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Research results of a new combined method in climate adaptation

The perceived weather and climate change risks in Dutch agriculture

Purpose: This study analyses how weather shocks influence agricultural entrepreneurs’ risk perception and how they manage these risks. It explores what risks agricultural entrepreneurs perceive as important, and how they face climate change and related weather shock risks compared to the multiple risks of the enterprise. Design/methodology: This paper uses qualitative data from several sources: eight semi-structured interviews with experts in agriculture, three focus groups with experts and entrepreneurs, and 32 semi-structured interviews with agricultural entrepreneurs. Findings: not published yet Originality and value: This study contributes to the literature about risk management by small- and medium-sized agricultural enterprises: it studies factors that shape perceptions about weather shocks and about climate change and how these perceptions affect actions to manage related risks, and it identifies factors that motivate agricultural entrepreneurs to adapt to climate change and changing weather shock risks. Practical implications can lay the foundation for concrete actions and policies to improve the resilience and sustainability of the sector, by adjusting risk management strategies, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and climate adaptation policy support.

Climate futures

This paper introduces and contextualises Climate Futures, an experiment in which AI was repurposed as a ‘co-author’ of climate stories and a co-designer of climate-related images that facilitate reflections on present and future(s) of living with climate change. It converses with histories of writing and computation, including surrealistic ‘algorithmic writing’, recombinatory poems and ‘electronic literature’. At the core lies a reflection about how machine learning’s associative, predictive and regenerative capacities can be employed in playful, critical and contemplative goals. Our goal is not automating writing (as in product-oriented applications of AI). Instead, as poet Charles Hartman argues, ‘the question isn’t exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting’ (1996, p. 5). STS scholars critique labs as future-making sites and machine learning modelling practices and, for example, describe them also as fictions. Building on these critiques and in line with ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre, 1997), we embed our critique of ‘making the future’ in how we employ machine learning to design a tool for looking ahead and telling stories on life with climate change. This has involved engaging with climate narratives and machine learning from the critical and practical perspectives of artistic research. We trained machine learning algorithms (i.e. GPT-2 and AttnGAN) using climate fiction novels (as a dataset of cultural imaginaries of the future). We prompted them to produce new climate fiction stories and images, which we edited to create a tarot-like deck and a story-book, thus also playfully engaging with machine learning’s predictive associations. The tarot deck is designed to facilitate conversations about climate change. How to imagine the future beyond scenarios of resilience and the dystopian? How to aid our transition into different ways of caring for the planet and each other?

Climate adaptation by international multidisciplinary knowledge exchange

Effects of climate change in cities are evident and are expected to increase in the future, demanding adaptation. In order to share knowledge, raise awareness, and build capacity on climate adaptation, the first concept of a “ClimateCafé” has been utilized since 2012 in 25 events all over the world. In 8 years ClimateCafé grew into a field education concept involving different fields of science and practice for capacity building in climate change adaptation. This chapter describes the need, method, and results of ClimateCafés and provides tools for organizing a ClimateCafé in a context-specific case. Early ClimateCafés in the Philippines are compared with the ClimateCafé in Peru to elucidate the development of this movement, in which one of the participants of ClimateCafé Philippines 2016 became the co-organizer of ClimateCafé Peru in 2019. The described progress of ClimateCafés provides detailed information on the dynamic methodological aspects, holding different workshops. The workshops aim at generating context-specific data on climate adaptation by using tools and innovative data collection techniques addressing deep uncertainties that come with climate change adaptation. Results of the workshops show that context-specific, relevant, multidisciplinary data can be gathered in a short period of time with limited resources, which promotes the generation of ideas that can be used by local stakeholders in their local context. A ClimateCafé therefore stimulates accelerated climate action and support for adaptation solutions, from the international and the local, from the public and private sector, to ensure we learn from each other and work together for a climate resilient future. The methodology of ClimateCafé is still maturing and the evaluation of the ClimateCafés over time leads to improvements which are applied during upcoming ClimateCafés, giving a clear direction for further development of this methodology for knowledge exchange, capacity building, and bridging the gap between disciplines within climate adaptation.

S.O.S. Climate Waterfront

Sustainable Open Solutions Climate Waterfront is an interdisciplinary project that aims to explore waterfronts in Europe facing extreme situations under the threat of climate change, eg. heat, too much absent rain and sea level rise with all its consequences. The central goal is to exchange adaptive strategies for sustainable solutions for infrastructure and urban planning. The multidisciplinary perspective in cooperation with all possible partners, stakeholders and citizens, leads to a better understanding of the challenges and adaptation strategies.The participating parties are six coastal cities: Lisbon, Rome, Thessaloniki, Gdansk, Stockholm and the Amsterdam region. All these cities, except ‘Amsterdam’, are represented by a university. The Amsterdam area is represented by a multidisciplinary, educated but not necessarily academically employed delegation.

Climate Communication

Over the past few years the tone of the debate around climate change has shifted from sceptical to soberingly urgent as the global community has prioritised the research into solutions which will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. So far this research has been insufficient. One of the major problems for driving public and private stakeholders to implement existing solutions and research new ones is how we communicate about climate change (Stoknes, 2014). There seems to be a lack of common language that drives the scientific community away from policymakers and the public. Due to this lack, it is hard to translate findings into viable and sustainable solutions and to adopt new climate-neutral economies and habits.