Contrasting the framing of urban climate resilience

Cities worldwide face climate change and other complex challenges and strive to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that these bring. The notion of urban (climate) resilience has become highly popular in both research and practice. However, the concept is inherently malleable; it can be framed in different ways, emphasising different problems, causes, moral judgements, and solutions. This review explores contrasting ways of framing urban climate resilience and their potential consequences. It identifies four typical framings: Urban Shock-Proofing (short-term & system focus), Resilience Planning (long-term & system focus), Community Disaster Resilience (short-term & community focus), and Resilient Community Development (long-term & community focus). These framings lead to different approaches to urban resilience and climate adaptation in research, science-policy-society interactions, governance, and practical resilience-building. They also offer different synergies with wider sustainability efforts, including the SDGs. Resilience Planning is widely represented in urban climate adaptation research. However, Resilient Community Development, dealing with community self-determination, equity, and deeper long-term socio-political determinants of vulnerability, is currently underdeveloped. Expansion of current scientific and institutional toolboxes is needed to support and build community-based adaptive and transformative capacities. Explicit reflection on framing is important to facilitate collaboration among actors and across disciplinary and departmental siloes.publishedVersio

The visual framing of climate change impacts and adaptation in the IPCC assessment reports

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a key source on climate change information. How the IPCC presents and frames this climate information influences how policymakers and various stakeholders worldwide perceive climate change and make decisions accordingly. Visuals are powerful components in this communication. Here, we assess how the visuals (N = 702) in the IPCC Working Group II Assessment Reports frame climate impacts and adaptation. We find that visuals are largely framed as distant in time and space and predominantly portray the threats of climate change rather than possible goals to be achieved. Furthermore, conceptually, they are largely narrow, science-oriented instead of showing a broader multi-impact or multi-strategy evaluation of the impacts on society and necessary adaptations. They primarily depicted what the impacts and adaptations were, with minimal attention to who was impacted or needed to take adaption actions or adopt responsibility. Very few of the visuals in WG II (N = 48, 6.5%) focus on adaptation and those that did often do not show a clear theme, spatial or temporal scale. Our findings suggest that IPCC visuals (still) focus primarily on showing that climate change is real and a problem, with little solution-oriented communication. We recommend that the IPCC pays explicit attention to its visual framing and that approaches are developed to better visualise adaptation.acceptedVersio

Архів П. Мартиновича, присвячений кобзарству

Продовжуючи серію публікацій до ювілею відомого дослідника побуту, цехових звичаїв та репертуару кобзарів та лірників художника Порфирія Денисовича Мартиновича, ми пропонуємо читачам матеріали його архіву, присвячені кобзарській тематиці.This edition continues publication of the archive materials dedicated to P.D. Martynovych, who was an artist and a prominent researcher, interested in every day life and repertoire of the Ukrainian epic singers — kobzars and lirnyks. His correspondence with V.P. Horlenko (year 1886) indicates, that he was involved in the problems of the preservation of the Ukrainian traditional culture, and in the kobzars’ studies. His recordings from kobzar P. Drygavka (done in 1913) give us information about kobzars’ every day life, traditions, customs in Kharkiv region

The interaction between cultural heritage and community resilience in disaster-affected volcanic regions

Research on cultural heritage and disasters often focuses on the vulnerability of heritage and ways to disaster-proof it against geophysical, societal, and environmental hazards. However, heritage might in turn also increase the resilience of the communities in which it is present, for example by providing livelihood diversification, helping build social connections, and embedding local knowledge of past disasters. This study analysed how cultural heritage might contribute to multiple aspects of community disaster resilience. It builds on an analysis of resilience and disaster-related cultural heritage of four communities living around Besakih Temple located on Mount Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia, using a mixed-methods MDSO (Most Different Same Outcome) multi-criteria analysis based on questionnaire-guided interviews with 114 respondents. While the variation of cultural heritage across sites is as predicted by theoretical literature, resilience varies considerably across the sites, depending on the type of resilience. Heritage had most positive effect on disaster preparedness and institutional aspects of community resilience. The results highlighted that connecting ‘regular’ disaster management and planning to local cultural heritage can provide valuable synergies for community resilience. Effects on other aspects of resilience were less clear and were likely mediated by existing socio-economic vulnerabilities and the geographical isolation of some of the communities. Further research could benefit from viewing cultural heritage through a ‘community capital’ lens, including matters of equitable access, capacity-building, community-based action, and interactions between cultural capital and other capitals, such as social, economic, political, human, physical, and natural.publishedVersio

Beyond rules: How institutional cultures and climate governance interact

Institutions have a central role in climate change governance. But while there is a flourishing literature on institutions' formal rules, processes, and organizational forms, scholars lament a relative lack of attention to institutions' informal side; their cultures. It is important to study institutions' cultures because it is through culture that people relate to institutional norms and rules in taking climate action. This review uncovers what work has been done on institutional cultures and climate change, discerns common themes around which this scholarship coheres, and advances and argument for why institutional cultures matter. We employed a systematic literature review to assemble a set of 54 articles with a shared concern for how climate change and institutional cultures concurrently affect each other. The articles provided evidence of a nascent field, emerging over the past 5–10 years and fragmented across literatures. This field draws on diverse concepts of institutionalism for revealing quite different expressions of culture, and is mostly grounded in empirical studies. These disparate studies compellingly demonstrate, from different perspectives, that institutional cultures do indeed matter for implementing climate governance. Indeed, the articles converge in providing empirical evidence of eight key sites of interaction between climate change and institutional cultures: worldviews, values, logics, gender, risk acceptance, objects, power, and relationality. These eight sites are important foci for examining and effecting changes to institutions and their cultures; showing how institutional cultures shape responses to climate change, and how climate change shapes institutional cultures.publishedVersio

