Recently, various effects of climate
change have become visible in Europe, including higher average temperatures, increases in precipitation in northern Europe and decreases in precipitation in southern Europe, decline in snow cover, melting glaciers, and warming of permafrost soils. Furthermore, extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, and droughts have led to increasing losses (European Commission 2020).
When it comes to dealing with climate change, Europe seems to be united. Important drivers for unified action at the European level were the floods in 2002 and the heat wave in 2003. In 2005, the European Union recognised the need to adapt to the consequences of climate change and set up a working group under the European Climate Change Programme. Finland was the first European country to present a national adaptation strategy in 2005. France and Spain followed in 2006, Germany and the UK in 2008. Today 28 European countries have developed national adaptation strategies, and some countries are already in the process of implementing adaptation activities via their national and sectoral action plans. Within these activities, municipal planning is a key avenue to respond to the consequences of climate change which have, undoubtedly, predominantly local impacts. Thus, all societal and cultural groups of a community need to be included in planning in order to build up resiliency.
Nevertheless, concrete adjustment measures are often exclusively associated with economic means, specific policies, governmental arrangements, and sectoral urban and regional planning and development. Local or regional cultures are rather seldom addressed, as they seem to be less important from our predominantly societal thinking in terms of cost-benefit ratios. Although the participation of local stakeholders plays a role in adaptation and resiliency programmes and projects, values, beliefs, knowledge, and behaviour of community groups, as well as cultural-historical contexts and traits of a region are far under-acknowledged in climate adaptation and resiliency policy making. This seems to be surprising, since the connections that people have with places and the way these places shape and alter their sensitivity to climate stressors, as well as their capacities to adapt to them, are well known. For decades social science and humanities scholars documented that the social vulnerability of a community at a specific geographical place is characterised by particularities of history, values, beliefs, knowledge, trust, and social relationships within and amongst groups, but also within political and legal traditions and institutional and socio-economic structures in which specific climatic change impacts manifests and occurs.
The ability of a social group to cope with the impacts of climatic experiences in the long term and to adapt to future stresses, perturbations, or shocks is known as resiliency. Cultural values influence how decision makers and community members interpret climatic experiences, particularly how they perceive the value of their geographical place, the level of risks they associate with the climatic changes and the beliefs they have about its control and responsibility to adapt and mitigate its effects. Thus, resiliency and culture are inextricably linked. With this book, we hope to contribute to bridging the gap between climate change policies and decision making and the cultural traits of communities in Europe and elsewhere.
The book’s chapter are structured as follows:
Chapter 1 introduces the focus of the book.
Chapter 2 focuses on the inevitable link of climate resiliency and culture and sets the scene for the case studies, which are explored in the next four chapters.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 feature four case studies in Bulgaria (Varna situated at the Black Sea), in Slovenia (the village of Livek in the hilly area of the northwestern part of Slovenia at the border of Italy), in Ireland (the Irish Midlands) and in Germany (The North Frisian Island Pellworm).
Chapter 7 compares similarities and differences of the cases studies in terms of their climate resiliency.
Chapter 8 provides an epilogue.
Reference
European Commission (Climate Action/EU-Action). (2020). Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/adaptation/how_en.
