Reimagining Extreme Event Scenarios: The Aesthetic Visualisation of Climate Uncertainty to Enhance Preparedness

Responding to the rapidly escalating climate emergency, this chapter outlines transformative multidisciplinary research centred on the visualisation of unpredictable extreme event scenarios. It proposes a unique, scientifically grounded artistic approach to one of the world’s most immediate challenges—preparing communities for extreme climate events, such as firestorms and flash floods. As preparedness is a function of prior threat experience, it argues that visualising threat scenarios in advance can be a key to surviving and adapting in an era of increasing climate instability. This approach can enable communities to viscerally experience and rehearse threat perception, situational awareness, adaptive decision making and dynamic response to unexpected life-threatening extreme events. Using experimental case studies at The University of New South Wales’s iCinema Research Centre and international benchmarks, this chapter explores how advances in immersive visualisation and artificial intelligence aesthetics can be integrated to provide a framework that enables the virtual prototyping of unforeseen geolocated climate scenarios to facilitate readiness in the face of accelerating climate uncertainty.