Research under climate change: between rapid impact and slow scholarship

Presenting author: Malcolm Johnson (University of Tasmania)

This paper seeks to discuss the challenge of researching climate change adaptation planning in an area of Tasmania where diverging values, discourses, and realities can limit the usefulness of seeking consensus and interrupts the framing of action. Drawing on findings from a literature review, this paper introduces a method that combines PPGIS and Q-method, Q+GIS. Findings indicate the mixed-method is ideal for investigating complex, contentious, and spatially-oriented social-ecological systems problems.

Typically, participatory methods seek consensus as a central goal of the methodology. However, consensus can often diminish marginalized voices, reduce progressive policy outcomes, and result in ideological backlash. When dealing with values, be it landscape values, social-values at risk, or the values that characterize emotional geography, the ability to reach consensus is particularly elusive as participants can react in unpredictable ways, especially in response to the reality of impending climate disruption. 

In order to address these issues, this paper details the potential for Q+GIS to better identify diverging worldviews around climate change and cultivate new ways of framing adaptation that responds to individual values rather than an elusive consensus-ness without abandoning the principles and consistency of participatory geographic research.

Presenting author: Erich Wolff (Monash University)

This contribution investigates the use of citizen science approaches in the context of disasters and climate change. Drawing on lessons from a project that was able to collect more than 5000 photos of floods in Indonesia and Fiji over the last two years, this contribution discusses the social aspects of this kind of research. More specifically, I propose a reflection on the ethical and practical challenges of data-collection projects using citizen science approaches. This reflection will interrogate if this framework can fulfil the promise of positively transforming the relationship between scientists and communities while still striving for academic rigour.

The lessons from the flood-monitoring research project suggest that while citizen science approaches can respond directly to the call for a more community-based scholarship, more studies are needed to understand the motivations, participatory models and political implications of this kind of data-collection framework. Even though research on citizen science approaches is still incipient, I argue that, when ethically conducted, this kind of engagement has the potential to significantly advance geographic knowledge in partnership with communities at the forefront of climate change.

Presenting author: Charlotte Jones (University of Tasmania)

There are substantial empirical claims about climate change, however we know much less about the affective conditions of living with climatic injustices, threats, uncertainties, and risks. We need scholarship therefore that responds to the temporal and affective complexity of climate change. Through a series of in-depth interviews with 21 young adults from variety of diverse backgrounds and situations, I uncover the ongoing social significance of emotions in childhood educational experiences of climate change. A lack of integration of cognitive and affective experience in climate change schooling has lasting effects in adult attitudes and behaviours, and related social dynamics of distrust and division, related to this issue. Young adult participants recount childhood experiences of being powerless, stranded and daunted in learning about climate change as significant formative encounters in their ongoing understanding of climate change.

The insights of this research contribute to longer-term processes of collective social transformation. We need continuing reflexive, rich and careful scholarly work that is responsive to the emergent emotional impact of climate change, particularly for young people. I explore opportunities and provocations for future long-term scholarly work, in order to find opportunities for shared action on climate change that affirms its affective significance.  

Presenting author: Isabel Cornes (University of Melbourne)

Other authors: Dr Brian Cook (University of Melbourne), Dr Paula Satizábal (University of Melbourne), Dr Marilu Melo Zurita (UNSW)

The state-led emergency service sector emphasises the importance of community engagement in preparedness for natural hazards and emergencies, however, in practice engagement initiatives largely continue to rely on top-down information dissemination. The Community Engagement for Disaster Risk Reduction (CEDRR) project and partnership between researchers and state-led emergency service organisations in Victoria, has aimed to analyse the importance of building relationships for community engagement for disaster risk reduction.

