Decoding climate risk narratives from the front lines

Most of us have experienced the power of a good story that captivates us with its compelling and emotionally resonant narrative.

Instead of presenting a culturally specific or narrow stereotype, stories that transcend time and place offer an archetype that, deep down, we recognize as a universal truth.

Our brains are naturally wired to learn through storytelling. While research may show statistics as evidence of an event or the media might employ fear-based clickbait, these tactics seldom persuade us to share a truth or call for change.

For many years, climate change adaptation has been dominated by a top-down approach. This has its limitations. Governments, the World Bank, the UN, and NGOs deploy field missions to identify community issues in an effort to find and implement solutions.

They facilitate funding and provide infrastructure but lack the resources to address micro-level problems faced by thousands of small communities worldwide.

Moreover, once these large organizations become involved, they produce reports, which can cause the stories they collect to become disconnected from their grassroots origins.

This detachment results in a loss of emotional connection, and although their work is carried out with the best intentions, the once-engaging story becomes a product to sell, justifying funding for the organization.

Furthermore, past actions have left many people skeptical of these large organizations, many of which are perceived as imposing colonial-style solutions on local communities.

Therefore, we must recognize that risks arise from both climate change-induced events and human responses to them.

This situation is worsened because most adaptation decisions are made in a context of profound uncertainty, as we cannot accurately predict the magnitude or speed of climate change, let alone develop policies to address these changes.

The gap between the global organization and local communities is inherently difficult to bridge. 

However, as people face a growing number of catastrophic events caused by climate change, communities in vulnerable areas are developing new, locally-led strategies to engage their members, driven by the need to adapt to a changing world.

A lack of adaptation finance exacerbates this disconnect.

The UN Adaptation Gap Report 2024 reports that actual international adaptation finance was $28 billion in 2022, but to meet the targets of the Glasgow Climate Pact in 2021, it must be at least $215 billion and possibly up to $387 billion.

In other words, funding needs to be at least ten times higher than current levels.

Local stories about coping with the array of hazards faced by vulnerable communities, including declining rainfall, flooding, rising sea levels, and intense storms, help community members understand local risks.

Locally-led adaptation and community-based storytelling offer a more socially just, bottom-up opportunity for identifying and implementing climate adaptation strategies.

Hassan Alzain

Because their very survival demands change, these communities have begun sharing their narratives with the wider world.

Instead of relying on top-down, policy-driven directives from institutions and governments that impose change, locally-led adaptation and community-based storytelling offer a more socially just, bottom-up opportunity for identifying and implementing climate adaptation strategies.

The Talanoa Dialogue is one structure designed to elicit change through storytelling.

The word “Talanoa” originates from the Pacific region of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji and describes an inclusive approach to addressing complex challenges, centred on sharing stories and experiences.

This dialogue-based process fosters participatory, transparent, and non-confrontational exchanges to teach skills, resolve problems, or gather information within a group.

Talanoa is not the only such term.

For centuries, community gatherings like these have taken place worldwide, where leaders, elders, women, and men assemble under various groups to share information and ideas, discussing pressing issues to unite the community and promote change.

We could view these meetings through the lens of the adage, “a problem shared is a problem halved,” but that only tells part of the story.

Communities are usually acutely aware of the stressors they face.

While individuals might feel overwhelmed, community dialogues help people identify and discuss stressors, find solutions or adaptations to the problems, encode them in stories, and then share the experiences for wider benefit.

The Conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change, now in its 19th year, is one frontline event that provides a platform for communities worldwide to share their stories of climate change adaptation.

The CBA, alongside the increasingly visible locally led adaptation movement, which empowers local stakeholders and facilitates policy change at national or international levels, serves as a living example of how community-driven climate stories can shape adaptation strategies across vulnerable geographies.

“People around the world are already adjusting to the changing climate. These experiences, rooted in cultures and contexts, often point the way forward for communities,” says Katharine Mach, professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science.

This insight underscores the critical need to treat local adaptation efforts not as isolated anecdotes but as integral data points in the evolving science of resilience.

Community experiences encode complex, place-specific knowledge that formal models and risk assessments often overlook.

Technically, this aligns with adaptive governance frameworks that emphasize iteration, context-specificity, and stakeholder engagement.

