ARISE: Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment

UK coasts provide recreation, transportation, commerce, natural beauty and food for coastal communities. However, they face interrelated challenges from issues such as climate change, coastal realignment, demographic shift and infrastructure development. Managing such issues can be difficult, with coasts and their seas providing diverse meanings and values for their stakeholders and communities.

In this respect, coastal residents, users, and managers experience challenges in coherently and meaningfully attending to livelihoods, health and wellbeing, as well as natural biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and conservation. This complexity highlights the need to develop and evaluate fair and transferrable approaches to promote sustainable use of diverse coastal resources.

This will be critical to strengthening resilience: the ability to anticipate, withstand, adjust to, and thrive after disruption and change.

We consider five foundational types of capital resources shown to help coastal communities build resilience: human, social, natural, physical, and financial. Elsewhere, place-based policy interventions have been shown to strengthen these types of capital and help build resilience through developing stronger relationships between people, their location, and their environment.

However, examples like education campaigns, enforcement initiatives, and community engagement are often designed through the lens of place-based histories, identities, and community values unique to the place where they are implemented. Such interventions may work in one place, but not the other, or may disparately strengthen certain capitals of local concern at the expense of others.

We thus come to a conundrum. If policy interventions are influenced by place-based community values where they are designed and implemented, how can we take transferable lessons from one coastal community to another, using interventions that reliably account for each of the five capitals?

ARISE: Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment, is designed to propose, develop and evaluate an intervention framework to practically address this puzzle. We will gather evidence to develop best-practice intervention methods, applicable across places and regions, focussed on achieving balanced strengthening across each of the five capitals.