Storytelling Workshops Reveal Turning Points for Climate-Resilient Communities

Climate adaptation has long been framed as a technical challenge: build the sea wall, restore the wetland, upgrade the drainage. But a new study from Scotland argues that the hardest part of adaptation may not be engineering at all—it may be storytelling. Researchers report that when community groups, public sector workers, and government officials were brought together to imagine what a well-adapted place actually looks like, the most powerful tool they had was narrative, and the most important outcomes were a set of clearly identified turning points that could transform abstract climate goals into lived reality.

The research, published in PLOS Climate by Emma L. Yule, Joana Avi-Lorie, Pamela Candea, James Porter, and Francesca Vantaggiato, examines how Scotland’s third National Adaptation Plan, known as SNAP3, pursues a key outcome of communities creating climate resilient places. The authors point out that clear adaptation outcomes are essential for driving climate action and assessing progress, yet developing a shared vision of desirable adaptation outcomes—and the steps needed to achieve them—requires something that policy documents alone rarely deliver: a shared understanding of what constitutes a well-adapted place and what resources communities need to create and implement such visions.

To probe that gap, the team organized a collaborative workshop that used storytelling techniques to co-produce adaptation visions. Rather than asking participants to rank priorities on a checklist or respond to a survey, the facilitators invited them to develop a shared narrative about their place and its climate future, and then to identify turning points—concrete moments of change where the story could bend toward resilience. Participants included community groups, public sector representatives, and government officials, creating an unusual space where the people who write adaptation policy sat alongside the people who must live with its consequences.

The storytelling approach is more than a facilitation gimmick. In adaptation research, narratives serve as a mechanism for surfacing values that conventional planning processes often obscure. When a community member describes a flood from memory, or a planner describes a drainage upgrade in technical terms, the two accounts reveal different assumptions about risk, responsibility, and belonging. By weaving these accounts into a single shared narrative, the workshop method forced participants to negotiate what a desirable future actually meant—and, crucially, to identify the specific shifts that would be required to get there.

Three key turning points emerged from the exercise. The first was a shift in governance structures toward the inclusion of local communities in developing adaptation visions. Participants recognized that top-down adaptation planning, however well intentioned, tends to produce outcomes that feel imposed rather than owned. The second was consistent knowledge-sharing across scales, supported by dedicated platforms and procedures, so that lessons learned in one community or one administrative level do not remain trapped there. The third was enhanced communication and engagement around adaptation narratives at the local level, ensuring that the story of a place’s climate future is told in language that resonates with the people who inhabit it.

The authors are blunt about the stakes. Unless these measures are implemented, they conclude, communities will struggle to create the climate-resilient places envisioned in SNAP3. That warning carries particular weight because Scotland’s national adaptation framework explicitly names community-led resilience as a central outcome. If the governance structures, knowledge platforms, and local engagement practices needed to realize that outcome remain absent, the plan’s most ambitious goal risks becoming an aspiration without a mechanism—a vision statement disconnected from the capacity of actual places to change.

The study also delivers a nuanced verdict on one of the most popular tools in contemporary climate policy: local adaptation targets. Participants perceived such targets as potentially useful drivers of adaptation action, giving communities concrete benchmarks and a sense of accountability. But the researchers identified real limitations to their effectiveness. Adaptation targets, they found, risk becoming siloed—treated as stand-alone metrics that fail to integrate broader resilience goals or the wider priorities of the communities they are meant to serve. A target to plant trees along a riverbank, for example, may satisfy a numeric goal while ignoring flood dynamics, biodiversity needs, or local land-use conflicts.

That tension between the positive and negative narratives around local adaptation targets leads the authors to a careful recommendation: continuous monitoring and a cautious, place-based approach to their implementation. In other words, targets should not be abandoned, but neither should they be treated as self-executing. Their value depends on whether they remain tethered to the lived priorities of specific places, and on whether monitoring systems can detect when a target has drifted from its original purpose. This finding resonates with a broader debate in adaptation science about the difference between measurable outputs and genuine resilience, which is often invisible until a hazard arrives to test it.

Methodologically, the research illustrates the growing field of co-production, in which knowledge is generated jointly by researchers, practitioners, and community members rather than extracted from communities by outside experts. Co-produced visions carry a distinctive form of legitimacy: because participants authored the narrative themselves, the turning points they identified are not external prescriptions but commitments they recognize as their own. The workshop format also equalized expertise in an important way. A government official’s knowledge of funding streams and a resident’s knowledge of which streets flood first are both forms of evidence, and the storytelling frame allowed both to enter the record on equal footing.

The implications extend well beyond Scotland. National adaptation plans are proliferating worldwide as climate impacts intensify, and most of them face the same structural problem this study exposes: the distance between a national outcome and a local reality. The Scottish findings suggest that closing that distance requires deliberate infrastructure—governance reforms that share power, platforms that move knowledge across scales, and communication practices that keep adaptation narratives alive in everyday civic life. They also suggest that the humble tools of narrative and imagination deserve a place alongside risk models and cost-benefit analyses in the adaptation toolkit. A community that can tell a coherent story about its climate future, and identify the turning points where that story can change course, may be better equipped to act than one armed only with a spreadsheet of targets. As climate pressures mount, the study’s central message is deceptively simple: well-adapted places are not just built, they are imagined, narrated, and negotiated—and the turning points that make them possible must be named before they can be reached.

Subject of Research: Co-producing climate change adaptation visions and pathways through community storytelling in Scotland

Article Title: Turning points in climate change adaptation: Storytelling and co-producing visions and pathways for creating well-adapted places

Article References: Yule, E. L., Avi-Lorie, J., Candea, P., Porter, J., & Vantaggiato, F. (2026). Turning points in climate change adaptation: Storytelling and co-producing visions and pathways for creating well-adapted places. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001056. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001056

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001056

Keywords: climate adaptation, storytelling, co-production, community resilience, Scotland, SNAP3, adaptation targets, governance, knowledge-sharing, place-based planning, PLOS Climate, turning points