What is hindering adaptation to climate change in the English suburbs, and what would help facilitate action?

Smith, Ian S; Williams, Katie; Gupta, Rajat

Abstract

Climate change makes many challenges on suburban areas. This chapter focuses on one of the multiple problematics of climate change: the challenge of overheating. Reporting on evidence from the EPSRC-funded SNACC project (EP/G061289/1), the chapter presents results from neighbourhood modelling of potential overheating in six English neighbourhoods using the DECoRuM model. It then explores how residents in these neighbourhoods thought through and thought about their response to the threat of overheating calling on Ostrom’s notion of the “collective action problem” and on social practice theory. Whereas there is a clear demonstrable technical problem for the 2050s and beyond, residents are unable to both resolve their collective action problem and move beyond how their current lifestyle preferences make many adaptive responses to overheating ‘inconvenient’. However residents are prepared to implement low cost technical fixes and options that have current benefits (such as shade planting). Thus any strategic plan for retrofitting the English housing stock needs to be realistic about the degree to which current owner-occupiers are prepared to invest their current household resources in the housing infrastructure of 2050.

• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Retrofitting Cities for Tomorrow’s World,
• Keywords: hindering, adaptation, climate, change, English, suburbs, action
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/907315