Building social resilience to environmental change in marginalised coastal communities

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project lays the groundwork for interdisciplinary collaboration on building social resilience in marginalised coastal communities. Seas and coasts can make a significant contribution to building a more sustainable society through, for example, low-carbon energy, resource provision and disaster risk reduction. At the same time, however, coastal communities may be more vulnerable to climate change risks or to negative effects from new offshore and coastal developments. In line with Sustainable Development Goal 14, there is hence a need to more fully understand how to manage society's relation with the sea in a way that benefits those who are most directly connected to the sea.This proposal therefore takes two countries with a strong social, cultural and economic connection to the sea - Scotland and Japan - and connects researchers working in the common direction of understanding and governing environmental change in seas and coasts. The overall objective of the project is to clarify how different disciplinary backgrounds - environmental sociology, geography, marine law, coastal zone management, environmental science communication, and marine science for environmental assessment - can work together to more effectively understand how environmental change affects coastal communities, and connect these findings with legal and environmental assessment and monitoring processes. The intended outcome is a conceptual and methodological framework, which will form the basis of subsequent larger funding proposals and more extensive empirical research.Key to attaining this objective is the development of initial links established by PI Mabon and Japanese Co-PI Kawabe with coastal communities in both Japan and Scotland. Specifically, Minamisoma in Fukushima Prefecture and Tomakomai in Hokkaido in Japan; and Orkney and Aberdeenshire in Scotland. In the project, these will be used as cast study areas for site visits, allowing project researchers to understand what kind of research would be feasible in follow-on funding and crucially allowing opportunity for interaction with local stakeholders to co-create new research questions ahead of more extensive research. This will be achieved through bilateral visits, and also through a longer-term academic visit between RGU and TUMSAT which emphasises development of early-career researchers and building of links with non-academic partners.Significant emphasis is placed on involvement and development of early-career researchers able to take an interdisciplinary approach to resilience in coastal communities. To this end, one early-career researcher from each country is included as a Co-Investigator, and budget is requested to allow a small number of additional ECRs to join the site visits and workshops during each bilateral visit.