Climate risk storylines: Navigating the uncertainties of climate change - Guidelines for humanitarian practitioners

Integrating climate information into humanitarian decision-making involves navigating significant uncertainties and complexities. This guidance describes an approach to facilitating climate-risk navigation. The approach builds on academic research in the areas of climate narrative, storylines, and forensic investigations of disasters while focusing on the unique challenges and modalities of decision-making in the humanitarian sector.

Storylines are increasingly used in the climate science community to quantify and describe past and future events and their impacts. Methods are often based on physical climate and scenario storylines. The approach has been developed and continues to be refined by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (“the Climate Centre”). Example applications of the approach and the associated outcomes and learning are presented to inspire further applications and refinement.