The Physical Climate Storyline Approach: Emerging Concepts of Climate Risk

Abstract:

A storyline approach is emerging to explore plausible climate change impacts and better understand their consequences for society. Storylines consider ways in which extreme or significant climatic events can evolve in a warming world and can include consequences for ecosystems and society. The narrative structuring inherent in a storyline approach links information from physical and social systems to better understand how climate risk will change over time. By bridging analytic modes in climate and social science, storylines navigate disciplinary boundaries to account for different assumptions, scales and approaches to uncertainty. When related to physical climatic processes, a storyline has been defined as a physically self-consistent unfolding of past events, or of plausible future events or pathways. However, storylines are inconsistently referenced in climate change literature where the term may also relate to socio-economic scenarios, climate or energy narratives, or tales about futures affected by climate change. The small body of existing literature directly related to physical climate storylines offers insight into how storylines have been developed with, and without, stakeholder engagement. This integrative review considers 18 peer-reviewed articles published since 2015 that present climate storylines at different temporal and spatial scales, considers societal involvement in development and communication and compares their handling of uncertainty. Where physical climate storylines also reflect societal consequences and associated risk, we refer to them as ‘climate risk storylines’. The review showed that climate risk storylines describe causal links centred on climatic extremes, often to inform analysis of interdependencies and relationships of risks across different methods of analysis. Climate risk storylines offer a flexible approach to better link science and society to visualise plausible climate impacts and explore how to manage their consequences.