Fostering Household Motivation and Capacity for Transformational Adaptation to Coastal Flooding

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Roughly 680 million people live by the coast on land less than 10 metres above sea level (11% of the global population) (Oppenheimer et al. 2019). In England alone, 370,000 homes are located in areas with a 0.5% or greater annual risk from coastal flooding (CCC 2018). The risks of living in the coastal zone will increase further this century even with the ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change. With 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, an associated average sea level rise of 0.26-0.77m is predicted (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018), and the number of people living by the coast and at risk of coastal flooding is also predicted to increase (Neumann et al. 2015). Engineered defences are an effective approach to manage coastal flooding on the South Coast of England, but households may also be expected to adapt their actions and behaviour as climate change drives increased coastal flood and erosion risk. Both HM Government and the Environment Agency, key players in coastal adaptation policy, have suggested they think there is a role and responsibility for households (EA 2020; HM Government 2020), and my PhD research explored how households participate in adaptation on the coast and their motivation to do so. "Adaptation" describes the actions we as individuals, organisations and governments can make to respond to actual and expected changes in the environment; "transformational adaptation" poses the possibility of not just responding, but altering the very nature of our societies and tackling long-term challenges now. Transformational adaptation, in contrast with incremental adaptation, focuses on the future and long-term change, on rapid and revolutionary changes to the nature of a system, and on creating new opportunities from environmental challenges such as coastal flooding and climate change (Suckall et al. 2019).This fellowship, "Fostering Household Motivation and Capacity for Transformational Adaptation to Coastal Flooding", provides me with the exciting opportunity to explore transformational adaptation on the South Coast of England through academic, policy and public facing impact and research activities. However, our understanding of transformational adaptation remains vague and poorly defined, and it has rarely been examined from a household point of view, nor from a sociological disciplinary perspective. To explore transformational adaptation of households, I will conduct further research into what opportunities and barriers there are to households adapting to coastal and climate change, and develop a competitive research proposal to further this research agenda that is crucial for adaptation in the UK and beyond. To achieve this, I will engage directly with policy stakeholders, coastal management stakeholders and community groups on the South Coast through workshops, a 6-part podcast series, interviews, and co-developing a policy brief. To inform these actions, I want to improve my depth of understanding of sociological research theories and methods, as this discipline offers approaches by which to ask questions such as: what is the role of the household in coastal adaptation decision-making; what is the nature of household responsibility to flood risk management; and how is a "flood risk responsible citizen" being framed by current policy? Gaining this increased knowledge and expertise in sociological methods will support further publications, establishing my academic profile, and furthering my career in researching coastal adaptation at the household scale.