Cultural Spaces of Climate Network

Contemporary debates over the threat of future climate change, coupled with the fixation on the apparent acceleration in anthropogenic global warming, and the general dominance of climatic modelling in climate change studies, have obscured the distinctive meaning that climate holds, and has held in the past, for different people in different places. Although there is a consensus that the global climate is changing, that human activities are exacerbating natural climatic variability, and that climate change will pose new and significant challenges for global society at large, the precise impacts for different social, economic and ecological systems are less clearly understood. It is essential to try to obtain a better understanding of how different groups of people in different contextual settings and at different points in time have conceptualised climate and have responded to its fluctuations.

There have, therefore, been calls for a re-examination of climate change that i.) challenges the increasingly global and scientific perspective on climate and ii.) addresses the idea of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions. Recent climate scholarship has, for example, highlighted a need to understand how different groups of people in different spatial and temporal contexts conceptualise climate as an idea. Efforts are thus now being made to explore how 'ordinary people' understand, talk or write about climate and make sense of it and to investigate climate as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of 'climate knowledge', all of which demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives afford.

The purpose of the proposed network is to draw together academic researchers from within and beyond the arts and humanities, representatives from professional and learned societies including the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and various popular climate and weather related interest groups, including the Climatological Observers Link (COL), The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) and the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS), to investigate possible approaches to encourage a more culturally driven and local-scale consideration of climate as an idea from both an historical and contemporary perspective.

Three workshops are proposed involving all these stakeholder groups. These will address a series of distinctive themes: i.) the potential contribution that arts and humanities approaches can make to contemporary climate and climate change discourses; ii.) the value of adopting an historical perspective in the investigation of the interrelationships between people, place and climate and of bringing historical materials into wider public and professional circulation to illustrate their use in developing narratives of climates past and present and iii.) the way in which the ordinary citizen, and amateur groups in particular, have in the past and could in the future usefully contribute to the production and circulation of climate knowledge, and to establish how they might become more involved as intermediaries between the public, academic and professional domains.

The immediate beneficiaries will be those actively involved and represented at the network meetings, including academic researchers, drawn from both within and beyond the arts and humanities disciplines, representatives of professional and learned societies, and people drawn from a wide range of public interest groups, organisations and societies with interests in climate and the weather.

Established links with RMetS, the RGS-IBG and the Chilterns Observatory Trust, will lead to a range of impacts. The original and innovative use that the network members can make of the resources and facilities available within these different groups will be of mutual benefit to the different communities involved, serving to provide access, for example, to archival sources, historical information and material artefacts, while at the same time publicising the potential for this material to be used and circulated beyond the purely academic arena. There will also be wider impacts beyond the immediate network. Representatives of all the communities participating in the network workshops will be encouraged to contribute to outputs in the form of papers for an edited monograph, while academic papers for peer reviewed journals will also be encouraged. The RGS-IBG and RMetS can act as fora for public outreach through their in house popular oriented magazines, The Geographical Magazine and Weather respectively, which can be used as media through which to publicise the activities of the network and might also carry articles resulting from the network meetings and features written by workshop participants. In addition, the outputs of the network will be publicised via an online RGS-IBG exhibition showcasing presentations and podcasts from the workshops. In addition, there will be opportunities for further public engagement through the RGS-IBG regional and Monday night lecture series and a possible feature in its linked website 'Geography in the News'.

Both Principle and Co-Applicant have also developed strong links with a range of amateur and enthusiast climatological societies as a result of a British Academy funded project investigating the role of the amateur in the production of contemporary climate knowledge. These groups include the Climatological Observers Link (COL), the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO), and the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS). Founded in 1970 and comprising over 400 members, COL describes itself as the most significant network for climate enthusiasts and amateur meteorologists in the UK, and aims to enable amateur observers to exchange information about the weather. TORRO, established in 1974, is a privately supported research body composed of c.400 amateur (and some professional) meteorologists and observers from the UK and overseas. Its activities focus on severe weather events. CAS represents an organization promoting an interest in clouds, with news, on line discussion forums, photograph gallery and bulletin. It is anticipated that further public dissemination and engagement may result from publicity about the network and articles resulting from it in the monthly COL bulletin and TORRO's key publication, The International Journal of Meteorology, the TORRO newsletter and website, and the CAS web based news forum.

There will also be benefits to other groups beyond the immediate network, including school groups. Among the new initiatives being established between the RMetS, the RGS-IBG and the British Council, for example, is 'Climate4Classrooms', an initiative which provides free teaching resources on climate and climate change for 11-18 year olds both nationally and internationally (see http://www.climate4classrooms.org/). It is anticipated that lectures, podcasts, documents and reports resulting from the network workshops will be made available for this initiative and thus for active use in seconda