Winter, climate and adaptation: Seeing how societies make sense of change

January always arrives with expectations: personal resets, lists of goals, and fresh calendars waiting to be filled. Yet what truly happens in January is not a neat line of objectives, it is a catalyst for narratives, a month in which events that appear “climatic” end up activating stories about risk, vulnerability, resilience and the institutions that must organise their responses under demanding conditions.

This January 2026 is no exception. In the United States, a large-scale winter storm has spread across much of the country, bringing snow, ice and extreme temperatures, with consequences for energy systems, transport and everyday life. At the same time, various regions across Europe are facing storm systems, snowfall and weather alerts that place pressure on mobility networks and infrastructure.

When we read these developments in a linear way, we often remain at the surface of the meteorological data. What unfolds, however, is more layered: societies do not simply experience these phenomena; they construct meaning around them.

I recently published a video on the Frost Fair of 1814, the fair that took place on the frozen River Thames. That historical episode is not merely about cold weather, but about how a community narrated, adapted, accommodated, improvised and administered an extreme event within its own social, economic and cultural context.

When snow builds up, ice thickens, and winter temperatures bite harder than usual, life doesn’t stop dramatically, it shifts. Journeys take longer, plans are rearranged, people check timetables more often, and organisations quietly adjust how things run. Trains are delayed, roads slow down, services stretch to cope. None of this is just “weather”. It is everyday life re-organising itself in response, and that process, subtle, practical, collective, tells a story that goes far beyond the forecast.

In this sense, climatic events operate as moments of systemic revelation. The phenomenon is not only a natural occurrence; it is a situation that exposes capacities, limits, dependencies and priorities within a society. The physical environment acts as a trigger, but meaning is constructed socially.

Rather than asking only about the intensity of the event, a more compelling question might be: what do these situations tell us about how societies integrate the recurrent into their sense of normality?. Winter storms in the United States or Europe are not anomalies; they belong to known seasonal cycles, and are becoming more frequent within the context of climate change. For that reason, what matters is not the idea of a “surprise event”, but how what is expected is managed, incorporated, organised and collectively narrated.

The focus here is not on criticism but on observation, what becomes activated at institutional, infrastructural and narrative levels when a phenomenon we know will arrive returns once again. It is often not the rare event that shows us how things work, but the fact that the same situations return, season after season, and we find ways to live through them. In that repetition, we see how responsibilities are distributed, how responses are adjusted, and how public meaning is formed.

Finally, the present storm and the Frost Fair of 1814 do not share the same context or conditions, what they do share is something deeper: they are situations in which the physical environment becomes a stage upon which societies narrate, adapt, accommodate, improvise and administer their relationship with what surrounds them.

It is not always about a sudden break from the ordinary. Sometimes it is about something we know will come back, something cyclical, and it is precisely that return which shows how everyday normality is held together. In those moments, climate stops being just climate and turns into something else, a kind of mirror where our structures, our decisions, and the stories we tell ourselves so we can live with what the environment brings, again and again, quietly come into view.

So perhaps the question is: how do we reorganise our lives, again and again, around what we already know will return?