Coastal TALES, Telling Adaptation: Living Environmental Stories for Coastal Resilience

Coastal TALES asks: How can stories of past practices help people rediscover more sustainable ways of living in their rapidly changing coastal environments? Our goal is to show how heritage stories can be used to create tangible local action that individuals everywhere can enact to help adapt to the changing climate. To explore this we use transdisciplinary methods, which bring together the knowledge and expertise of local communities in combination with academic skills working across disciplinary boundaries, to focus on three northern coastal regions: Alaska, Ireland and Wales. People are feeling the results of the climate changing and are asking what they can do on the ground, but many actions now feel insufficient and are predicated on undertakings that have little perceptible local effect. This research therefore attends to the growing social need to understand how individuals can address the effects of the climate changing at home. It provides examples of how stories can be transformed into tangible action in different locations and offers creative inspiration to those who want to actively adapt sustainably. Coastal TALES collaborates with societal partners to understand heritage stories are driving action in education, policy and local nature-based innovation.