Join us in congratulating Alys Daniels-Creasey and Sarah Manning, our Postgraduate Earth Fellows, for their outstanding work on the ‘Adapting to Changing Environments’ project, a joint venture between the Edinburgh Earth Initiative and the Centre for Adapting to Changing Environments (ACE).
During their time on the project, Alys and Sarah conducted a series of interviews with thirteen key academic actors from different disciplines working on adaptation research across The University of Edinburgh. These interviews were instrumental in identifying insightful examples of language, shared values, themes, and tensions that cut across disciplines, thereby serving as effective recommendations for spearheading future adaptation efforts at the University and beyond.
Between themselves, the interviewees represented a wide range of disciplines, from Law, Geosciences, Chemistry, Biology, Education, and Social and Political Science – in keeping with the interdisciplinarity that is at the heart of the Edinburgh Earth Initiative’s endeavours in general, and the Climate and Health campaign in particular.
As an apt culmination to the project, Alys and Sarah worked together on a report tabulating the essential findings and insights from the interviews. The report comprises four sections – defining, valuing, acting, and recommendations. The defining section of the report highlights the need for a flexible definition of ‘adapting to changing environments’, acknowledging the difference in terminologies that pervades each discipline. More significantly, this section draws our attention to the terms academics may use instead of ‘adaptation’.
An inherent open-endedness underlines the report’s valuing section, allowing each interviewee the freedom to interpret the term’s meaning in ways that they see fit. The interviewees’ responses are spread across the categories of intrinsic value, monetary value, institutional value, educational value, and societal value. A detailed listing of the tensions that inevitably arise when valuing adaptation brings this section to a close.
In the acting section, the report chronicles the interviewees’ reflections on the actions that need to be taken on individual, disciplinary, University, and philanthropic levels to advance adaptation research, segueing perfectly into the report’s recommendations section that outlines how the University can adapt to changing environments, remaining cognizant of the fact that adaptation research and development must evolve into being interdisciplinary, just, and urgent.
Some of the recommendations include but are not limited to: the pressing need to endow adaptation research with institutional backing from the University, the designation of an adaptation champion to carry the work forward, and the regular creation of opportunities for facilitating dialogue amongst all disciplines around adaptation research.
On 19th May, the contributors to this project gathered to discuss the essential findings and recommendations proposed in the Adapt.Ed research report. A final version of the report was then compiled with plans to disseminate it among the wider University community.
Once again, a massive shout out to Alys, Sarah, and the entire team at ACE for the time and effort they have invested into producing this report and making an original, need-of-the-hour contribution to knowledge in the field of adaptation.
You can read the report here as a part of the Earth Fellows Edit!
