Scenarios and storylines provide complementary frameworks to explore, quantify, and communicate climate risks under deep uncertainty, and to support decision-making across science, policy and practice. Storylines, defined as “physically self-consistent unfoldings of past events, or of plausible future events or pathways,” can be used to systematically describe climate-driven trends or extreme events, and the associated risk while accounting for uncertainty. Socioeconomic scenarios explore long-term alternative development pathways, exposure and vulnerability dynamics, and societal responses. Together, they provide a powerful framework to investigate short to long-term climate risk estimates and projections, including compound and cascading risks, stress-test systems, intervention options in uncertain futures. They allow us to explore multiple plausible futures, supporting decision-making in high-uncertainty conditions and helping prioritize and optimize interventions to reduce negative impacts.
This session brings together researchers and practitioners working across climate science, impacts and risk assessment, and social sciences to advance the development and application of climate risk storylines and scenarios. We welcome contributions that span the full chain from physical climate modelling and event attribution to the co-production of narratives with stakeholders, and the use of scenarios in real-world decision contexts.
We invite abstracts that address, among others:
a) Physical and impact-based climate storylines, including past events, attribution studies, and plausible future extremes
b) Development and use of socioeconomic scenarios, including qualitative narratives and their quantification
c) Methods for integrating quantitative and qualitative knowledge, and linking climate and non-climate risk drivers
d) Conceptual models and frameworks for combining hazards, exposure, vulnerability and response
e) Applications of storylines and scenarios for stress testing, impact and risk assessment, early warning systems, adaptation planning and policy support
f) Participatory and co-production approaches that enhance relevance, robustness and uptake for decision-making
By bridging physical modelling, socioeconomic pathways and stakeholder-driven approaches, this session aims to strengthen the role of storylines and scenarios as actionable tools for managing climate risks in a rapidly changing world.