Residents rally round in a crisis

It’s also National Pie Week, by the way, and that’s obviously snagged my subconscious more effectively because I’ve been hankering for hot flaky pastry, and that’s just not normal for me.

So, how do you promote Climate Week when all the big-name sponsors that used to support it have sloped away, local authorities no longer have the capacity to co-ordinate events and schools are buckling under the burden of Govian edicts?

Well, how about having just about every television news reporter in southern and southwest Britain standing up to their knees in flood water for a fortnight? That was a pretty good advertisement, I thought. That, and the angry crowds of residents from flooded-out homes calling ministers to account. As awareness-raising goes, it did the business.

Suddenly – and, I suspect, briefly (until the next climate coup) – man-made climate change, and the very real threat it poses to all our lives, is on the political and news agenda, albeit still mainly in the form of panto-style, ‘Oh-yes-it-is/Oh-no-it-isn’t’ rhetoric. These knockabouts are a distraction and irrelevant now. Climate change is happening, and we have to deal with it. What we should be discussing is how.

If the images of neighbours delivering groceries by boat, building barricades of sandbags and turning schools into supply centres tells us anything, it reminds us that people pull together in a crisis.

Emergencies force local residents to connect and become real communities. In the short term, at least, situations like this create bonds that can be crucial both to survival and to promoting recovery.

This ability to cope, both during and afterwards, this ‘bounce-back-ability’, if you like, is called community resilience. How resilient a community is will depend on different factors, but with the frequency of severe flooding set to double by 2050, the question is: why wait until disaster strikes to find out? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to prepare ourselves now?

I don’t just mean appointing volunteer flood wardens, though that that’s a step in the right direction. Shocks to communities come in economic and social forms as well as the obvious and overwhelming environmental ones. As public spending cuts further reduce local authorities’ ability to support, we are increasingly being thrown back on our own resources. Planning and practical action is called for.

I’m not talking about US-style ‘prepping’ here. Yes, there’s stockpiling to be done, but it’s of social capital, not survival gear.

Communities need to be adaptable, able to absorb and adjust to changing situations, and for that people need to come together and share their strengths.

The importance of these social links in community resilience has been illustrated by a project, The Good Life Initiative in New Earswick in York, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, working in collaboration with the Stockholm Environment Institution at the University of York.

I worked as a researcher on the project and spent two years working with the good folk of New Earswick, among whom I made new friends, and I learned some interesting lessons. Firstly, people need to trust you, and that takes time and sustained engagement. As importantly, you have to be prepared to adapt: when our original objective of building new community groups around sustainability issues failed, we changed the project to link the issues with the underlying interests of existing community groups.

New Earswick has traditionally been low on community engagement and it was a challenge at times to involve people. Nature, however, proved a successful ‘hook’. By the end of the project so many turned out to plant trees on Willow Bank green that I cried. We also held an Earth Summit at Joseph Rowntree School that linked in with the global UN conference in Rio.

The students got to put questions on film to people like Ban Ki-moon. That was a tearful day for me, too (in a good way.) Ultimately, the initiative achieved real success in forging new social links, as well as reinforcing existing connections, and this is the soil from which real resilience can take root. The Good Life Initiative showed that, with the right kind of practical support, communities can take on more responsibilities, but it needs the wider governance structure to provide policies and infrastructure to promote it.

To read the report, go to www.jrf.org.uk/publications/practical-action-build-community-resilience

Follow Kate Lock on Twitter @KlockworksKate