A social science typology of climate change storylines

Climate change is increasingly encountered through extreme events - floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms - that appear as brute physical facts. Yet such events only become intelligible through stories. They are narrated as crises, risks, injustices, or failures of preparedness; they are woven into accounts of resilience, responsibility, and adaptation. These storylines do not merely describe climate change; they actively construct what it is, who it concerns, and what can be done. This article develops a social-scientific framework for analysing and co-creating climate storylines, arguing that they are foundational to how climate change is understood, governed, and lived.

The article conceptualises storylines as social practices through which shared realities are produced. Narratives are not neutral representations; they organise meaning, shape identities, and delimit horizons of action. In the context of climate change, storylines stabilise interpretations of slow onset and extreme climate events and render others marginal or unthinkable. They distribute agency and responsibility and produce subjects such as the “resilient community” or the “adaptive citizen.”

The article reviews dominant storylines in climate science - such as resilience, adaptation, crisis, justice, and risk management - and shows how they organise climate change as a particular kind of problem. Despite their growing prominence, storylines are largely treated as neutral, factual devices for organising physical processes under uncertainty. This leaves a critical gap: storylines are not only representations of events, but narrative constructions that actively produce meaning, social roles, and political horizons. By bringing social-science perspectives to the analysis of climate science storylines, this article makes these constitutive and political dimensions explicit.

Building on recent work in climate science, the article treats storylines as a bridge between physical processes and social meaning. Following Shepherd et al. (2017), a storyline is understood as “a physically self-consistent unfolding of past events, or of plausible future events or pathways,” for which no a priori probability is assigned. Rather than predicting what will happen, storylines trace how particular constellations of drivers, events, and impacts might plausibly unfold. This event-oriented mode of representation aligns scientific knowledge with how people experience risk and imagine futures. Reframed as social practices, storylines show how identical climatic “facts” can be woven into divergent realities and political projects.

Building on this synthesis, the article proposes a typology of four ideal-typical climate storylines: (1) the managerial-risk storyline, which frames extremes as calculable hazards; (2) the resilience storyline, which emphasises adaptation and responsibilities subjects; (3) the crisis-emergency storyline, which constructs climate change as rupture; and (4) the justice-political storyline, which situates extremes within histories of inequality and structural power. These storylines may rely on the same observable facts, yet they produce distinct understandings of what is happening, who is responsible, and how society should respond.

Rather than offering a definitive classification, the typology functions as an analytical heuristic. It demonstrates how climate change is not a single object awaiting interpretation, but a multiplicity produced through narrative, opening space for alternative imaginaries and political possibilities in a changing world.