Envisioning Climate Change Adaptation Futures Using Storytelling Workshops

Rachel Harcourt, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Suraje Dessai and Andrea Taylor
Additional contact information
Rachel Harcourt: Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Wändi Bruine de Bruin: Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, and Center for Economic and Social Research, Dornsife Department of Psychology, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, 635 Downey Way VPD-512, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Suraje Dessai: ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Andrea Taylor: Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: Engaging people in preparing for inevitable climate change may help them to improve their own safety and contribute to local and national adaptation objectives. However, existing research shows that individual engagement with adaptation is low. One contributing factor to this might be that public discourses on climate change often seems dominated by overly negative and seemingly pre-determined visions of the future. Futures thinking intends to counter this by re-presenting the future as choice contingent and inclusive of other possible and preferable outcomes. Here, we undertook storytelling workshops with participants from the West Yorkshire region of the U.K. They were asked to write fictional adaptation futures stories which: opened by detailing their imagined story world, moved to events that disrupted those worlds, provided a description of who responded and how and closed with outcomes and learnings from the experience. We found that many of the stories envisioned adaptation as a here-and-now phenomenon, and that good adaptation meant identifying and safeguarding things of most value. However, we also found notable differences as to whether the government, local community or rebel groups were imagined as leaders of the responsive actions, and as to whether good adaptation meant maintaining life as it had been before the disruptive events occurred or using the disruptive events as a catalyst for social change. We suggest that the creative futures storytelling method tested here could be gainfully applied to support adaptation planning across local, regional and national scales.

Keywords: futures; narratives; adaptation; workshops; U.K. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/12/6630/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/12/6630/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:12:p:6630-:d:572522

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().