In a climate catastrophe, resistance is taking root . . .

When legions of teenagers around the world start developing strange new “Greenfingers” power, which let them grow plants, it becomes clear that to use their ability for good, they’ll need to learn to work together. But in a time of widespread corruption and greed, there are plenty of profit-hungry organizations who want to use the Greenfingers for their own ends. And not everyone would like to see the Earth saved…

SYNOPSIS:

The year the ice caps finally finished melting, teenagers around the world started developing magic.

A global warming heist about the importance of individual action in a time where moral and ethical decisions are being made by profit-hungry organisations. Set in the near-future, three teenagers – Gabrielle, a climate change activist; Theo, an English fisherman’s son and Hester, the heir to an oil fortune - fight to rise up and restore the world to good health, against the wishes of companies who continue to profit from climate change.

Gabrielle is skipping school to attend a protest against climate change in her city’s centre when tendrils of roots start growing from her fingertips. She stands in the middle of the vegetation, still holding onto her banner. IT’S TIME FOR A CHANGE, it reads.

An English boy called Theodore is helping his dad bring in the day’s catch of fish. Their boat has a collision with the nearby Dalex oil rig, and their ship sinks. Theo saves his dad’s life by growing seaweed from his hands, using it as a rope to pull him to safety on a life raft.

Hester is shadowing her father as he gives some investors a tour of their oil fracking rig off the coast of California. Her dad is bragging about the recent family vacation he surprised Hester and her mom with, going to see the new Mars settlement in one of the commercial Warren Space shuttles. Hester accidentally floods the deck of the rig with algae when she gets angry, finding that she control the algae.

She pitches the idea of using the Green Fingers teenagers to start a new revenue stream for their company – growing plants to burn as biofuels. They could even use it for the new settlement on Mars as an easy supply of energy, fresh food and bioplastics.

It would be a huge boon for Dalex if they could win the energy contract for Mars with Warren Space. Hester’s dad puts her in charge of leading a training project for Green Fingers recruits, to test out the theory.

Theo gets interviewed to work for an energy company as a Greenfingers. He’s flown to Texas to start a training program, and will be able to support his parents while they try to find jobs.

When he arrives, Hester and her dad give an introductory speech, and he realises that his new employers are Dalex – who own the oil rig that wrecked their boat, and is damaging the ocean by his home. He gets into a fight with Hester when she implies the biofuels project will fix climate change – something created due to her company’s carbon emissions.

During the first day’s training session, the Greenfingers find that their powers are amplified beyond their control when they work together. A girl nearly dies when an apple seed sprouts into a tree in her stomach, and Theo saves her life by stopping the plant from growing. His actions stop him from being fired for yelling at Hester that first night.

That night, Hester is at a political campaign party when she bumps into Edgar Warren, the owner of Warren Space. She pitches him the biofuels project, impressing him with a demonstration of her powers. While drunk, he gives Dalex the energy contract.

The next morning, Hester and Theo find that overnight their training grounds have turned into a woodland – their training session the day before caused every plant and seed around them to grow overnight and destroying the buildings. Hester quickly calls a press conference, pretending this was intentional, and uses the opportunity to announce the Warren Space venture to the world.

Theo still hates Hester, Dalex and everything they’re doing to the planet – but his parents need the money he’s earning. They take the trainees out to sea on Hester’s family yacht, and experiment with growing aquatic plants in the water. First, they use seaweed to create a net that pulls all of the rubbish out of the water, and then bag it up in the boat. But they accidentally make an algae bloom, creating a dead zone in the ocean.

Theo and Hester have a big fight, both wanting to use the training to do different things – Theo wants to try to heal the planet where climate change and deforestation are killing plants, but Hester wants to focus on the Mars contract.

She doesn’t believe climate change is a big issue. It’s only then that she realises her dad has been feeding her propaganda about climate science, raising her to think that it isn’t real. Betrayed by her dad, Hester joins Theo in a mission to save Earth using their powers.

Edgar Warren comes to see the training session and arranges to take the group to the International Space Station, so they can test the Greenfingers powers in space.

They contact a climate change protest group, getting in touch with the first girl to grow plants, Gabrielle. She comes out to meet them at a Dalex coal factory, where Hester and Theo have taken the trainees for another test activity. They’re going to use plants to pull toxic metals out of the soil around the factory, where decades of coal ash left in ponds as slurry have leaked into the groundwater.

Gabrielle is more interested in sabotaging the factory, however. She grows a vine into the ground, breaking through a water pipe and sending bindweed up into the factory’s basements. She floods it, filling the building with plants and shutting the factory down.

On a flight, Theo discovers that he can link up with the Greenfingers on the ground below, tapping into their powers and using them to make big changes to the ground, like pulling the pollution out of a river in a net of seaweed.

Hester discovers that Edgar and her dad plan to use the Greenfingers and a solar sail built in space at the ISS to melt the polar ice caps and extract the oil underground. With Gabrielle, they make a plan to stop this. They will destroy the solar sail while training on the ISS, and at the same time hold a ‘green rising’.

They will sabotage the worst polluters all around the world: factories, oil rigs and mines everywhere. They won’t give up until the governments agree to meet their demands – to transition to renewable energy sources, end pollution, and start carbon storage immediately.

Hester flies to Svalbard to find evidence proving that her dad is going to open up the Northern oil fields once the ice caps melt. She find evidence that he held solar seeding experiments decades before, spraying chemicals into the sky to try to absorb sunlight. She decides to use this to ruin her dad’s reputation and stop his actions – by filing a lawsuit against him.

They launch into space, and arrive on the space station with Edgar. Hester’s dad is angry at Hester, and arranges for her to be sent to Mars. Edgar is planning to use the Arctic oil they’ll extract to terraform Mars by building thousands of solar sails.

After destroying the solar sail he wants to use to melt the Arctic ice, they realise that they might be able to use their time on the space station to do something similar on a larger scale, linking up with the Greenfingers on an entire continent and using their strength to restore balance to nature.

With Gabrielle’s help on Earth, they grow forests and pull waste out of the waters from the space station as it orbits the earth. They bring the rubbish in the oceans together into a giant island, which they cover in seagrass, algae, coral and kelp, turning it into a new natural landmass. Meanwhile, Gabrielle orchestrates her rebels as they take control of factories and release a statement of demands to the governments. Hester’s lawsuit is released, which reveals that her dad is responsible for the Greenfingers mutation – the chemicals from his failed solar seeding experiment made their way into the water supply, and from there into foetuses born decades before.

A year later, nature is starting to flourish again. With new forests across the planet, carbon emissions have dropped dramatically, and the waste islands out in the ocean have become hubs for wind turbines, creating electricity from the high winds at sea to use in cities.

Change is spreading across the planet, a little at a time. And the temperature of the planet has stopped rising. There’s a long way to go, but people are working on it.

GREEN RISING