From probability to plausibility in climate-risk scenarios: a cognitive framework for decision-making under deep uncertainty.

Climate-risk scenario analysis has become central to financial supervision, adaptation planning, and institutional governance, yet formally modeled futures often fail to guide action. We argue that the gap between representation and response is partly cognitive. Drawing on constructive memory, mental time travel, source monitoring, episodic future thinking, scenario planning, and organizational sensemaking, we develop a framework of plausible futures for decision-making under deep uncertainty. On this account, climate futures gain practical force when they become mentally constructible, narratively scaffolded, socially stabilized, and culturally legitimated. Simulational fluency is proposed as one pathway through which scenario form may influence how readily decision-makers construct, inspect, compare, and rehearse possible futures. The framework identifies false precision in quantitative models and the ways narrative can sharpen or mislead judgement. These insights support the joint development of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Climate-risk governance requires sophisticated calculation together with anticipatory practices that allow institutions to inhabit uncertain futures cognitively; those practices keep uncertainty explicit and judgement both revisable and answerable to evidence.