Despite scientific evidence of increasingly frequent and severe weather and climate extremes, we still lack effective tools to communicate their adverse impacts. In refugee camps, these impacts are deeply interconnected, shaped by displacement and fragile infrastructure, and amplified by multi-risks such as floods, drought, and heat. Yet data often obscures refugees' lived experiences and reduces them to statistics, making it hard to visualize everyday realities and to communicate the urgency for disaster risk reduction.
This talk addresses two gaps: the need to connect complex disaster risk assessments with narratives that center refugees’ experiences, capacities, and agency; and the need to make research outputs actionable for communities facing structural barriers.
We present a visual approach developed in the Dadaab refugee camp complex in Kenya, one of the world’s largest humanitarian refugee settings. Through a participatory process involving more than 80 refugees, humanitarian actors, and host-community members, we co-produced an impact web, which is a conceptual risk model that captures the interconnected and dynamic nature of complex disaster risks.
We then translated the impact into a series of visual art narratives. These illustrations communicate the complexity of risk through the realities of everyday life in the camp, bringing individual experiences, their stories, and perspectives to the foreground. We discuss how this combination of conceptual models and artistic storytelling can support capacity building, training development, and broader science communication, while keeping the experiences and agency of affected communities at the center.
This talk shares: (1) a transferable approach to visualizing complex risks for multiple stakeholders; (2) a case example weaving empirical evidence with art to strengthen engagement; and (3) practical insights on how visual tools can support learning, dialogue, and local action. Ultimately, it explains how to make climate risk visible, relatable, and actionable in complex humanitarian contexts.