Tales Of Future Weather
What if tomorrow’s climate were already making the headlines?
Projections of climate change and its consequences can feel abstract. But a future seventeen-day heatwave - with maximum temperatures reaching 42 °C, an overwhelmed maternity ward, care-home staff stretched to the limit, and an exhausted lifeguard on a packed beach - is something people can picture.
Scientific reports on the climate are indispensable. Yet their language — probability distributions, emissions scenarios, confidence intervals — rarely speaks to the general public, and it is hard for decision-makers on the ground to put it to use. The rigour is essential, but the message it produces (“the frequency of intense heat episodes will rise by X % by 2060”) tends to be read, filed and forgotten, because it feels distant and abstract.
How do you give people a genuine sense of what a summer in Belgium might feel like in a world that has warmed by two degrees above pre-industrial levels? That is the question at the heart of Tales of Future Weather.
The project sets out to tell the story of a plausible future weather event as though were today’s news. The tales take the form of fictional press articles, official statements, personal testimonies and day-by-day weather data.
Rather than sketching a range of possible futures, they build a single, physically coherent scenario. The storylines show what could happen if, say, a run of fierce spring and summer heatwaves struck Belgium in a world two degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels — an extreme but realistic event, as probable in that future climate as the legendary summer of 1976 was in its own time.
Built on rigorous science and finished with a layer of fiction, these tales depict a plausible extreme summer. They draw on scientific data, published research and discussions with relevant stakeholders, but they describe no particular future and should not be mistaken for a forecast. What the tales offer is something more elusive than a projection: a concrete, vivid and plausible sense of what may be coming.
Cycle 1 – Heatwaves: the first Tales of Future Weather (2026–2027)
Tales of Future Weather is designed as a recurring series, with each cycle exploring a different weather extreme in a future climate. The first cycle centres on an unprecedented summer with several intense heatwaves. The choice reflects a clear, well-documented signal in Belgium’s climate projections, as well as a finding that emerged consistently from discussions with stakeholders: it is the accumulation of weeks of heat, far more than isolated peaks, that genuinely tests our society’s resilience.
The full narrative will describe a plausible fictional summer: a warm spell taking hold as early as May, three successive heatwaves breaking record after record at Uccle, serious disruption on the roads to the coast, mounting pressure on healthcare staff and growing strain in Brussels’s most deprived neighbourhoods… A collective, cross-sectoral story that poses a single, searching question: if this happened tomorrow, would we be ready?
Alongside it, the project also aims to develop an ”adapted” version of the tale, worked out with those same sectors, to show how measures could blunt the worst of the impacts.
Later cycles will turn to other climate extremes — extreme precipitation, prolonged drought, severe storms — gradually building up, over time, a rich and concrete picture of future weather events, their impacts, and the possible adaptation strategies open to us.
Three institutions, one shared purpose
The Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) is where the project originated. As its scientific lead, the RMI provides the meteorological and climatological foundation on which everything else rests: identifying a representative simulated weather event, calculating the day-by-day weather data and ensuring the narratives remain anchored in rigorous science. The project also reflects one of the RMI’s core concerns — understanding how a changing climate affects our ability to anticipate extreme weather and protect the population from its consequences.
The Climate Risk Assessment Center (CERAC) co-leads the project and makes sure the stories ring true beyond the meteorological data. Drawing on its expertise in resilience and crisis management, CERAC reviews the narratives for plausibility, enriches the scenarios with the cascading impacts that an extreme event would set off across society, and maintains the dialogue with stakeholders across sectors.
The Belgian Climate Centre's (BCC) contribution flows directly from its core mission: serving as the bridge between the scientific community and the wider world of stakeholders, decision-makers and practitioners. It brings scientists and sectors together in workshops that pair scientific knowledge with practitioners’ first-hand experience of impacts on the ground – work that both grounds the stories in reality and helps keep the underlying science rigorous. For Tales of Future Weather, the BCC brings resources and strategic expertise to ensure that both the data and the narratives reach non-specialist audiences.
Communication is a shared effort across all three partners, handled by a joint team that ensures every element of the project speaks with a consistent and credible voice. The narratives themselves are shaped by extensive dialogue with practitioners from a wide range of fields such as health, transport, education, energy, construction and emergency management. Their input informs both the plausibility of the impact scenarios and the relevance of the questions the project sets out to answer.
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