The UK’s coastal communities are testing new ways to govern their own resilience to rising seas and stronger storms, with researchers, local residents, and government agencies working together across all four nations. This matters because current coastal management often treats communities as passive recipients of top-down policy, ignoring local knowledge, cultural values, and the uneven social impacts of change. TRACC directly addresses that gap by co-designing governance tools with the people who live on the coast, rather than for them. If the project succeeds, it could reshape how the UK handles coastal adaptation—shifting from reactive, centralised decisions to place-based, inclusive approaches that account for justice, wellbeing, and local priorities. The team will test these methods in four real coastal communities, build a “Resilience Assembly” to connect different locations, and upscale learning through existing coastal partnerships. The result would be a practical, tested framework for governance that other coastal nations could adopt, making communities more able to adapt on their own terms.
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TRACC is a highly ambitious, innovative project delivering transdisciplinary approaches for coastal resilience governance co-designed and implemented across all four UK nations. We have an outstanding project team, drawn from across academia, government agencies, NGOs and local communities, that will create a step change in our understanding and management of coastal community resilience in the UK. Specific objectives are: Build transdisciplinary theory and practices for coastal resilience across diverse stakeholders and within the project team (WP0). Co-design and test novel transdisciplinary research-governance approaches and tools across four RCs, through co-creation of transdisciplinary actions plans and learning cycles between researchers, citizens, stakeholders, policymakers, and the coastal environment itself, to address policy challenges around coastal resilience and a just transition (WP1, WP6). Co-develop narratives of resilience and sustainability with diverse social and cultural groups, stakeholders, and policy makers across multiple coastal communities, and consider to what degree different narratives are reflected in current policy, management, and institutions, with particular attention to questions of power, values, and justice (WP2, WP3); Assess the multiple broad and specific values of natural capital, nature more broadly, and community resilience, and their relation to wellbeing, by linking ecological modelling and economic, creative, interpretative, and deliberative approaches (WP2, WP3); Develop a multiple evidence-based approach to underpin values-based transformative coastal governance, including through developing effective methodologies for increasing ocean-climate literacy, integrating local knowledge and transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge exchange (WP4, WP5); Appraise the potential of key leverage points and barriers for place- and values-based transformative coastal governance, and effectively build capacity to address them, including through an innovative Resilience Assembly connecting different locations (WP5); Upscale learning and amplify impacts through effective networking and deliberative social learning between coastal and estuary partnerships, other coastal groupings and national stakeholders and agencies (WP6).
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