Community resilience is widely promoted so that communities can respond positively to a range of risks, including shocks, extreme events, and other changes. Although much research has identified ...characteristics or capacities that confer resilience, resilience is more than simply the sum of these. Resilience is an emergent property-the capacities are linked and act together. We present an empirical analysis of five different capacities and assess how interactions between them confer resilience in two coastal communities in Cornwall, UK. These capacities are place attachment, leadership, community cohesion and efficacy, community networks, and knowledge and learning. Based on a survey and focus group discussions, our results show that residents draw on these capacities in different combinations, enabling resilience in diverse ways. This provides a dynamic and socially nuanced perspective on community resilience as process, potentially informing theory and practice of conservation, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and community development.
•Proposes empathy as a key phenomenon that shapes human-environment relations.•Empathy-sustainability involves empathy with others and empathy with nature, mediated through place and ...identity.•Diverse methods, from experiments and games through to creative engagement, can measure and stimulate empathy.•Evidence on empathy-sustainability relationship, and the mediating roles of place and identity, informs policy on sustainability.
Sustainability science recognises the need to fully incorporate cultural and emotional dimensions of environmental change to understand how societies deal with and shape anticipated transformations, unforeseen risks and increasing uncertainties. The relationship between empathy and sustainability represents a key advance in understanding underpinning human-environment relations. We assert that lack of empathy for nature and for others limits motivations to conserve the environment and enhance sustainability. Critically, the relationship between empathy and sustainability is mediated by place and identity that constrain and shape empathy’s role in pro-environmental sustainability behaviour. We review emerging evidence across disciplines and suggest a new model exploring interactions between place, identity and empathy for sustainability. There are emerging innovative methodological approaches to observe, measure and potentially stimulate empathy for sustainability.
An increasing focus on place based planning and adaptation processes brings to the fore the importance of understanding the situated experience of social and environmental change. Populations do not ...respond uniformly to environmental and social change, and given that consensus is needed to successfully achieve inclusive adaptation it is important to understand how and why people are more sensitive to certain changes and risks over others. Using a sense of place lens, we investigate how an individual’s relationship with their property and their town shapes their sensitivity to a range of risks. To investigate this, we conducted a survey in towns in South Africa, UK and France (n = 707) to examine the relationship between multiple dimensions of sense of place with place-based risks. We find that relationship with place matters differently for perception of social, environmental and overdevelopment risk. In particular, we find that feeling safe in place correlates with reduced perceptions of social risks but increases the likelihood of perceiving environmental risk. The role of place in risk perception is stronger at the property scale than the town scale, and it is only at the property scale that place meaning is related to risk perception. Our findings contribute to theory on the subjective experience of place-based risks and has implications for how social and environmental change can be communicated and managed.
•Surveys carried out in 4 coastal towns in 3 countries focused on multiple dimensions of sense of place and risk.•Sense of place explains variation in perceptions of environmental, overdevelopment and social risks.•Feelings of place related safety leads to lower perceptions of social risk but higher perceptions of environmental risk.•The meaning attached to place is significant for perception of risk at the property scale but not at the town scale.
Coastal areas are exposed to changing patterns of mobility and increasingly extreme weather events, offering unique opportunities to study the complexity of adaptation to global changes and the ...diversity of responses to risk. How individuals and communities respond to risk varies widely, however traditional rationalist and economic based understandings have proved limited in explaining responses to risk. Increasingly social science, and specifically, a focus on peoples' relationships with their local places is providing a useful approach to understanding human responses to place based change. We bring together literature on sense of place, mobility, risk perception, and adaptation and develop a conceptual model to highlight the dynamic links between these processes. In particular we concentrate on a way of understanding risk that focuses on the role of different types of attachments to place. We explore this model using a pilot study (n = 70) and present data that indicates how different types of place attachments are significant in whether people perceive themselves to be at risk of flooding. Our review and results emphasize the interconnectivity of social and environmental change, and suggests that by identifying particular place attachments, as shaped by mobility, we can deepen our understanding of how communities choose to respond to risk.
Abstract
Adaptation to climate change is inescapably influenced by processes of social identity—how people perceive themselves, others, and their place in the world around them. Yet there is sparse ...evidence into the specific ways in which identity processes shape adaptation planning and responses. This paper proposes three key ways to understand the relationship between identity formation and adaptation processes: (a) how social identities change in response to perceived climate change risks and threats; (b) how identity change may be an objective of adaptation; and (c) how identity issues can constrain or enable adaptive action. It examines these three areas of focus through a synthesis of evidence on community responses to flooding and subsequent policy responses in Somerset county, UK and the Gippsland East region in Australia, based on indepth longitudinal data collected among those experiencing and enacting adaptation. The results show that adaptation policies are more likely to be effective when they give individuals confidence in the continuity of their in-groups, enhance the self-esteem of these groups, and develop their sense of self-efficacy. These processes of identity formation and evolution are therefore central to individual and collective responses to climate risks.
