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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Adaptation: Combining Old and New kNowledge to Enable Conscious Transformations to Sustainability

Alternative title: Klimatilpasning: Gammel og ny kunnskap forent for bevisst transformasjon til bærekraft

Awarded: NOK 10.2 mill.

The AdaptationCONNECTS project has contributed to research on how to successfully adapt to climate change, and it did so by focusing on the relationship between climate change adaptation and transformations to sustainability. The project results respond to an urgent need for more integrated and holistic perspectives on both adaptation and transformation, recognizing that the challenge of the 21st century is to hold global average temperature increases to below 1.5°C, while also adapting to the current and anticipated impacts of climate variability and change. Adaptation has been largely approached as a technical problem that can be solved through improved technologies, behavioral change, and better policies and management, with little attention to the role that beliefs, values, worldviews and paradigms play in climate change responses. Yet subjective factors always influence interests, priorities, and political decisions about how systems are organized, managed, and adapted to changing conditions. The project approached adaptation in a broader and deeper manner through integral, holistic frameworks that linked the practical, political, and personal dimensions of transformative change, drawing attention to characteristics and values that are most likely to contribute to adaptation through transformation: collaboration, flexibility, creativity, and empowerment. The project used innovative methods to explore the relationship between adaptation and transformation in four sub-projects: Coffee Connects, Travel Connects, Art Connects and Education Connects. The research focused on connecting climate change with what matters to people, and it emphasized the important role of values, worldviews, and paradigms, including the ways that relationships between individual change, collective change, and systems change are perceived and approached. Research questions were addressed through specific case studies. For example, Coffee Connects researched the perspectives of coffee producers in Guatemala about climate change, and how meaning making influences adaptation processes. Travel Connects studied the relationship between individuals and collective leadership in an indigenous community in Alaska facing multiple social-ecological challenges. Education Connects emphasized an integrative approach to teaching about climate change and sustainability issues and has explored how such approaches to climate change can contribute to transformative learning. A textbook on Climate and Society: Transforming the Future, was written and published in 2019, and a second edition will be published in 2024. Art Connects has focused on the relationship between climate and art, including the role of "artivism" in the Extinction Rebellion, using photography as a means of documentation, as well as the role of climate fiction. Art Connects supported an art-science collaboration with Norwegian artist Tone Bjordam for the book project, You Matter More than you Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World. The text, accompanied by original drawings, integrated the research results from AdaptationCONNECTS while encouraging readers to reflect and think about the relationship between climate change and social change from a relational perspective. The book was launched in 2021 to generate conversations about new ways of thinking about social change. This book complements an earlier Art Connects output, Our Entangled Future: Short Stories to Empower Quantum Social Change. The results from the AdaptationCONNECTS project draw attention to how transformations can be carried out in an integrative manner, and they highlight the importance of relational perspectives that emphasize values and meaning-making. There is both a theoretical and practical focus on collaboration in the project, therefore aligning efforts with other projects and initiatives is an important motivation for the research. The project has led to new collaborations with numerous research groups and diverse societal actors, both nationally and internationally. Through events, workshops, conferences, special journal issues, books, articles, lectures, webinars, podcasts, keynote talks, videos, social media, the project has disseminated results that promote a more integrative approaches to research on climate change adaptation and transformations to sustainability. The project's emphasis on combining old and new knowledge to enable conscious transformations to sustainability highlights the importance of connections and relationships in successful adaptation processes.

The outcomes of the AdaptationCONNECTS project have led to new ways of looking at transformations to sustainability. The project has introduced innovative approaches that have been taken up by researchers, educators, and practitioners. Some examples include: • The analysis and presentation of meaning-making around climate change adaptation, described by Hochachka (2019) as a set of Russian dolls or Matryoshkas, has introduced many researchers to integral approaches to adaptation. • Research on the Indigenous concept of individual and collective leadership, expressed by Gram-Hanssen (2021) as “individual-collective simultaneity,” has been recognized by community members as a useful articulation of Indigenous approaches to collaboration. • The presentation of integrative approaches to education through both articles and a textbook by Leichenko and O’Brien (2019) has brought a transformative lens to climate change education, including greater attention to subjective experiences and emotions. • Introduction of the concept of “quantum social change” by O’Brien (2021) has generated discussions among climate change psychologists, journalists, activists, and researchers regarding what this means and how to put this into practice. • The description of the Three Spheres of Transformation as a fractal approach to scaling has offered a way for practitioners to transcend bottom-up versus top-down perspectives and local versus global binaries. In addition to these impacts, the Project Leader was invited to do a presentation on transformation to the IPBES community, and subsequently invited to participate in the scoping process for the IPBES transformative change assessment, and eventually asked to co-chair the assessment. She has been engaged with this initiative since 2021; the research produced through the AdaptationCONNECTS project is thus penetrating beyond the climate change community.

AdaptationCONNECTS is an innovative research project that will make connections across theories, methodologies, institutions, and disciplines to co-design and co-produce new knowledge on adaptation to climate change. The project focuses on the question of what it means to successfully adapt to climate change, hypothesizing that this occurs through processes of transformation. Adaptation will be approached through practical, political and personal spheres of transformation. This project challenges conventional discourses on adaptation and aims to broaden understandings of successful responses to climate change. The project addresses 8 research questions organized around 4 characteristics of adaptation that have transformative potential: 1) Collaboration: How do and can individuals and groups engage with adaptation work more effectively to influence systems and structures? What types of processes and tools can be used to collaborate better across different values, belief systems and paradigms? 2) Flexibility: What types of flexibility in planning, management, and operations promote adaptability and resilience? How does the flexibility of adaptation narratives influence adaptive capacity and the ability to transform? 3) Creativity: What role does creativity play in adaptation processes, and how can it contribute to new types, tools and approaches to adaptation responses? What lessons can be learned from art that can contribute to responses that reduce vulnerability and risk? 4) Empowerment: How can new understandings of the dynamic relationship between individual and collective human agency be integrated into adaptation policies and actions? How can education be transformed to empower individual/collective action? The relationship between adaptation and transformation will be explored using innovative methodologies within four sub-projects: Coffee Connects; Travel Connects, Art Connects, and Education Connects.

Publications from Cristin

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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam