Taking the material turn as a theoretical framework following a socio-ecological approach, offers scholars in African studies the opportunity to focus on the understanding, production and circulation of grassroot environmental and ecological knowledge. This article focuses on the use of story-maps as sources for a study of climate change resilience in urban Sudan. Urban areas worldwide are increasingly affected and impacted by climatic events such as flooding, erratic weather events, storms, droughts and sandstorms. In particular African cities find themselves at the frontlines of climate change, which requires the development of greater resilience. Greater Khartoum, is one of those African cities that has faced major climatic changes over the past decades. In order to face environmental threats, there is a scholarly need to better understand the proactive or reactive acts of resilience that urban communities develop at grassroots level. To study this, our research team has applied a variety of innovative methods focused on a selected area in Greater Khartoum, in this particular case Tuti Island. 

Our team consists of researchers based in Sweden and Sudan, working on interdisciplinary knowledge co-production in an international study entitled “An Interdisciplinary Spatial and Temporal Study of Social Cohesion and Resilience to tackle the consequences of Climate and Environmental Change in Urban Khartoum.”a collaboration between Malmö University and Lund University in Sweden and the University of Khartoum in Sudan.[1] In this paper, we will reflect on the methods implemented within the study; such as story-mapping, oral history and the use of georeferenced digital data and participatory photography on ongoing floods in Tuti island during the summer of 2020. These methods produced a constellation of ArcGIS esri story-maps to study resilience to climate change, agricultural land use changes, migration and diversity and social and environmental memory. The story-maps function as sources that translate localised knowledge. Following the description of the technique of story-mapping, we will present two story-maps from the project and reflect on their analytical value, concerning the context surrounding the production of story-maps as data sources and as a form of co-production of environmental knowledge.