Progressive Participation (Asynchronous Session)
Featured Environmental History, Archaeology, and the Political Ecology of Climate Change: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on Boundaries, Borderlands, and Population Displacement in Perpetuity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher Graham
Climate change is a global problem but it’s solutions are still restricted by national borders. Local and national policies often remain unbending and unresponsive to current climate realities. Nothing demonstrates this more than the issue of climate displacement and migration. Everyday across the world, thousands of people are displaced by climate shocks like floods and droughts and are increasingly threatened by slow-onset disasters like sea-level rise. Yet, when people flee for their safety and subsistence crossing national borders, most are denied refuge. Despite growing evidence showing that climate change is driving internal and cross-border displacement, presently neither national immigration laws nor International refugee laws specifically recognize or fully protect people who cross international boarders seeking refuge or asylum due to the effects of climate change. Those who make sometimes dangerous journeys to cross boarders are relegated to desolate borderlands or repatriated back to the disaster sites they fled. So why is it that borders remain so closed off to climate migration? And what does the future hold for the displaced in limbo between boarders and borderlands? Cross/interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the ecologies of human mobility, have something to say. Pulling from case studies on environmental history, archaeology and political ecology, this paper surveys the state of human mobility in the anthropocene - where we are and where we are heading. It contemplates the big history of the displaced in relationship to the rigidity of border sovereignty, and the role cross-disciplinary discourse plays in re-humanizing the international system.
Ripple Effects: Disseminating Local Climate Action via TV View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elke Weissmann
The paper presents research into how the efforts of local communities to tackle climate change may be amplified through the medium of local television. In the United Kingdom, public service television had a clear impact in how television was developed around ideas of community cohesion as well as education, information and entertainment (Scannell, 1990). However, when local television was set up in the 2010s, the adopted system was a commercial one. This hampers how communities can engage with local television to make their voices heard. This is particularly problematic in a city where there is a level of disconnect between what local community groups want to achieve and what the local government is willing to support. This paper examines how community-led local television may be able to amplify local voices to inspire change beyond the immediate membership of community groups. It presents the work conducted by Love Wavertree CIC, a local community group based in Liverpool, UK, which is collaborating with Edge Hill University to deliver a series of climate assemblies which will lead to some television content which will then be disseminated via the group's website and local screenings.
Unveiling Informal Governance of Adaptation to Climate Change with Participatory Methods: An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Forest Management in Three Countries View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothée Fouqueray
To date, the participation of environmental stakeholders in climate studies has mostly focused on technical data (e.g., citizen science for species inventories, local monitoring of climate change impacts). Here, we rather describe participatory approaches tackling social and economic issues of climate change. Leaning on study cases of adaptation to climate change in Canadian, Belgian, and French forests, we discuss the benefits and challenges of participatory methods through the lens of our interdisciplinary team (ecology, economics, geography). We draw on a conceptual framework focused on ES, social synergetic, antagonistic, or neutral interdependencies, and collective action. These interdependencies are reshaped by changes in management decisions that modify ES and by new trade‐offs in the interests of forest stakeholders. We first show how our serious game and collective workshops allowed for the expression of participants’ daily experience of environmental management, and how this is effective in revealing the actual (informal) governance of climate change. We then outline the prospective use of participatory methods to build alternate scenarios of adaptation to climate change. We illustrate with quotations and pictures, for instance when participants (dis)agreed on shared goals or on their levels of responsibility in paying for adaptation measures. We conclude with recommendations for the best use of participatory methods in climate studies for forest, agricultural, and coastal systems.
Measuring Increased Resilience: The Race to Resilience Campaign View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marco Billi, Roxana Borquez, Paulina Aldunce
Adaptation has increasingly become one of the key pillars in climate action in the face of growing global climate-related risks and the insufficiency of mitigation efforts to minimize those risks effectively. However, contrary to mitigation, adaptation has never enjoyed a strong consensus in terms of its ultimate goal, indicators, and measurement, so that monitoring and evaluating global adaptation efforts is a significant challenge. Multiple approaches exist, focusing on different aspects and relying on different procedures and data. Moreover, there is an increasing consensus that adaptation and resilience-building are strongly context-dependent endeavors. Both their design and assessment must be adjusted to the characteristics of specific initiatives, sectors, realities, or territories. At the same time, however, a universal, coherent framework is needed to aggregate and validate outcomes and favor collective learning and cross-fertilization between initiatives. In this paper, we review existing frameworks to measure and evaluate adaptation and resilience-building efforts. We identify key challenges, opportunities, and tensions they encounter. We then discuss the experience from the Race to Resilience Campaign that catalyzes actions by non-state actors to build the resilience of 4 billion people from groups and communities who are vulnerable to climate risks, with a particular focus on its Metrics Framework, precisely as an effort to combine global-level needs for data comparability and aggregation with the flexibility required for the heterogeneity of adaptation and resilience-building efforts. We conclude with a reflection on the particular challenge of data validation and quality assurance this endeavor implies.
Can the UK Achieve Net-zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David F. Hendry
Net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are an excellent target, but difficult to achieve by having to bridge a dramatic energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, as well as eliminate other sources of GHG emissions from agriculture, construction and waste. A comprehensive strategy for doing so is essential, and although components like renewable electricity generation and electric vehicles are well developed, many issues remain, especially timing the stages in tandem. The key sensitive intervention points (SIPs) are (a) installing sufficient non-GHG electricity, (b) having electric vehicles connected to the grid for large-scale short-run backup storage, (c) utilising intermittent `surplus' energy for nearly free hydrogen production, (d) some liquified for medium-term storage and a high-heat for industry, and (e) other electricity-based uses such as in agriculture. Public support for a purely green economy will wane if the economic costs are too high, so it is essential to maintain employment and real per-capita incomes. Decarbonizing the economy while also dealing with the economic costs of the COVID-19 pandemic can occur by using an integrated stepped approach.