Scientifically, it advances climate services that are informed by both empirical data and local narratives, enhancing the relevance and uptake of adaptation policies.

The Solomon Islands is a “least developed country” with a population of more than 800,000 people who speak more than 70 languages across 992 widely dispersed islands. Eighty percent of the population lives in low-lying coastal areas at risk of rising sea levels.

There is limited transport, subsistence communities, an unemployment rate of around 40 percent, and literacy rates that vary significantly by location, ranging from about 77 percent in Honiara to less than 30 percent in the provinces.

The country’s geography has shaped its inhabitants’ lives, communities, communication, and storytelling across generations. Over time, distinct community groups have emerged, such as villages, farmers, churches, and women’s groups.

Historical knowledge shared across generations through stories about weather events, colonial influences, various local troubles, and now climate change demonstrates how inhabitants adapt to the changes forced upon them.

In Malawi’s Lake Chilwa Basin, a seven-year adaptation project helps communities process locally caught fish.

Traditional outdoor drying methods are becoming increasingly unviable due to changing rainfall patterns, insect damage, and theft, resulting in a loss estimated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization of up to 40 percent of production.

An adaptation project led to developing an indoor solar drying method that uses 30 percent less firewood, reduces drying time from 24 to 12 hours and delivers higher-quality fish that fetch better prices at market.

Events like the CBA conference and the ability to share stories across vast distances through social media, along with the accessibility of mobile devices — even in some of the world’s most remote locations — enable stories like those from the Solomon Islands and Malawi to be heard more than ever before.

However, while global story sharing may be easier, it does not necessarily help to scale the solutions.

Scaling local adaptations to a global level can be challenging because the original local solution often suits small communities best, due to social dynamics, power relations, cultural norms, and mistrust of those imposing the adaptation from above.

However, if these community-based adaptations can be shared among similarly sized and like-minded communities worldwide, then the power of storytelling to convey universal truths may emerge more effectively.

Community-driven adaptation approaches are most successful and sustainable when they are led by the community, rather than being externally managed.

Without respect for community-based decisions, conflicts may arise between communities and external suppliers or top-down initiatives due to differing priorities of scale and conflicting commercial perspectives.

For example, to protect communities in the Philippines from rising tides, sea walls were constructed to reduce flooding — a top-down initiative that carries significant costs.

The community solution was to raise the floors of houses using coral rubble and plastic waste — a far more flexible, accessible, and achievable solution for families or small communities.

The coral and plastic solution is potentially a great story, but who will champion and share it?

In situations like this, we may well ask what political or economic forces were at play when the top-down decision to build the wall was approved and what local narrative was behind the decision to raise floors with found materials.

Furthermore, if stories like the sea wall are to be effective for a wider audience and suitably assessed by others, the story also needs to articulate the effectiveness of each activity in terms of risk reduction.

So, how can we source and create community-driven climate stories that provide the necessary details to reach and engage communities in creating a tipping point for change?

It is important to acknowledge that navigating and implementing change presents challenges, and organizations will need to find ways to adapt if they wish to pursue new paths like those discussed here.

One method that might be employed to address uncertain global and regional changes is the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathway.

In relation to the points above, this involves creating a strategic vision of the desired future (widespread sharing of effective stories) and then moving from short-term actions (the local) to establishing a framework to guide future actions (the global).

The majority of academic articles about responses to climate hazards focus on the household or individual level. This suggests there is an untapped wealth of stories to share.

If we can capture the essence of these by training a new generation to tell engaging stories, we could capitalize on this wealth of information already at hand and create a pipeline of community-level, locally-led adaptations that might lead to transformational social change on a global scale.

This presents an opportunity for external organisations to provide storytelling training and fund the relatively small cost of building digital storytelling hubs that enable peer-to-peer exchange among vulnerable communities.

Several lessons can be learned from these initiatives and examples.

First, community-driven climate stories that guide adaptation strategies to tackle complex climate change risks must be rooted in real-world local problems and solutions.

Second, someone within the community needs to turn their local experiences into compelling stories and help them reach a global audience through real-world or online networks.

Third, external actors entering communities to foster change should maintain a respectful distance to avoid alienating locals and prevent the adoption of, or reversion to, an outdated top-down model.

• Hassan Alzain is author of the award-winning book “Green Gambit.”