Navigating climate risk in humanitarian action: The potential of storyline approaches

The humanitarian community has a long history of attempting to reduce the human impact of extreme weather and climate events. Over the past decade there has been an increasing shift in the humanitarian community towards using climate science to better anticipate climate impacts on vulnerable communities and hence guide humanitarian planning and responses. However, large uncertainties, climate and non-climate, and complex compounding risks pose significant challenges to integrating climate information into humanitarian planning.

In the glossary of the IPCC Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report storylines are defined as “A way of making sense of a situation or a series of events through the construction of a set of explanatory elements” and “can be used to describe plural, conditional possible futures or explanations of a current situation, in contrast to single, definitive futures or explanations”.

With this they are valuable for the humanitarian sector as storylines related approaches including impact pathways and complex risk frameworks offer the potential to provide robust and valuable understanding of risk, as well as supporting the development of effective interventions. They do not remove the underlying uncertainty, however, they do help to shift the questions asked from “What is going to happen”, to “What would unfold if this storyline occurred".  This shift has the potential to connect with decision making options and processes far more effectively than presentations of aggregate uncertainty ranges.

We explore the potential value  of storylines for climate risk management within the humanitarian sector, we present practical examples of effectively applying them to estimate and describe  systemic climate-related risks, especially in vulnerable regions.