Building Climate Resilience through Community, Landscapes and Cultural Heritage

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Landscapes, communities and individuals have historically and continue to cope and adapt to climate change, some through incremental changes (potentially unnoticed), whilst others make rapid adjustments, reflecting abrupt changes in their environment, through landscape loss and gain. However, the impact of these activities and the effectiveness of adaptations leaves traces in our modern landscape. Understanding how communities have interacted with their environments and adapted to changing circumstances provides a basis for examining how future changes may be managed and communicated through a variety of mechanisms, building resilience at a range of spatial and temporal scales across landscapes. Information on past adaptations is often recorded, but poorly integrated into discourses around community resilience. As a result communities can be ill equipped to make informed and appropriate adaptations for building climate resilient futures. This co-created project addresses this information and process gap. Geographical contexts and circumstances influence how people and communities experience the world and interact with their landscapes. Local knowledge, practices and experiences emerge in place and reflect their specific environment. These knowledge's, practices and experiences become embedded in materialistic and adaptation responses and behaviours, and technological developments. In doing so they make a distinctive contribution to community trajectories of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience over time. This work will afford important insights into how societies in the past have been affected by, coped with and conceptualized environmental changes. It will also explore the nature of the individual, community, institutional, regional and national responses and adaptations following these changes. These insights can help inform future climate resilience provision. Understanding and capturing local environmental knowledge is key to the successful development of community adaptation systems that embed uncertainties associated with climate change and assist communities to interact with their landscapes and environments sustainably. The project, co-developed with existing and new partners (Historic England; Fjordr; Staffordshire Record Office and Museum & Tasglann nan Eilean Siar - Museums and Archives of the Outer Hebrides) will investigate how communities have lived with and are living with and adapting to climate change to build climate resilient communities. Through the development of a toolkit we will support and facilitate decision making in respect to current landscapes and environments. The toolkit will develop a multifaceted approach of cataloguing features (historic, material and archival), supplemented with contemporary oral histories within a Geographical Information System (GIS), using an co-creation approach that engages with communities throughout the process. The project will help all of the partner institutions better appreciate the cultural and socio-economic implications of extreme weather and climate in the regions and communities within which they operate, and the ways in which they might anticipate future impacts in their work. This research addresses the current need of agencies and authorities (e.g. Historic England) for tools that facilitate understanding and value of cultural heritage and the ways in which it can underpin informed decisions about sustainable futures, which supports community communication and engagement in future decision making, which is fundamental in building resilient communities. There is clear potential for the toolkit to become an embedded aspect of future CCRA4 and of immediate value to environmental organisations and local/regional community groups (e.g. flood forums and local historical groups) and shape future policy debates (e.g. FCERM strategy) across the UK.