CONVERSE (COmmuNity Vision for REsilient RiverScapEs)

"The landscape is connected but the community, data and management aren't" (CONVERSE Workshop Participant)

The number of people at high risk from flooding in the UK is predicted to double by 2080, disproportionately impacting socially and economically marginalised populations. Typically flood interventions use hard engineering approaches that are rarely developed in consultation with communities. As such, communities feel their voices have not been heard and interventions are at odds with their needs and values. Adaptation to flooding therefore necessitates a radical reimagining. Nature Based Interventions (NBI) have the potential to deliver a wide range of physical and social benefits that are more integrated with community needs. However, there are both scientific and social challenges associated with quantifying the use of NBI. Scientifically, we currently lack large-scale empirical evidence to evaluate their efficacy with a major limitation being a disconnect between local & catchment-scale benefits. Questions also arise about what data and metrics are needed to define success. For these questions to be answered there needs to be routine and long-term monitoring. Socially, NBI cross geographical and organisational borders, and the expertise and problem-solving capabilities of multiple stakeholders. As such NBI are often highly contested, involve unclear problem definitions and have uncertain and unpredictable trajectories. Quantifying the social impacts of NBI schemes is therefore a significant challenge. Where attempts have been made to include the community in monitoring of NBI they are often delivered by 'experts' rather than community-led leading to uneven power balances whereby communities feel that schemes are being 'done' to them rather than being the ones who are 'doing the doing'. Therefore, NBI scheme implementation often meets resistance and evidence to underpin how to best co-design and co-deliver schemes with communities to maximise community needs remains woefully inadequate.

Placing the community at the heart of the project, CONVERSE (COmmuNity Vision for REsilient RiverScapEs) will address these challenges, seeking to empower socially and marginalised communities to take ownership of their local environment. Specifically, the CONVERSE project will bring together communities working in equitable partnership with scientists to co-develop NBI design and monitoring programmes to establish sustainable management strategies and challenge historic approaches to NBI. Building on aspects raised during the partnership building phase CONVERSE will: (i) understand relationships to place and NBI and identify how these differ amongst stakeholders; (ii) co-design engaged monitoring strategies that evaluate NBI efficacy at different scales; (iii) collaboratively undertake community defined monitoring strategies and compare these to conventional monitoring strategies; (iv) compare the efficacy of data captured in quantifying the physical and social benefits of NBI; and (v) evaluate partnership building mechanisms, community interaction, and the legacy and sustainability of the partnerships.

Leveraging upon a significant body of partner funded work we have built a team that crosses typical disciplinary boundaries; it is unique in that it is led by an engagement specialist in conjunction with physical and social scientists together with community partners who span across community, charity and health groups, practitioners responsible for both physical and data infrastructure of NBI and those in policy and regulation. By the end of the project we will have empowered and up-skilled communities and produced a blueprint for the co-design and co-evaluation of effective monitoring strategies for Nature Based Interventions. Further we will have used a unique transdisciplinary approach to deliver exemplar engaged community science.