Co-developing local narratives for assessing resilience under cascading risks

This is the second activity of the Met Office in the MACC programme and has a focus on local climate risk narratives

Summary

This Met Office work package focuses on co-developing local, place based climate risk narratives that help decision makers understand and respond to cascading risks from extreme weather events. By combining climate science, systems thinking, and stakeholder engagement, the work package aims to make complex climate risk information usable and actionable across community, local authority and national governance scales. The outputs will support more effective adaptation planning by revealing dependencies between systems (e.g. flooding, infrastructure, health, communications) and identifying intervention points to strengthen resilience.

Project Details

Research Areas

Climate storylines to explore how extreme weather events can trigger cascading impacts across interconnected systems will be co-developed and tested with stakeholders to ensure relevance and usability, integrating quantitative climate and socio-economic data, and translation of complex riskinformation into practical tools.

In collaboration with partners, place-based candidate events will be selected and key descriptors and dataproduced. An iterative approach will be taken to co-develop the event narratives in a format that can be trialled to inform workshops with community groups. The main objectives are to:

• Co-develop extreme event narratives with stakeholders that are consistent across governance scales and grounded in climate evidence. Incorporate quantitative climate projections, asset data, and socio-economic information into narrative-based storylines by building on previous work for the Outer Hebrides (Pope et al., 2023), CCC (Pirret et al., under review) and lessons being learned in generating international scenario narratives for FCDO.
• Visualise cascading climate risks across interconnected systems (e.g. flooding, power, communications, care services). To do this we will explore related methods, such as the use of downward counterfactuals (Ciullo et al., 2021) and the modelling approach developed by Mitchell and Ramsey (2025, in prep) to map impacts within the cascade, model interventions and develop visualisations.
• Identify intervention points and adaptation options through a systems perspective.
• Produce practical tools and guidance, including a stakeholder workshop toolkit, to support local resilience planning and decision-making.
• Ensure alignment and consistency with other MACC projects, particularly related storyline and risk-cascade work.

Outputs will include: storylines, visualisations, and a workshop toolkit that enable users to assess local vulnerabilities, understand systemic risks, and identify adaptation actions:

• A consistent set of extreme event storylines including impact cascades and interventions
• A practical workshop toolkit for local stakeholders
• A peer-reviewed journal paper

These will complement other MACC strands and supports the MACC Hub, adding applied, place-based tools for local adaptation planning.

Project Partners

• ATTENUATE project
• Greening Campaign (working with councils, community groups, and businesses in Hampshire)
• Local authorities, community groups, and multi-sector stakeholders participating in co-design and pilot workshops

These partners ensure strong links between climate science, local knowledge, community action, and policy-relevant adaptation planning.

Contact

Met Office Lead: Helen Hanlon

References

Ciullo, A., Martius, O., Strobl, E. and Bresch, D.N. (2021). A framework for building climate storylines based on downward counterfactuals: The case of the European Union Solidarity Fund. Climate Risk Management, 33, 100349.

Pope, J.O., Logan, M., Kennedy, S., MacDonald, K., Matthews, A., Milne, K. and Pratt, E. (2023). Musical messages – Creating a bespoke climate story for the Outer Hebrides. Climate Services, 32, 100407.