Dr Max Hope

Contingency plans are essential in guiding the response to marine oil spills. However, they are written before the pollution event occurs so must contain some degree of assumption and prediction and hence may be unsuitable for a real incident when it occurs. The use of Bayesian networks in ecology, environmental management, oil spill contingency planning and post-incident analysis is reviewed and analysed to establish their suitability for use as real-time environmental decision support systems during an oil spill response. It is demonstrated that Bayesian networks are appropriate for facilitating the re-assessment and re-validation of contingency plans following pollutant release, thus helping ensure that the optimum response strategy is adopted. This can minimise the possibility of sub-optimal response strategies causing additional environmental and socioeconomic damage beyond the original pollution event.

As Northern Ireland transitions out of conflict, increased attention is being paid to the role heritage can play in building peace across society and developing a more sustainable future. Recent archaeological investigations at Dunluce Castle have uncovered elements of the site’s Gaelic past and the remains of an early seventeenth-century town built immediately prior to the Crown-sponsored Plantation of Ulster. The project included a dynamic programme of community engagement and outreach that created opportunities to work as a group in the embodied act of recovering the physical past. This formed a space in which to challenge aspects of the region’s contested past and facilitated the renegotiation of accepted local histories and existing identity constructs.

This paper contains a critical exploration of the social dimensions of the science–humanitarian relationship. Drawing on literature on the social role of science and on the social dimensions of humanitarian practice, it analyses a science–humanitarian partnership for disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia, an area threatened by tsunamigenic earthquakes. The paper draws on findings from case study research that was conducted between 2010 and 2011. The case study illustrates the social processes that enabled and hindered collaboration between the two spheres, including the informal partnership of local people and scientists that led to the co-production of earthquake and tsunami DRR and limited organisational capacity and support in relation to knowledge exchange. The paper reflects on the implications of these findings for science–humanitarian partnering in general, and it assesses the value of using a social dimensions approach to understand scientific and humanitarian dialogue.

Knowledge, coping strategies, and expertise that have accumulated within indigenous communities in response to repeated hazard events, are an important part of disaster risk reduction. There is a tendency, however, for indigenous societies to be treated as if they are separate from and contrast sharply with modern industrial societies. Increasingly, globalisation means local cultures are produced through the inter-relationship of local traditions and global processes, and by the mixing of cultures that can result. In November and December 2007, a premonition from a Brazilian mystic circulated Bengkulu City foretelling of a destructive tsunamigenic earthquake that would hit the city on the 23 December of that year. Thankfully the earthquake did not occur, but the rumour caused considerable alarm among residents of the city. This paper examines the premonition and demonstrates the insight it gives into the hybrid and plural ways in which local people make sense of and respond to earthquake and tsunami hazards.

The Parish Council of Ashton Hayes in Cheshire voted in November 2005 to try to become England’s first carbon neutral village. This grass roots project has grown rapidly in its first year and has engaged a large proportion of village residents. The project has produced a number of impacts on the community and the wider region and these are being evaluated in terms of their environmental, economic and social dimensions. This paper describes the process of project development and implementation and draws some general conclusions from this experience before going on to consider some of the findings of the initial evaluation of the project. We conclude by suggesting that Ashton Hayes provides an interesting case study of a community-led attempt to bring sustainable development into the mainstream and that the challenge remains, as with many community-led initiatives, of how to translate the considerable early momentum of the project into sustainable forms of participation and behaviour.

Human geography fieldwork is important. Research has shown that when students ‘see it for themselves’ their enjoyment and understanding is enhanced. In addition it helps develop subject-specific and transferable skills, promotes ‘active learning’ and links theory to ‘real world’ examples in a ‘spiral of learning’. Stressing the socially constructed nature of knowledge and identity, however, Nairn (2005) has made a valuable critique of the assumption that human geography fieldwork gives students direct and unmediated access to ‘the truth’. Drawing on qualitative research with students in New Zealand she shows that their fieldwork experience, rather than enhancing their understanding, reinforced misconceptions they held prior to the trip. Using evidence from an action research project on the student experience of human geography fieldwork in the Western Isles of Scotland, this paper argues that while fieldwork can reinforce preconceptions in the way Nairn describes, this is not inevitably so. Fieldwork can give us direct experiences that challenge our preconceptions. The reality of others can ‘call us to attention’ in ways that make them matter to us. This ‘enhanced affective response’ helps deepen our understanding of the wider world and our place within it. It is for this reason that fieldwork remains a valuable mode of learning for human geography students.

Delivering fair, long-term resilience for tomorrow’s cities means acting now to break cycles of risk accumulation. Inclusive future visioning can help by placing the voices and experiences of those at risk at the start of urban policy, planning and project processes, and integrating this with the best science to reimagine what cities and neighborhoods are for, and could be in the long-term.

