Fossil fuel-based development has resulted in climate change and biodiversity loss, threatening the ability of the biosphere to sustain civilization. However, despite the transformative change needed to address climate change, the complexity inherent in dynamic, coupled social-ecological systems can create challenges that stifle mitigation and adaptation efforts. For example, increasing urbanization can mask information about the local and distal ecological impacts of unsustainable consumption patterns. Diverse actors, powerful vested interests in the status quo, and differential impacts of climate change create inevitable tradeoffs and conflicts among stakeholders. The multitude of plausible future scenarios and their dependence on actions taken today create challenges for planning, governance, and collective action. While there is a long history in psychology and economics of studying decision-making under uncertainty, we argue that the deep uncertainty inherent in climate change cannot be easily understood using these same paradigms. In this context, narratives—stories about how the world works, what the future will look like, and our own role in this process—can extend cognition, creating shared knowledge across space and time, and shape our beliefs, values and actions in the face of tremendous uncertainty. Narratives thus have political agency and can reinforce or disrupt existing power relations and trajectories. Here, we review some of this literature in the context of climate change.

以化石燃料为基础的发展导致气候变化和生物多样性丧失，威胁到生物圈维持文明的能力。然而，尽管应对气候变化需要变革性变革，但动态、耦合的社会生态系统所固有的复杂性可能会带来挑战，从而扼杀减缓和适应努力。例如，城市化进程的加快可能掩盖有关不可持续消费模式对当地和远端生态影响的信息。不同的参与者、对现状的强大既得利益以及气候变化的不同影响在利益相关者之间造成了不可避免的权衡和冲突。众多看似合理的未来情景及其对今天采取的行动的依赖给规划、治理和集体行动带来了挑战。使用这些相同的范式无法轻易理解气候变化固有的深刻不确定性。在这种情况下，叙事——关于世界如何运作、未来会是什么样子以及我们自己在这个过程中的角色的故事——可以扩展认知，创造跨越时空的共享知识，并塑造我们在世界上的信念、价值观和行动。面对巨大的不确定性。因此，叙事具有政治代理作用，可以加强或破坏现有的权力关系和轨迹。在这里，我们回顾了气候变化背景下的一些文献。