Teresa Bridgeman

Nations of Climate Champions and the Fabric of the Everyday: shaping stories of engagement, sustainability and resilience

Chair, West Somerset Flood Group

Stories: the frameworks for our worlds

Treasury Department of the Environment

Most exciting story 2019

Meme created by Dr Sam Montano North Dakota State University

The fabric of the everyday

Flood & Coast 2018

Build trust with consistency … communication… continuity… commitment

www.morethanminutes.com

The Parish Council has signed a 100-year

maintenance contract, futureproofing our

investment

Wow, we got an award for the bridge with its 16,000*

reclaimed stones

But where did all the people

go?Nice little bridge

*Estimate only. Nobody had time to count them.

Keeping the people on the bridge: FCERM Draft Strategy

engage everybody, including those who haven’t flooded?

sustain our engagement for the long term?

work closely, inspire action?

raise awareness and preparedness?

Educate/train (3.1.1; 3.4.2; 3.4.3)

commission research, to be completed by 2022 (3.2.1)

create digital tools (3.2.2; 3.3.2)

Questions: How do we… Measures:

Build trust with consistency … communication… continuity… commitment

Flood & Coast 2018

Take action: shape our thinking

“Our thinking needs to change faster than the climate” (John Curtin)

Talk action: shape our stories

• Stories we tell ourselves

• Stories we tell our peers

• Stories we tell our communities

• Stories we tell our bosses

• Stories we tell government

The SMART STORYUncluttered, goal-driven, time-limited

Everything moves towards a single and increasingly inevitable end (Aristotle)

REAL LIFE

THE MISTY STORY

Carolyn Otley (Community Resilience Coordinator, CumbriaLRF and Cockermouth MRT)

Jozi Brown (Cumbria Council for Voluntary Service)

Multi-agency Intangible

Shifting Transient

Years long

Endings we give our stories about FRM and resilience

Mitigation: we successfully installed PLR on 63 properties

Preparation: we successfully delivered training to 15 wardens

Response: we successfully managed the situation without loss to life

Recovery: we all rebuilt our lives better than ever before

Working with Natural Processes

A jigsaw over time

My name is Roger, I farm on the hill and keep the

cricket pitch in shape. I’m a Parish Councillor.

My name is Charlie, I’ve been working on this river for the EA for 45 years. My cousin lives

here.

My name is Sarah, I walk these hills every morning. I remember

the 1968 floods.

My name is Teresa, I keep sloping off to conferences

when I should be discussing telemetry with

David from the next village.

My name is Sergei, I run the dance class at the

hall. I live at the top of the catchment.

My name is Gemma, We won

the FWAG SW Kingfisher award at

our school.

Sustainable NFM, resilient communities

My name is Will. I walk these roads a lot. My

daughter runs the Highways infrastructure

team.

The MISTY Challenge

Awards for action now

Standing round talking: Wessex EA

Disruptive working practice and silo trashing: Defra Digital

Telling it how it is: Aire Rivers Trust

Individual story changer: Dan Martin, Somerset County Council

Resilience thinking, the brainy bit: Hugh Deeming, Carolyn Otley, Liz Sharp, John Drury, Evangelos Ntontis, Neil Adger and colleagues

MISTY Research winners (2015-2019)

Ask me for full references

Support for story-changing policy makers and practitioners

Drury et al 2019

Deeming 2015

Sharp 2018

Adger et al 2016

Ntontiset al 2018

To be continued…

TO BE CONTINUED