Informing UK governance of resilience to climate risks: improving the local evidence-base

International assessments of evidence on climate change (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) or national climate change risk assessments (e.g. UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA) do not offer a sufficiently granular perspective on climate impacts to adequately inform governance of resilience to climate risks at the local level. Using an analysis of UK decision-makers managing and responding to heatwaves and flood risks, this paper argues how more robust local evidence is needed to inform decision-making regarding adaptation options for enhancing local resilience. We identify evidence gaps and issues relating to local climate change impacts, including sources and quality of evidence used, adequacy and accessibility of evidence available, ill-communicated evidence and conflicting or misused evidence. A lack of appreciation regarding how scientific evidence and personal judgement can mutually enhance the quality of decision-making underpins all of these gaps. Additionally, we find that the majority of evidence currently used is reductively based upon socio-economic and physical characteristics of climate risks. We argue that a step change is needed in local climate resilience that moves beyond current physical and socio-economic risk characterisation to a more inclusive co-constitution of social and politically defined climate risks at the local scale that are better aligned with the local impacts felt and needs of stakeholders

Progress in global climate change politics? Reasserting national state territoriality in a 'post-political' world

This paper builds on previous geographical and social science work at the boundaries of climate change by (re)asserting the significance of the territoriality of the national state in global climate negotiations. Using the post-political consensus as a theoretical framework and drawing upon examples from climate change negotiations like Kyoto and Copenhagen, it argues that it is too premature to fetishize the consensus of, and collectivism between, national states in global climate politics. As geographers, ‘territoriality’, both as a material and discursive device, is fundamental in, and constitutive of, how we interpret and understand climate change and the politics thereof

Vulnerability, Resilience and Exposure: Methodological Aspects

The economic recession which followed the 2008 financial crisis has raised important issues on differences in the impact, especially from a spatial perspective, of the socio-economic shocks \u2012 at both the regional and the community level, especially in the European Union Member States. These differences may be due to the different levels of vulnerability, resilience and exposure, and may arise because of dissimilarities in the intrinsic characteristics of regions or communities (e.g. the pre-crisis economic characteristics of regions, ageing, household income, and so on). While, in the scientific literature, a great deal of attention has been paid to the concept of resilience (e.g. the capacity to bounce back or to resist a given shock) and vulnerability (e.g. the inherent characteristics that create the potential for harm), less attention has been paid to the full set of measures of socio-economic exposure (e.g. the things affected by a shock), as well as both to the relationship between vulnerability, resilience and exposure and to the losses which ensue as a result of different external shocks and exposure. The objective of this chapter is the exploration of the above-mentioned links, since a closer analysis of these interrelations might produce different outcomes. This study aims to review systematically the existing literature on vulnerability, resilience and exposure, in order to understand the connections between these concepts, with reference not only to economic shocks but also to other catastrophic events, such as natural disasters, man-made disasters, and so on