This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach, reflecting on the lead author's experiences with CEDRR. We examine the role of power and relationships between and within organisations, career personnel, volunteers, publics and the research team, which have been critical in supporting and constraining the project. Over five years, CEDRR continues to evolve with regular feedback from emergency service managers and volunteers, publics, and the research team. While outwardly fulfilling the requirements set by these partners, the project has faced bureaucratic and practical curveballs, challenges of 'buy-in' from volunteer 'engagers' to conduct engagements, and impediments from consecutive emergency events. Although there is urgency in developing effective participatory engagement methods to support publics preparedness, our analysis highlights the importance of engaging with and listening to the volunteer 'engagers' at the heart of the community engagement process.

Presenting author: Marc Tadaki (Cawthron Institute)

Proposal-building is a ubiquitous research activity in which the defining categories of social and environmental life are assembled and enacted. This assembly responds to the incentives in government funding priorities, as well as the wider milieu of environmental politics. How researchers navigate these tensions and find 'room to move' is an important topic that deserves attention, yet is seldom discussed. 

In this paper, I reflect on composing a large interdisciplinary research proposal that hinged significantly on the promise of environmental prediction, while at the same time tried to ring-fence space for improvisation, contingency, and emergence. As we built our proposal to know fish futures, we navigated a value-laden course through choices about 'whose entities' should be assumed to exist in the future and why. Furthermore, in our attempt to foreground critical social science in knowing the future differently, we ran into an irreducible democratic problem of 'impact' and ideology; is ideology change the new behaviour change? 

While geographers might be forced to rehearse impact discourses, and while these are often structured by dominant norms, we do have choices about how to perform 'impact'. Clarifying and understanding these choices is an important step toward reconstituting impact from the inside out. 

Presenting author: Nicole Graham (University of Sydney)

Research under climate change presents significant challenges to mental health, academic workload and career. On the one hand, climate science data demands an urgency and action-oriented approach to planning work tasks and career goals. On the other hand, research and writing about climate change can overwhelm researchers to the point of despair and inaction raising fundamental questions about its relevance and capacity to contribute meaningfully to the problem. This paper considers the hope and motivation that arise through critically reviewing research goals and reinvesting more time in the potential of curriculum-level educational strategies to address climate change. Faithful to the compelling premise of legal geography, that law is both shaped by and shapes landscapes and the lives of their inhabitants, my research currently foregrounds questions of climate change through the lens of legal education.

Situating my research within one of the oldest and best resourced law schools in the country, I am concerned to find ways to reform law via legal education so that the climate striking generation of law students have high-level climate change literacy, interdisciplinary competency, and deeper skills of collaboration. Could educational change enable future cabinet ministers, judges and policy writers to confront climate change more effectively?

Presenting author: Lauren Rickards (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other author: Blanche Verlie (University of Sydney)

Climate change is both compelling researchers to engage with multiple crises and generating multiple crises for research. In particular, there is emerging discordance between the pace and rhythms of much research and those of the increasingly volatile world it is a part of and that it seeks to study.

In this paper we draw on three of our own research experiences to explore this discordance, underlining not only the embodied and emplaced character of research in practice but the ecologies of crises that research is inescapably part of. The first vignette (Lauren's) features the record-breaking flood that abruptly ended the Millennium Drought and unceremoniously upended a carefully designed project about the drought as interviewers and interviewees alike were forced to deal with floodwaters, its messy effects and the systemic crises it exposed and exacerbated. The second vignette (Blanche's) discusses an effort to respond to the not-fully-expected 2019/2020 bushfire and smoke crisis as it was unfolding, and the institutional barriers to researching that event as it was happening, such as the slow pace of formal ethics approvals and their expectation of carefully designed and forward planned applications. The third vignette explores the challenges faced in Lauren and Blanche's collaborative project on educational institutions' climate vulnerability and adaptation during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as burgeoning workloads and the loss of collaborators through institutional 'change plans,' a.k.a. academic shock doctrine.

Overall, in this paper we seek to progress conversation within geography and the Academy more broadly about the situated knowledges of research through exploring how research about crises is increasingly embedded within crises. We argue that in addition to research projects needing to pragmatically manage crises, research in general needs to become more attentive and responsive to multi-sited ecologies of crisis, including the crises it may inadvertently contribute to.