Public engagement is critical for building awareness of climate change risks, impacts and potential responses, and is a first step in fostering shifts to more sustainable, low-carbon, resilient societies. Our engagement activities include public lectures and workshops, participation in conferences, media appearances, and participation in webinars, videos and podcasts. We work with organisations, local communities, and activists to raise awareness of climate change impacts and adaptation needs, and to support constructive responses to the Climate Crisis. In recent years, we have organised talks for primary school teachers, community groups, party political organistions, local authorities, and members of Extinction Rebellion. We have chaired workshops on sustainability in business, assessing climate change impacts on cultural heritage, and how studies of contemporary climate risk and past episodes of disruptive social-ecological transition can inform each other. We have recorded video conversations with academic colleagues on the relevance of the IPCC conversation as we hurtle towards a warming above 1.5°C, and on transformational adaptation, the latter for UEA’s Philosophy Public Lecture series in 2021 and Oxfam GB’s June 2017 symposium on Resilient Solutions.
Currently, we are working with Climate Museum UK to develop workshops and trainings to integrate adaptation to future climate risks into existing and emerging resilience and sustainability activities at the local level. This work recognises that resilience and sustainability actions tend to be framed in terms of existing conditions and often pay little or no attention to the how the climate and ecological crises will mediate what is sustainable in the medium to long term.