Local narratives of change as an entry point for building urban climate resilience

Cities face increasing risks due to climate change, and many cities are actively working towards increasing their climate resilience. Climate change-induced risks and interventions to reduce these risks do not only impact urban risk management systems and infrastructures, but also people's daily lives. In order to build public support for climate adaptation and resilience-building and stimulate collaboration between authorities and citizens, it is necessary that adaptation and resilience-building are locally meaningful. Thus, interventions should be rooted in citizens’ concerns and aspirations for their city. Urban policymakers and researchers have started the search for better citizen participation in adaptation. However, tools to connect the relatively strategic and long-term notions of adaptation to a gradually changing climate held by planners and scientists with how citizens experience today's climate and weather remain elusive. This paper investigates the use of ‘narratives of change’ as an approach to elicit perceptions of past, present and future weather, water, and climate, and how these relate to citizens’ desired futures. We tested this by eliciting and comparing narratives of change from authorities and from citizens in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Our analysis of the process showed that historical events, embedded in local memory and identity, have a surprisingly strong impact on how climate change is perceived and acted upon today. This contributes to an awareness and sense of urgency of some climate risks (e.g. flood risks). However, it also shifts attention away from other risks (e.g. intensified heat stress). The analysis highlighted commonalities, like shared concerns about climate change and desires to collaborate, but also differences in how climate change, impacts, and action are conceptualized. There are possibilities for collaboration and mutual learning, as well as areas of potential disagreement and conflict. We conclude that narratives are a useful tool to better connect the governance of climate adaptation with peoples’ daily experience of climate risks and climate resilience, thereby potentially increasing public support for and participation in resilience-building.</p

The effects of serious gaming on risk perceptions of climate tipping points

A growing body of research indicates that effective science-policy interactions demand novel approaches, especially in policy domains with long time horizons like climate change. Serious games offer promising opportunities in this regard, but empirical research on game effects and games’ effectiveness in supporting science-policy engagement remains limited. We investigated the effects of a role-playing simulation game on risk perceptions associated with climate tipping points among a knowledgeable and engaged audience of non-governmental observers of the international climate negotiations and scientists. We analysed its effects on concern, perceived seriousness, perceived likelihood and psychological distance of tipping points, using pre- and post-game surveys, debriefing questions and game observations. Our findings suggest that the game reduced the psychological distance of tipping points, rendering them more ‘real’, proximate and tangible for participants. More generally, our findings indicate that role-playing simulation games, depending on their design and future orientation, can provide effective science-policy engagement tools that allow players to engage in future thinking and corresponding meaning making.publishedVersio

Religious positions on climate change and climate policy in the United States

February 2006, a group of 86 evangelical leaders, under the auspices of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, challenged the Bush administration on global warming. Other religious groups and leaders in the USA, and other countries, have taken positions as well. As the US evangelical community seems to have a considerable influence on the views and policy of (Republican) national leaders, these developments are relevant for assessing US and international climate policy. Using argumentative discourse analysis, this paper analyzes the religious positions on climate change and climate policy in the United States, as evident in their communication in the media, opinion documents, and websites. Religious positions show a wide range of views, images, and discourses that deal with fundamental moral and ethical questions concerning climate change, stewardship and social justice. Our main conclusion is that both proponents and opponents of strict climate policy strongly value these concepts, but that they interpret them in different ways. A robust policy strategy (regarding support in the religious community) should pay careful attention to the effects of both climate change and climate policy on the poor in both developing nations and the USA itself.Keywords: environmental justice, equity, ethics, religion and environment, climate policy, United State

Роль військових у формуванні євроатлантичної політики України

7 квітня 2009 року на базі Чернігівського центру євроатлантичної інтеграції відбувся інтерактивний семінар на тему: «Роль військових у формуванні євроатлантичної політики України». Захід провів Інститут трансформації суспільства (Київ, директор - Олег Соскін) спільно із Чернігівським державним педагогічним університетом їм. Т.Г. Шевченка за підтримки Посольства Словацької Республіки в Україні.

Особливості перебігу та корекції артеріальної гіпертензії у хворих з супутньою вегетативною дисфункцією на курорті Трускавець

Частота синдрома вегетативной дисфункции у больных гипертонией составляет 60-70%, что существенно усложняет течение заболевания и ухудшает качество жизни пациентов. Больным гипертонией с признаками симпатикотонии целесообразно назначать бета-блокатор Корвазан и биологически активную воду Нафтуся, так так они существенно снижают частоту вегето-сосудистых кризов. Билогически активная вода Нафтуся содействует уменьшению количеству автономных нарушений и более быстрому достижению целевых уровней артериального давления