Governments globally are adapting to sea level rise through a range of interventions to improve everyday lives of communities at risk. One prominent response is planned relocation, where people and ...communities are enabled to move from localities exposed to coastal erosion and inundation as a result of sea level rise. Managed retreat has significant social consequences including under-reported impacts on health, well-being and social identity. Here we adopt well-established measures of well-being and document the outcomes of planned relocation on well-being in the Volta Delta region of Ghana. Data from a bespoke survey for individuals (n = 505) in relocated and non-relocated communities demonstrate that planned relocation negatively impacts well-being and anxiety of those relocated when compared to a community that is equally exposed but has not moved. Individuals in the relocated community reported significantly lower levels of overall wellbeing, significantly higher levels of anxiety, and lower perceptions of safety, compared to non-relocated community members. These outcomes are explained as being related to the disruption of community connection, identities, and feelings of efficacy. Relocated community members reported significantly lower levels of attachment to the local area and home, significantly lower levels of community-based self-efficacy, and significantly lower levels of overall community-based identity. The results demonstrate that planned relocation to address sea level rise has multiple social consequences with outcomes for well-being that are not straightforwardly related to risk reduction.
With the increasing number of adaptation plans being generated across the world at multiple scales and levels of organization, the issue of coordination among plans is emerging as a significant ...challenge. We focus on how lack of coordination may constrain their efficiency as a result of potential transfers of vulnerability. This paper focuses on interdependencies between autonomous feedback control loops that represent adaptation processes and makes the link between autonomous action and (social-ecological) system levels. These interdependencies allow changes in vulnerability of one adaptation actor as a consequence of the reduction of vulnerability of another actor. We refer to the processes behind such changes as "vulnerability transfers" and suggest the need for their identification so that actors may make agreements to address them explicitly. A thorough analysis of each step involved in a feedback control loop enables the identification of potential interdependencies, leading to seven basic types of vulnerability transfer. The analysis of example cases of observed transfers of vulnerability in three coastal case studies then demonstrate the suitability of feedback control loop networks to assess, ex-ante, potential vulnerability transfers. The example cases feature all types of theoretically possible vulnerability transfers. Initial empirical investigation showcases the relative importance of shared infrastructures in generating transfers of vulnerability. It also helps to reveal forgotten links to avoid decreasing efficiency of adaptation processes beyond each autonomous agent's jurisdiction. Our representation contributes to a more comprehensive ex-ante identification of transfers and hence the possibility to discuss and manage them.
The sharp end of climate change is being, and will continue to be, experienced at the local and personal scale. How changing patterns of hazards interplay with local landscapes is an important focus ...of risk management, both in understanding how place-based risk is perceived and in identifying how local populations would like these risks to be managed. In this study we focus on the object of hazard and examine how different meanings associated with water and waterbodies relate to flood risk perception and preferences for flood management strategies. We present analysis of a mixed methods study with survey data (
n
= 707) of residents in four coastal towns in France, South Africa and UK presented alongside an in-depth study of the two French towns (semi-structured interviews
n
= 15 and document analysis). Our analysis unpacks the significance of relationships between the meaning of water in general, and the meaning of specific water bodies, to flood risk perceptions. Our findings indicate that general water meaning is more reliably related to flood risk perception than specific waterbody meaning, where waterbody meanings are significant for flood risk perception, positive identification with rivers relates to reduced flood risk perception. We also find that the meanings associated with water and waterbodies relate to specific preferences for different types of flood management, including insurance and local taxation. The implications for landscapes undergoing rapid change, for example as a result of changing climate and hydrological regimes, are discussed. In particular, we highlight how infrastructure interacts with sense of place in communities undergoing rapid social–ecological change and how understanding this interplay can help in the design of more fully supported adaptation strategies.
Catchment resilience is the capacity of a combined social ecological system, comprised of water, land, ecological resources and communities in a river basin, to deal with sudden shocks and gradual ...changes, and to adapt and self-organize for progressive change and transform itself for sustainability. This paper proposes that analysis of catchments as social ecological systems can provide key insights into how social and ecological dynamics interact and how some of the negative consequences of unsustainable resource use or environmental degradation can be ameliorated. This requires recognition of the potential for community resilience as a core element of catchment resilience, and moves beyond more structural approaches to emphasize social dynamics. The proposals are based on a review of social ecological systems research, on methods for analyzing community resilience, and a review of social science and action research that suggest ways of generating resilience through community engagement. These methods and approaches maximize insights into the social dynamics of catchments as complex adaptive systems to inform science and practice.
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