Coastal communities in the UK are trying to manage the competing demands of housing, tourism, conservation, and climate adaptation, often with policies that work well in one town but fail in another. The problem is that current approaches to building resilience—such as education campaigns or community engagement—are so tied to local history and values that they cannot be reliably transferred between places. This project aims to solve that by developing a framework that balances five types of capital—human, social, natural, physical, and financial—across different coastal settings. If successful, the research would give local authorities and environmental managers a practical toolkit for designing interventions that strengthen resilience without accidentally undermining one type of capital while boosting another. That could mean more effective flood defences, better-managed fisheries, or coastal tourism that supports both local livelihoods and biodiversity. The work is applied and policy-oriented, with direct implications for how public money is spent on coastal regeneration and climate adaptation.
View original technical description
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.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know