Knowledge, coping strategies, and expertise that have accumulated within indigenous communities in response to repeated hazard events, are an important part of disaster risk reduction. There is a tendency, however, for indigenous societies to be treated as if they are separate from and contrast sharply with modern industrial societies. Increasingly, globalisation means local cultures are produced through the inter-relationship of local traditions and global processes, and by the mixing of cultures that can result. In November and December 2007, a premonition from a Brazilian mystic circulated Bengkulu City foretelling of a destructive tsunamigenic earthquake that would hit the city on the 23 December of that year. Thankfully the earthquake did not occur, but the rumour caused considerable alarm among residents of the city. This paper examines the premonition and demonstrates the insight it gives into the hybrid and plural ways in which local people make sense of and respond to earthquake and tsunami hazards. © 2011 The Authors. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

Rapid urban expansion presents a major challenge to delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Urban populations are forecast to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and business as usual will condemn many of these new citizens to lives dominated by disaster risk. This need not be the case. Computational science can help urban planners and decision-makers to turn this threat into a time-limited opportunity to reduce disaster risk for hundreds of millions of people.

Normative future visioning (NFV) offers a critical approach that can respond to the challenges of transformative adaptation. In the context of climate crisis, an understanding of the diversity of desired end-states and pathways for good urban futures is fundamental to fostering cooperation and inspiring purposeful action that can challenge and transform unsustainable processes and behaviours, and researching these processes. This paper contributes to transformative adaptation and climate resilient development by conceptualising NFV as a critical pedagogy. This framing understands NFV as a collective learning experience that can lead to emancipation and transformative action. A novel Encounter–Change Framework is proposed as a general mechanism for evaluating NFV methods. The framework is tested through the Tomorrow’s Cities project across its NFV deployment in nine cities: Quito, Istanbul, Nairobi, Kathmandu, Rapti, Nablus, Dar es Salaam, Cox’s Bazar and Chattogram. General lessons highlight the importance for NFV evaluation of analysing both methodological detail and its positioning within wider policy and planning processes. Detailed empirical findings reveal key lessons and challenges that emerge from practice – related to time, ethics, co-production, diversity, consensus, equity and authorship. These inform both NFV and other participatory experiences that aim at transformation. POLICY RELEVANCE Transformative adaptation has proven difficult to implement in cities. It promises fundamental changes to socio-technological systems and in so doing raises concerns for future populations and generations, particularly those more vulnerable and equity-deprived. This paper puts forward a framework that offers one way beyond this impasse and supports practices that are future-and transformation-oriented: the Encounter– Change Framework. By drawing on key themes and insights from critical (urban) pedagogies (encounters, connections, emancipation and action and change), a way is proposed to evaluate practical NFV experiences. The Encounter–Change Framework is tested across nine cities. The results emphasise two lines of innovation for policy: a) unpacking the process of NFV from a perspective of power to increase its chances for impact and b) evaluating the positioning of NFV, both in relation to other future approaches and questions and as a part of wider adaptation policy and planning strategies.

Deep-rooted socio-ecological and technical systems, values and lifestyles, ‘locked in’ by vested interests and flows of power, underpin the interconnected problems of climate change, hazard vulnerability and poverty. A ‘shallow’ approach to co-production, with its focus on knowledge exchange and shared learning between individuals, struggles to gain the ‘purchase’ needed to transform these material structures. In this paper we demonstrate that non-representational theory is a good starting point for an alternative ‘deep’ approach to disaster risk management co-production. We review key aspects of non-representational theory and their application to disaster risk management and build a novel hybrid conceptual framework. We use this to analyse a case study of disaster risk management co-production (an aftershock forecasting approach used by humanitarian agencies during the Nepal 2015 earthquake), how social change occurred in this instance, and the role disaster risk management co-production played. We emphasise how change was the consequence of unexpected shifts in assemblages of human, non-human, virtual and real actors. These created ‘events’ that were opportunities for change that were realised with fidelity. Using this analysis, we develop an alternative deep approach to co-production, as ‘a practical means of going on’, and finish with five precepts to guide transformative disaster risk management based on the concept of multi-actor change cascades.

The innovation process is central to effective adaption to climate change and development challenges, but models from business and management tend to dominate innovation theory, which sits outside the adaption-development paradigm. This paper presents an alternative conceptual framework to visualise innovations as pathways across the adaption-development landscape for humanitarian and development goals. This useful tool can reveal, map and coordinate innovation strategy. To demonstrate and validate this approach we analyse a case study of innovation in aftershock forecasting for humanitarian decision-making and show that the most effective strategy is for multiple innovation strands and hubs to move concurrently and cumulatively towards transformative humanitarian and development goals.

