5 Documentaries About Sustainability & The Environment For All Ages

If you’re looking at exploring the world, nature and the challenges it faces without leaving your couch, there’s plenty of resources for you! Sustainability documentaries allow us to discover nature’s beauty and give us ideas to change the world step by step. Such documentaries are great conversation starters that encourage us to think about how to change the trend and share our knowledge with others and future generations.

Damon Gameau is the writer, director, narrator, genius and star of his movie 2040. Constantly friendly, engaging and upbeat, Damon enlists his sweet four-year-old daughter Velvet as his model for the comparison between life in 2019 and 2040, with his innovative positive vision of how our world could be transformed over the next two decades to produce sustained abundance and peace, primarily through innovative methods to stop climate change. The principle is to examine the best ideas of today to see how scaling them up can address the massive risks facing our planet, flicking between the present and the imagined future. 2040 is a conversation starter, with potential to help tip us over the edge into recognition of the need for global climate action, recognising that emission reduction is nowhere near enough.

Divided into five chapters - agriculture, energy, economy, democracy, and education - this inspiring documentary gives us hope with non-utopian, concrete local and global solutions to build a better world for tomorrow: Permaculture and local, organic agriculture, local currencies, circular economy, new modes of active democracy, a more social and human education. A small step is still a step and this documentary reminds us that hope is necessary too.

Brave Blue World is a sustainability documentary about the world’s water crisis with serious star power. It features Matt Damon and Jaden Smith, who each have co-founded nonprofits related to water, as well as scientists and pioneers around the world who are tackling problems of water scarcity and sanitation. This film is great for those looking for a documentary about the world’s water shortage crisis and doesn’t shy away from the urgency of the problem.

When two worlds collide

Heidi Brandenburg and Mathew Orzel’s crisp, capture the 2009 confrontation between Peru’s president Alan Garcia, hailing from the elites, and indigenous activists who intend to preserve their Amazonian rainforest home. Exploitation of resources is the core conflict, brought to a boil by indigenous leader Alberto Pizango, who rallies against Garcia and his actions. It’s a documentary that traces how the friction between a government and its people can metastasize into a dangerous state of insurgency.

The documentary film Semesta, co-produced by Mandy Marahimin and heartthrob actor Nicholas Saputra, intimately explores the struggle of seven community leaders in harnessing local wisdom to slow down the effects of climate change. Semesta, the Indonesian word for "universe," comes at a time when the world's attention is focused on the devastating effects of climate change – from bushfires in Australia to floods and landslides in Indonesia. The documentary is a reminder that nature conservation is already deeply ingrained in the diverse religions, beliefs and cultures of the archipelago.