1. Introduction

As global warming accelerates, climate events such as extreme fires and floods are escalating in their unpredictability, intensity and frequency, taking lives, destroying communities and wreaking havoc on habitats. The scope, scale and uncertainty of these extreme events, and their impacts on human populations, are demolishing commonly held beliefs about safety, cultural norms and emergency protocols. Preparing for these threats at the community level, not simply mitigating and managing their impact, is an increasingly existential task. Without the ability to experientially preview and address these unforeseen vulnerabilities in situ, it is extremely challenging for researchers, frontline personnel and local communities to understand their likelihood, let alone engage with practices that minimise the devastation they entail to build the imaginative readiness required.

In this context, the ability of visualisation to communicate vulnerabilities quickly and powerfully has long been recognised and is being drawn upon in heterogeneous fields. The defence and mining sectors, for example, are using immersive visualisation for scenario training as it enables personnel to feel as if they are present in virtual scenarios where they can physically experience dangers and safely rehearse their response to threats in advance. Aesthetic experimentation in the arts and sciences is increasingly being applied to visualise the complex experiences and data embodied in climate scenarios. However, these are constrained by disciplinary conceptualisations and practices that centre on data modelling or evocative impact. In climatology, for example, extreme events are visually formulated as an atmospheric disturbance, in engineering as infrastructural risk, in ecology as environmental damage, in the social sciences as adaptive vulnerability and in the creative arts and humanities as affective loss. These result in detached depictions that tend to render humans as passive observers of the aftermath and the events as the effects solely of natural laws. They are unable to viscerally embody the uncertain interactions between populations and constantly fluctuating location-specific climate variables such as intense ember storms and torrential rains.

As the totemic 1.5 °C climate target is breached and a predicted 2° if not 3° horizon approaches, this requires a complete reframing of visualisation. It demands leveraging the arts and technology to shift the formulation from impersonal depiction and detached prediction to an embedded visualisation that enables stakeholders to prepare by viscerally engaging with unforeseen geolocated threat scenarios in advance. Such integration can deliver the experiential plausibility facilitated by the arts and the physical probability enabled by technology and science. It would transform the current singularity of disciplinary approaches by integrating lived experiences and abstract data into compelling dramatisations that enable stakeholders to sensorially feel they are present in local scenarios where they can interactively experience and respond to probable vulnerabilities. Such rehearsal of climate scenarios could enhance imaginative threat perception, visceral decision making, situational awareness and adaptive readiness using virtual scenarios. Virtual scenarios have been proven to be powerful ways of envisioning complex interactions and pathways. They are experientially multidimensional and open-ended, allowing the multiplicity of flexible interpretations and responses required in such dynamic situations.

The foundations for such scenario-driven virtual visualisations are already in place. Recent advances in digital arts are able to render previously unimagined virtual worlds in extremely high fidelity, and developments in climate science facilitate visualisation of geolocated extreme event micro-climates, while generative AI and machine learning breakthroughs are being used to analyse fire and flood data and then model and construct more accurate simulations.

Integrating these advances will empower stakeholder communities to viscerally imagine threats, enact hazardous stories, mock up risk-laden transactions and probe hyperlocal preparedness. Such advances will transform visualisation’s use from what will happen to what it could look like and rehearsing how to prepare. It will establish a new multidisciplinary domain of ‘climate scenario visualisation’. Reframing the envisioning of climate disasters from the impersonal viewing of unexpected incidents into an experiential preview of possible encounters will enable communities to prepare for unforeseen emergencies through the immersive rehearsal of compelling data-driven scenarios that bridge the fictional and factual. In an era of increasing terrestrial uncertainty, such a paradigm enables us to reimagine extreme event encounters, so we can increase and tailor preparedness.

Drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of 38 senior and emerging leaders in the creative arts, climate sciences, environmental engineering and intelligent systems, this book canvasses advances and considers how developing knowledge and practice may be integrated and leveraged to realise an innovative multidisciplinary paradigm. Grouped into four sections, the 14 chapters in this book explore the emerging strengths and current disciplinary limitations in addressing the challenge of envisioning unpredictable extreme event interactions from theoretical and experimental perspectives.

The first part, ‘Picturing’, charts developments in digital art, data modelling and intelligent simulation that could be utilised to envision situations that explore imaginative risk perception.

The second part, ‘Narrating’, surveys current performative arts that could be deployed to enhance previewing narratives that embody visceral decision making.

The third part, ‘Rehearsing’, explores design settings that could be adapted to mock up interactions that test situational awareness.

The fourth part, ‘Communicating’, canvasses lessons from recent inquiries to conceptualise how geo-specific scenarios could model experiences that probe readiness.