With Climate Museum UK, we have been piloting workshops on local resilience, aimed at members of the public and representatives of local organisations. We run one-day resilience workshops in Norwich, and can take these to other localities within the UK on request.

These workshops are highly interactive. Trainers introduce the topic and facilitate sessions, with content driven by participants within a framework provided by the trainers, who are on hand to guide discussions and answer questions. The structure is that of a community climate risk assessment with participants identifying hazards, impacts and responses, and developing an adaptation and resilience action plan.

The workshops are structured as follows:

1. Introduction to the Climate and Earth Crises

• A rapid overview of the twin crises of climate change and environmental destruction, their drivers and implications
• Adaptation and resilience – what they are and why they are needed
• Opportunity for participants to ask general questions

2. Local hazards, impacts and risks

• A framework for understanding risk (hazard, exposure, vulnerability, response)
• Participants identify key hazards for their context/locality, and their impacts
• Discussion of who/what is most at risk and why
• What makes risks and impacts worse, and what might reduce them?

3. Adaptation and resilience actions

• Overview of different types of adaptation and their relationship to resilience
• Participants identify possible adaptation and resilience actions
• Participants are guided to identify criteria for prioritising actions
• Discussion of who might be involved in supporting & implementing actions
• What else is needed to ensure successful implementation?

4. Developing a local adaptation and resilience action plan

• Participants work together to draft an adaptation and resilience action plan, bringing together learning from previous sessions to identify priority actions, key stakeholders, gaps and needs, and next steps.
• How might this plan, or a version of it, be pitched to the wider community?
• How can action be scaled up at the local level?

If you are interested in attending a workshop, or in having us organise one for you, please contact us.

This module draws on content from our Adaptation Literacy and Adapting to Climate Change courses.