About the project
Surprisingly little is known about people’s resilience to climate change. You will address this gap by using big data to map out individual adaptation and resilience strategies to extreme weather events in England, and identify how these vary by poverty levels, greenspace access and future vulnerability to climate change.
Extreme weather events driven by climate change are already increasingly common in the UK, and near certain to increase under all climate change scenarios. As such, building national resilience through adaptation – in addition to mitigating further emissions – is a national priority. However, there is no clear method for gathering evidence of adaptation and resilience, and relatively little large-scale evidence of individual adaptation.
In this studentship you will help to fill this gap by providing the first large-scale mapping exercise of individual adaptation strategies to extreme weather events in England. You will then identify how these vary by socio-economic and ecological context, as well as by the degree of vulnerability to future climate change.
This highly novel project will involve combining different datasets (Office of National Statistics consumer data, Google search trends, maps of poverty, vulnerability to future climate change, and greenspace quality and quantity) to understand not only what adaptations people are already taking, but how this differs with poverty levels (and other indicators of social vulnerability) and risks to future climate change. You will also test if access to greenspace (or blue space e.g. the sea) affects how people adapt to extreme weather events.
Overall, the work is highly topical and policy relevant, and it is expected it could be of considerable interest both to government, industry and academia as it shows the baseline level of adaptation, which is needed to make an assessment of current resilience to climate change and variability.
