaign's interactive premise — asking each viewer to name what they love before showing how climate change imperils it — transforms a systemic global issue into a question of personal consequence. In the United States, where peer organisations such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council had long pursued litigation and policy-pressure strategies, The Climate Reality Project carved out a distinct lane in public-interest communication: emotionally direct, cinematic, and designed for broad resonance rather than activist audiences specifically. The project also demonstrated strategic range in 2013: according to prnewswire.com, earlier that year The Climate Reality Project launched Reality Drop in February, a social-media and gaming tool developed with Arnold Worldwide to counter climate misinformation online, indicating that 'What I Love' was one component of a larger, multi-format communications effort rather than an isolated production.
Director Matthew L. Lloyd shaped 'What I Love' as a documentary-register public-interest film, prioritising restraint and intimacy over spectacle.
According to adstasher.com and clapboard.com, Lloyd served as both director and director of photography on the project, a dual role that typically signals a unified and controlled visual language. That consolidation of creative authority is legible in the finished work: the film carries the unhurried quality of a documentary social experiment rather than a conventional public-service announcement. Subjects are not presented as victims of climate change but as people in full possession of what they love, which makes the subsequent revelation of threat more structurally effective. The approach trusts the audience to complete the emotional logic without editorialising.
Demi Moore's narration anchors the film's tone. Her voice operates at a register that is neither urgent nor detached — it holds the space between care and candour that the campaign's central question demands. The line attributed to the campaign, 'What I Love asks you to choose the people, places, and things that define your life and then reveals how climate change will directly impact each one,' per clapboard.com, functions as both a description of the film's mechanics and its emotional contract with the viewer. B-Reel, the agency behind the production, brought a background in digital and film work to a campaign that sits at the intersection of documentary craft and public advocacy. The single-asset format places full creative demand on the film itself, forgoing the redundancy that multi-format campaigns provide and betting instead that one well-executed piece of work, voiced with conviction and directed with precision, carries sufficient weight on its own terms.
No verified performance data for 'What I Love' is publicly available in terms of audited view counts, earned media reach, or measurable shifts in audience behaviour following the October 2013 launch in the United States.
What is documentable is the broader context in which the campaign operated. According to eventmarketer.com, The Climate Reality Project's '24 Hours of Reality' initiative in 2013 attracted a substantial online audience, illustrating the organisation's capacity to generate meaningful digital engagement around climate content during that period. The announcement of 'What I Love' itself was made in a press release that, per climaterealityproject.org, welcomed one thousand five hundred new Climate Leaders — framing the campaign's launch as part of a wider movement-building moment rather than a standalone communications event.
Structurally, 'What I Love' demonstrates several qualities that correlate with public-interest effectiveness. The personalisation mechanic — asking viewers to name what they love before confronting them with climate risk — creates conditions for genuine emotional investment rather than passive consumption. The use of a recognisable narrator in Demi Moore extends credibility and reach into cultural audiences that might not engage with conventional environmental advocacy. The documentary register chosen by director Matthew L. Lloyd resists the didactic quality that frequently undermines public-service advertising. Taken together, these elements constitute a campaign with above-average creative coherence for the category. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects that coherence while acknowledging the constraints of a single-asset release without publicly documented distribution scale or measurable outcomes.
'What I Love' is a public-interest film released by The Climate Reality Project in October 2013 in the United States. Directed by Matthew L. Lloyd and narrated by Demi Moore, it asks viewers to identify what they love most and then reveals how climate change directly threatens those people, places, and things. It was produced by agency B-Reel.
Matthew L. Lloyd directed 'What I Love' and also served as director of photography, according to adstasher.com and clapboard.com. Demi Moore provided the voice-over narration. Both contributions shaped the film's documentary tone and emotional intimacy, distinguishing it from conventional public-service announcements of the same period.
B-Reel produced 'What I Love' for The Climate Reality Project, according to clapboard.com and adstasher.com. B-Reel brought experience in film and digital production to the project, which was released as a single media asset in the United States in October 2013 as part of the organisation's broader 2013 communications effort.
The Climate Reality Project also launched Reality Drop in February 2013, a social-media tool developed with Arnold Worldwide, per prnewswire.com. 'What I Love' complemented that effort by targeting emotional engagement rather than information correction, reflecting the organisation's strategy of deploying multiple formats across the US public-interest landscape simultaneously.
'What I Love' holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine creative coherence — its personalisation mechanic, documentary craft, and Demi Moore's narration — while accounting for its single-asset format and the absence of publicly documented distribution scale or verified audience performance metrics.
The campaign's central premise is captured in the line 'To love a thing means wanting it to exist,' per clapboard.com. Viewers are asked to name the people, places, and things that define their lives, and the film then shows how climate change threatens each one — making an abstract global issue a matter of immediate personal consequence for US audiences.
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