As climate change intensifies across Southeast Asia, effective communication is increasingly important to strengthen public understanding, promote behavioural and societal changes and enhance community resilience. Journalists play a key role in translating complex scientific information into accessible narratives, yet significant gaps remain between scientific knowledge production and media reporting practices. This article presents a self-produced case study examining efforts to bridge this divide through a co-produced research project involving climate scientists, communication researchers and journalists in Malaysia and Indonesia. This was conducted in three phases: (1) network forming and planning phase to establish partnership between researchers, journalists and climate experts; (2) identifying capacity gaps and co-production needs through focus group discussions and workshops with media practitioners and scientists; and (3) the co-design and implementation of a climate communication resource bank. The study foregrounds the development, utility and future application of this resource bank, arguing that narratives of the future become more actionable when they are co-created and rooted in local socio-economic realities, attentive to justice and vulnerability and embedded within media systems capable of sustained translations. The resulting resource bank was developed to support journalists and climate communicators with credible scientific resources, contextualised case studies, expert contacts and narrative framing tools relevant to the local context.