Following the release of How to Live on Earth, hundreds of clips of world-class footage captured for the film have been published on Open Planet — a not-for-profit, open-source library for education and impact storytelling.
On 20 September 2026, How to Live on Earth was released to the world for free on YouTube. Now, footage captured by Open Planet Studios during the making of the film has been made freely available through Open Planet’s impact library, giving storytellers around the world the tools to respond to the film with their own stories — and to connect its ideas to the places, communities and solutions that matter most to them.
This reflects the filmmakers’ commitment to making planetary storytelling accessible and aligns with Open Planet’s approach to creating impact — moving from a single film to a much broader ecosystem of storytelling. By making the film’s extraordinary footage available to others, people can not only watch a vision for how to live on Earth, but use the footage to tell their own stories, to their audiences, about what it looks like in practice: from communities restoring nature and rethinking food systems, to innovators changing the way we value nature in all aspects of our lives.
Jonnie Hughes, Co-Founder of Open Planet Studios and Executive Producer of How to Live on Earth, said: “By opening up footage from How to Live on Earth through the Open Planet library, we’re putting the imagery that storytellers need into the hands of people everywhere — so they can make their own how-to videos in their own way, for their own audiences, in their own languages! Our hope is that this footage collection sparks a wave of positive, inspiring stories from all over the world.”
Featuring more than 16,000 clips, the Open Planet library enables educators, NGOs, filmmakers, creators and changemakers around the world to turn trusted footage and data into stories of their own, helping important ideas travel further, reach new audiences and inspire action.
There is already a precedent for what can happen when feature-film footage is made available in this way. In 2025, Open Planet Studios released thousands of cinematic clips from Ocean with David Attenborough, bringing some of the highest-quality footage ever captured above and beneath the waves into the hands of storytellers worldwide. The collection has since powered thousands of new stories, with more than 8,300 downloads in its first six months across 50+ countries.
For How to Live on Earth, this new collection brings together footage highlighting environmental challenges, solutions and examples of people connecting with nature around the world — from the depths of forests in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico, to cityscapes in South Korea and the USA, to coastal regions in the Maldives and the Bahamas.
By making this footage freely available, Open Planet aims to power new storytelling while also cutting costs and carbon for thousands of other storytellers, who can reuse and build on hundreds of hours of high-quality nature footage for educational and impact purposes.
Explore the collection and create your own how-to story: https://openplanet.org/collections/howtoliveonearth/