I’m working with Nick Brooks of Garama, and under the umbrella of Climate Museum UK on a programme called Adaptarchy.
It has three goals:
- Adaptation Literacy: supporting people and organisations of all sectors to understand climate change adaptation, its core concepts and relevance to their lives. We will achieve this through training workshops offered online or in-person for organisations and groups.
- Anticipating climate risks: supporting people to identify appropriate responses to address climate change risks affecting their communities. We will achieve this through informal workshops with active citizens in Norfolk and beyond, exploring possible scenarios.
- Organising for resilience: developing tactical capacities in people within and beyond the programme to organise for resilience and community safety. We will achieve this through the combined impacts of training and local engagement, amplified with advocacy and transparent sharing of knowledge.
Climate Change is the key threat multiplier amongst the nine Planetary Boundaries that indicate Ecological Overshoot, and it also worsens the injustices of Social Shortfall.
As Climate Change accelerates, and global action to reduce emissions is stalling, we all need to work for the safety of people and biodiversity in the face of its inevitable impacts. This has been called ‘Adaptation’ — but we might also think of it as ‘community safety’, ‘resilience’, or ‘survival’. Adaptation does not stand in opposition to Mitigation. It is about anticipating risks, preparing for them, and minimising the risks as much as possible by intervening at the roots of harm. Too little or too much water is the immediate cause of 98% of these incidents, but the original systemic causes are more societal and economic.
Climate impacts are starting to affect us all now wherever we live, for example, through our food prices, through stresses on our water supplies, the effects on our health, or our insurance premiums. Even if not directly displaced or injured by them, we can see disastrous climate incidents unfold daily across the world through our digital screens.
Despite this ‘transapocalypse’, adaptation efforts remain limited and fragmented, and largely restricted to narrow technological and engineering considerations in specific sectors. Government adaptation and resilience planning — where it exists — is woefully inadequate.
Navigating climate change and its cascading risks requires a whole-of-society approach that blends top-down and bottom-up actions. These actions should range from national policies and infrastructural initiatives, through local government planning, to community resilience. Given the lack of engagement of central government with adaptation, much of the adaptation burden will fall on local authorities, organisations, businesses, and communities.
Just as the Carbon Literacy Project has helped individuals and organisations understand how they can reduce their emissions of climate-heating greenhouse gases, Adaptation Literacy supports people and organisations to understand climate change adaptation and resilience and to identify appropriate responses to address climate change and related risks.
This support takes the form of a flexible, interactive training programme offered by Climate Museum UK and Garama 3C, as part of the Adaptarchy initiative. This is offered as a one-day in-person course or an online course spread over two weeks. The training blends presentations with interactive discussions and creative exercises and is based on a set of core modules focusing on key concepts and actions. Additional modules can be tailored to different audiences, including local government, civil society, the cultural sector, and the private sector. The balance between presentation, discussion, and creative exercises can also be adjusted to suit the needs of the audience.
The purpose of the course is to equip participants with a practical understanding of adaptation and resilience that they can use in their personal and professional lives to ensure that they, their communities and organisations, are prepared for the impacts of climate change.
The Adaptarchy initiative
The impacts of climate change are felt locally, and it is at the local level that most adaptation will take place, supported by relevant national policies where they exist, and driven solely from the bottom-up where they do not. Adaptarchy recognises the mismatch between the urgent need for adaptation and resilience on the one hand, and the lack of action on climate change by central government on the other. This mismatch means that people, communities, business, local authorities, and other organisations need to take their own action to address climate change risks and impacts.
Adaptation is about reducing risks to the systems on which we depend and developing new systems and behaviours where climate change and other threats render existing ones obsolete. But it is also about developing new forms of governance that enable people to take appropriate actions. These actions go beyond addressing specific climate change risks and impacts. They include actions that address the underlying drivers of vulnerability that mean some people are at much greater risk than others, and the drivers of fragility that make social and economic systems vulnerable to disruption and even collapse in the face of rapid climatic and environmental change.
Our approach to Adaptarchy embraces the need to be ‘collapse aware’, but rejects ‘collapse despair,’ viewing collapse as a choice that modern societies make through inaction in the face of rapid climatic and environmental change. Personally, my lead principle is to be Possitopian, which is about opening to the possibility that the situation could become much worse while acting as if we can create the best of all possible worlds.
Climate change and other complex risks are likely to result in the collapse of production systems and supply chains, and in some economic and political systems, leading to a more unpredictable, hostile and disordered world. Adaptarchy is about anticipating and weathering these outcomes through self-organised, bottom-up, cooperative action at local and bioregional levels to:
i. Develop general local and community resilience to address a range of risks, including food and water shortages, price shocks, and disasters;
ii. Adapt by identifying, anticipating and planning for uncertain but specific climate change hazards, including extreme heat and drought, unprecedented fires and floods, extreme climate variations, and permanent climate shifts such as those associated with a weakening or shut-down of the North Atlantic circulation;
iii. Integrate adaptation into ‘conventional’ resilience and sustainability initiatives, which often fail to consider whether actions taken today will be viable in the future under climate change;
iv. Identify and address the structural drivers of vulnerability to climate change and other threats, which are often related to inequality, exclusion, and other social, economic and political factors.
Get in touch with Nick Brooks on npjbrooks@googlemail.com for more information.