As the negative impacts of natural hazards continue to escalate around the world due to increasing populations, climate change, and rapid urbanisation (among other factors and processes), there is an urgent requirement to develop structured and operational approaches towards multi-hazard risk-informed decision making on urban planning and design. This is a particularly pressing issue for low-to-middle income countries in the Global South, which are set to be impacted ever more disproportionately during future natural-hazard events if the “business as usual” urban-development approach continues unabated. The urban poor of these countries will suffer most under current, risk-insensitive development trajectories.To address this crucial challenge, we introduce the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE). The TCDSE facilitates a participatory, people-centred approach to risk-informed decision making, using state-of-the-art procedures for physics-based hazard and engineering impact modelling, integrating physical and social vulnerability in a unified framework, and expressing the consequences of future disasters across an array of stakeholder-weighted impact metrics that facilitate democratisation of the risk concept. Operation of the TCDSE leads to a risk-sensitive future urban scenario (consisting of an urban plan and a set of pertinent policies) owned not only by the planning authorities, municipalities, the government or the private sector, but also by the communities who will live in these future cities. It therefore represents a significant advancement in the state of the art towards inclusive, people-centred disaster risk reduction, as advocated by global policies and world-leading international agencies like the United Nations, the International Federation of Red Cross, and the World Bank.This talk will cover the successful deployment of the TCDSE across a range of rapidly expanding urban areas in the Global South that lack formal planning and are increasingly exposed to multi-hazard occurrences (e.g., Nablus in Palestine, Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, and Kathmandu in Nepal). The promising potential of the TCDSE to help minimise future urban risk creation in these contexts will be highlighted.

Future Visioning (FV) is emerging as a critical area for climate adaptation science, policy, and practice. Yet, experiences tend to be led by government institutions or powerful stakeholders, leaving out relevant voices for climate justice. This article highlights the importance of incorporating diverse perspectives in shaping future visions for risk-informed planning and adaptation in cities. The paper examines data from normative FV engagements conducted in four contexts in Tanzania, Palestine, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The analysis reveals various logics used to express place-based injustices and the extent to which these inform visions for resilient future urban environments. By adopting a comparative approach, the research analyses results both within cities - focusing on narratives and scenarios emerging from different social groups - and across cities, exploring emerging global narratives on desired urban development in a context of rapid urbanisation, multi hazard risks and climate change. Our findings highlight the complex nature of visions, which intersect universalistic values with situated experiences and lived injustices. Further research on this topic should explore how intersectional future thinking can drive specific planning trade-offs, as well as its tangible influence on urban planning paradigm shifts and processes amidst rapid urban change.

Climate change adaptation has consequences for democratic life. Climate change, a defining political challenge of our time, is unfolding amid growing pressure on democratic societies. This is marked, for example, by social fragmentation, institutional instability and rising anti-science sentiment, which, in turn, make more difficult the aims of inclusive, equitable, and evidence-based climate policy. Whereas the social, cultural, economic and environmental consequences of climate change policy are recognized, the consequences of adaptation planning and action for political practice, and for democratic life in particular, are not yet systematically accounted for. Considerable work focuses on how democratic institutions frame and enable climate adaptation, including work on political economy and participatory processes. This paper flips the question to ask: how might climate adaptation policy and its delivery, support or hinder democratic practice? The aim is to open research and action for the intentional strengthening of democratic practice through adaptation. Building on a systematic literature review inspired by the PRISMA method we derive a novel evaluative framework to bring structure to this agenda. The Climate Adaptation Democracy (CAD) Framework. The review sits within a macro structure of established traditions of democratic thought–deliberative, procedural and radical traditions–that bound a consideration of democratic practice. Three design workshops with academic experts and policy partners then determined the range of themes, limits and high-level qualities of the Framework to maximize its generality. The resulting CAD Framework offers twelve ‘qualities’ of democratic practice. These are entry points to facilitate policy actor reflection. We offer three vehicles for the active consideration of the consequences of adaptation for local democratic practice: stocktake review, project deep dive, and pathway mapping. By suggesting methods for deployment in addition to establishing an analytical framework for evaluation, the aim is to establish the consequences of adaptation for democracy as a specific area of study and practice. Key policy insights The practices of climate change adaptation have consequences for democratic life. Lack of systematic attention to democratic consequences means we do not know how far current adaptation actions are positive or negative for democratic life. Twelve qualities of democratic life can be used to reveal currently hidden consequences of adaptation policy. If consequences for democracy are not incorporated in adaptation planning, there is a danger of drifting into a better adapted but democratically weaker future. Vehicles for policy makers to design, track and evaluate the democratic consequences of climate adaptation include stocktake review, project deep dive, and pathway mapping.

This paper examines a residential writing retreat for final year human geography and planning students held in a youth hostel in North Yorkshire, considering how it is experienced by students. This is a curriculum innovation for the dissertation module that combines aspects of geography fieldtrip and writing workshop to support the dissertation writing process and build community. Drawing on the concept of ‘the slow university’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016; O’Neill, 2014) where the ‘slowing down’ and ‘stripping away’ of the usual structures and patterns of teaching and learning create a critical and creative space for thinking and writing, we explore whether and how the Malham retreat makes space for writing. The study is also informed by our spatial approach to the processes and content of research and teaching as geographers (Massey, 2005). Qualitative focus group evidence was gathered on the student and staff experience and used to evaluate the field trip (Breen, 2006; Krueger & Casey, 2009; Stewart & Shamdasani, 2015). This paper presents the results of this evaluation and it is argued that the retreat made space for writing in three ways: 1. The space of countryside, nature and youth hostel. 2. The formal and informal learning spaces staff and students constructed during the retreat 3. ‘Head space’- the social, psychological and emotional room the retreat made for staff and students. This model of residential writing retreat could be transferable to dissertation and other modules involving a substantive writing project on all kinds of undergraduate courses.