Transformation and resilience on urban coasts

Transformation opens new opportunities for living with risk where existing systems generate vulnerability and hazard, or where preventing systems failure is impossible. In a world where risk is increasingly associated with cities, and cities increasingly growing on the coast, TRUC is focussed on the relationships between development, risk, resilience and transformation in six coastal megacities: Kolkata, Lagos, London, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo. TRUC will build an original, integrated, participatory framework in collaboration with stakeholders to first characterise and then identify interactions between bio-physical, land-use and decisionmaking processes. The aim is to reveal the pathways and trade-offs through which systems interactions constrain or open opportunities for resilience or transformation and how these outcomes themselves interact and influence sustainable development; offering scope for considerable theoretical, methodological and practical advancement.

TRUC meets the need for more integrated science to inform policy by combining an urban biophysical model (SUEWS) with the WorldRiskIndex (WRI), developed by consortium PIs. This adds considerable value to past investments as well as offering substantial research gains over a relatively short period. Research will have neighbourhood level resolution and be city-wide. Flexibility is built into the modelling and analysis process to accommodate divergent data and stakeholder availability. Local teams will head-up data acquisition and liaise with stakeholders to help frame local questions and ensure effective dissemination. The consortium includes natural and social scientists and each partner will be involved in conceptual or methodological and case study research. Research will feed into international scientific discussion on development pathways and scenarios within the IPCC, AR5 (three consortium members are authors in AR5). The project will be a flagship research for the IGBP-IHDP project Land Ocean Interaction on the Coastal Zone with three scientific steering committee members included.

TRUC is a policy-facing research project, its design structure is built to maximize opportunity for stakeholder involvement from the start of the project, through data collection to analysis and beyond. Indeed stakeholder engagement - and more than this, influence - is essential for the success of TRUC which embeds co-production of knowledge within its integrated risk assessment approach. A harmonized set of learning resources targeted at professionals and post-graduate students will facilitate formal learning post-project (see below). This adds considerable value to the proposal. Hosting the project website with a permanent international research and policy centre - the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management, Chennai, guarantees its long-term and continuing access to TRUC PIs for stakeholders as well as researchers and students beyond the life of the project. PIs welcome this opportunity for extended engagement, exploring additional opportunities for this during the project is a specific aim of the TRUC Communication and Impact Committee.

TRUC will build on lines of engagement and impact that are already in place, will strengthen these, and add new dimensions so that post-project relations will have a strong likelihood of persisting. This is important, impact can sometimes be delivered over the short-term but more often it comes from a process of shared learning between research teams and policy makers. Letters of support from each city case study and from the international science-policy communication projects UGEC and LOICZ evidence the strong basis for these claims and the preparatory work that has already been undertaken to introduce key policy communities to TRUC, there are of course many other linkages that can be drawn upon as would be expected from the senior project team assembled as TRUC PIs.

Practitioner impact (Task 6.3) will focus on:

1. A conceptual and methodological sourcebook including illustrative material drawn from case study experiences and findings. To be published online by LOICZ. This will provide guidelines on data management and model building, including the rationale for the principal data (i.e. indicators, variables and attributes) that should be made available or created. There will be a discussion of how barriers to data access might be overcome (e.g. by broadening searches across other accessible datasets or through the use of proxy variables) and will lay out the steps (e.g. data-collection; participatory activities; integration), which need to be undertaken by those wishing to use the TRUC integrated approach. This output will be structured in a modular way, which lays out the detailed procedures relative to each main phase of an integrated vulnerability assessment and the way the framework can be used to inform local resilience-building plans, programmes and projects. The sourcebook will be produced in consultation with the External Advisory Group who will be able to target it better to audience needs.

2. Peer-to-peer learning exchanges are made possible through TRUC's participatory approach and multi-case structure. Local scientists and practitioners will be encouraged to enter into dialogue to reflect on the process and findings of research and associated policy considerations between cities. This will be supported by - and provide a sharp vulnerability reduction/resilience building focus to - existing inter-city networks (e.g., ICLEI) and bilateral relationships (e.g. between London and New York) in which our research teams are already embedded.