Teresa Bridgeman
Nations of Climate Champions and the Fabric of the Everyday: shaping stories of engagement, sustainability and resilience
Chair, West Somerset Flood Group
Stories: the frameworks for our worlds
Treasury Department of the Environment
Most exciting story 2019
Meme created by Dr Sam Montano North Dakota State University
The fabric of the everyday
Flood & Coast 2018
Build trust with consistency … communication… continuity… commitment
www.morethanminutes.com
The Parish Council has signed a 100-year
maintenance contract, futureproofing our
investment
Wow, we got an award for the bridge with its 16,000*
reclaimed stones
But where did all the people
go?Nice little bridge
*Estimate only. Nobody had time to count them.
Keeping the people on the bridge: FCERM Draft Strategy
engage everybody, including those who haven’t flooded?
sustain our engagement for the long term?
work closely, inspire action?
raise awareness and preparedness?
Educate/train (3.1.1; 3.4.2; 3.4.3)
commission research, to be completed by 2022 (3.2.1)
create digital tools (3.2.2; 3.3.2)
Questions: How do we… Measures:
Build trust with consistency … communication… continuity… commitment
Flood & Coast 2018
Take action: shape our thinking
“Our thinking needs to change faster than the climate” (John Curtin)
Talk action: shape our stories
• Stories we tell ourselves
• Stories we tell our peers
• Stories we tell our communities
• Stories we tell our bosses
• Stories we tell government
The SMART STORYUncluttered, goal-driven, time-limited
Everything moves towards a single and increasingly inevitable end (Aristotle)
REAL LIFE
THE MISTY STORY
Carolyn Otley (Community Resilience Coordinator, CumbriaLRF and Cockermouth MRT)
Jozi Brown (Cumbria Council for Voluntary Service)
Multi-agency Intangible
Shifting Transient
Years long
Endings we give our stories about FRM and resilience
Mitigation: we successfully installed PLR on 63 properties
Preparation: we successfully delivered training to 15 wardens
Response: we successfully managed the situation without loss to life
Recovery: we all rebuilt our lives better than ever before
Working with Natural Processes
A jigsaw over time
My name is Roger, I farm on the hill and keep the
cricket pitch in shape. I’m a Parish Councillor.
My name is Charlie, I’ve been working on this river for the EA for 45 years. My cousin lives
here.
My name is Sarah, I walk these hills every morning. I remember
the 1968 floods.
My name is Teresa, I keep sloping off to conferences
when I should be discussing telemetry with
David from the next village.
My name is Sergei, I run the dance class at the
hall. I live at the top of the catchment.
My name is Gemma, We won
the FWAG SW Kingfisher award at
our school.
Sustainable NFM, resilient communities
My name is Will. I walk these roads a lot. My
daughter runs the Highways infrastructure
team.
The MISTY Challenge
Awards for action now
Standing round talking: Wessex EA
Disruptive working practice and silo trashing: Defra Digital
Telling it how it is: Aire Rivers Trust
Individual story changer: Dan Martin, Somerset County Council
Resilience thinking, the brainy bit: Hugh Deeming, Carolyn Otley, Liz Sharp, John Drury, Evangelos Ntontis, Neil Adger and colleagues
MISTY Research winners (2015-2019)
Ask me for full references
Support for story-changing policy makers and practitioners
Drury et al 2019
Deeming 2015
Sharp 2018
Adger et al 2016
Ntontiset al 2018
To be continued…
TO BE CONTINUED