Empowering citizen and community adaptation to systemic risks from climate change
Climate change is increasingly having impacts on individual livelihoods and prosperity yet plans for adaptation strategies have mostly been limited to government and the private sector. Our international team will undertake three case studies (in the UK, India, and Ghana) to explore the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on a local level from the citizen perspective.
In a series of online workshops, we will bring together groups of citizens and empower them to create bespoke strategies for individual adaptation. Our team of experts will guide participants through an interactive mapping exercise to identify climate change threats and interventions tailored to local context. Participants will then work together and with our team to review their strategies from a range of different perspectives.
By the end of the project, participants will have developed practical and customised pathways for on-the-ground climate change adaptation, empowering them to protect their families and communities, and advocate for or even catalyse institutional change.
Through EMPOWER we hope to improve the safety of communities and develop new protocols for urgently needed bottom-up climate change adaptation approaches.
Project objectives:
- To work with citizens and local communities to create adaptation strategies to protect themselves from the effects of climate change;
- To analyse proposed adaptation measures in terms of feasibility, how they might apply to multiple contexts, and taking into consideration who to engage with and when;
- To map proposed adaptation measures to broader, longer-term outcomes such as air quality, public health, biodiversity protection etc.
- To learn from the different regional contexts where our case studies are set to help set the direction for broader uptake of citizen and community adaptation planning.