Rural Communities Adapting and Living with Climate Change

Status: Ongoing
Type of Project: Research Report
Principal Investigator: Dr Martin Phillips, University of Leicester (Email)

 

Objectives

The research is exploring the impacts on rural communities of the social and environmental effects of climate change.  In particular it assesses the degree to which three drivers of rural transition - governmental policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation, alternative/counter-cultural visions and practices, and environmental changes associated with climate change - might present quite contrasting futures for rural communities. 

It also explores how rural communities might variously engage with, adapt to and drive forward particular futures. This is being undertaken through a programme of work that seeks to foster creative knowledge exchange and learning between governmental policy makers, alternative environmentalists, academic researchers and rural communities.

The project will establish a steering committee of people who are experts on these three selected drivers of rural change. This committee will review the different rural futures presented by the three drivers and their discussion will be used to inform the development of climate change mitigation and adaptation future scenarios.

These scenarios will then be employed in an interdisciplinary examination of three different rural communities.  Visual representations of the potential futures will be created, presented to and discussed with residents in these communities. The degree of engagement, resistance and transformation of the scenarios will be examined by the research team, who will also present their findings on community responses to the expert steering committee.

The project's outcomes will include an evaluation of the potential for creative knowledge transfer between the three knowledge communities that constitute its expert steering committee and the degree to which people in rural communities are likely to embrace, ignore or resist particular climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and practices.