Pathways to understanding the changing climate: time and place in cultural learning about the environment

To what extent are people aware of processes of environmental change over time, and how are such changes observed and reflected upon? Do people draw upon a knowledge of past environments in thinking about future environmental scenarios, including those associated with the changing climate? This project will develop innovative methodologies for engaging with the active perception of the environment in particular localities. Mike Hulme, in 'Why We Disagree About Climate Change', has argued that variations in the perception of climate change arise from different cultural outlooks on our natural and social worlds and different levels of exposure to climate risk. This points us towards the pressing need to find ways of eliciting and recording these cultural outlooks, while also leading us to ask: to what extent do people connect their local environmental knowledge with global processes?
In order to relate environmental transformations to the perceptions of processes such as climate change, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge of how environmental experiences are shaped and narrated. We will gather and build a database of narratives and images exploring and reflecting upon environmental pasts and futures in East Anglia, a region with a long history of landscape flux and, due to its flat and low-lying nature, a particular vulnerability to processes of climate change. Recognising, in keeping with the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, that questions of intergenerational equity are central to our capacity to respond to the challenges of the changing environment, an integral part of our research will be the involvement of schools and schoolchildren. By walking pathways in the Fen landscape and by experiencing places, objects and images children will engage with different narratives and forms of expertise about the environment they are living in (from natural features to spirits and legends of the place). Working with the Greater Fens Museum Partnership, who have extensive experience of community and school outreach, we will organise a series of activity days in which schoolchildren will draw upon the narratives collected for the database, and work with artists, environmental scientists, and museum staff to generate creative responses to their regional environmental history. This will culminate in an exhibition, hosted by the Greater Fens Museum Partnership and curated by the children. These will give a valuable insight into the routes by which children are able to perceive and engage with environmental history, and how this feeds into visions of the future in the context of climate change. Outcomes from the schools projects and the exhibitions will be added to the database.
Climate change is experienced by communities in particular localities, but can only be understood as a global process. For this reason, an important part of our research will be to foster cross-cultural links between schools and grassroots organisations exploring the ways in which different localities can find common ground. Drawing on existing networks in regions where the Division of Social Anthropology has strong working relationships, especially Alaska, Mongolia, and Vietnam (but open to future collaborations elsewhere), we will explore the extent to which methods we are developing in the UK are applicable in these different research contexts and what lessons can be learned. By establishing connections between schools and organisations in the East Anglia with their counterparts elsewhere in the world, we will not only be exploring how communities perceive environmental change in their own locality, but also how they receive and respond to the experience of change elsewhere in the world. In addition to establishing virtual links, we will invite educators and community organisers from these diverse settings to participate in the workshops providing opportunities for interaction and knowledge transfer around issues of environmental change.

We anticipate that outcomes of the project will be of benefit to policy makers at local and national level. As local authorities in the region have already sought to draw upon narrative memory in the formulation of policy, for example in the development of the Cambridgeshire Surface Water Management Plan, it has been indicated that our planned database of narratives of environmental change will be of particular interest for local government. On a national level, the University's Centre for Science and policy has organised meetings between researchers on the proposed project and Senior Civil Servants in the Department for Communities and Local Government, who have expressed a particular interest in the insight that anthropological research might bring to issues of planning, flood management, and regional adaptation to climate change. The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs have also expressed interest in our previous Climate Histories network and have sought a meeting to discuss our research. Through maintaining contact with these policy makers and inviting them to become involved in project events (particularly the end-of-project workshop), we hope to maximise the opportunity for the outcomes of the project to have a wider influence.

We have worked closely with scientists who are actively involved in communication with policy makers, and the need for this research emerges from these collaborations: the Climate Histories network from which the current proposal emerges involves two lead authors in the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the development of our work has also been encouraged by Charles Kennel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Former Director of the NASA Mission to Planet Earth. Through continuing to work with our contacts through the network, and inviting our scientific colleagues to workshops over the course of the project we are not only confident that we have a route for disseminating the significance of our work for debates in the environmental sciences, but also that we are in a strong position to have the research incorporated in the process of communicating scientific findings to policy makers.

This project will be of particular benefit to schools, with school activity days and a museum exhibition to be curated by schoolchildren an integral part of our research programme. In order to ensure that schools activities reach a wider audience, we will liaise with the local authority to invite teachers from other schools in the area to participate in and observe the activity days; we will also work with a consultant with experience in classroom education to make the documentation of the activity days we are organising available on the WWW, so that the material can be used by teachers in the design of curriculum-relevant lesson plans.

We anticipate that the nature of our work, which will draw on the the rich potential of folklore and local beliefs of place to shape narratives of environmental change, will be of interest to publishers of children's literature. To this end we hope to develop existing links with the publishing industry and to invite children's publishers to our project workshops and to a viewing of the museum exhibition, in the hope that this can lead to the production of new forms of children's literature with benefits for environmental education.