UCL's Climate Voices: Professor Mark Pelling on Climate Governance

“It's very clear that acting on climate change is urgent in every dimension,” says Professor Mark Pelling. “Increasingly, everything we do will be felt or seen and hopefully evaluated through the lens of climate-informed action. Every decision that's taken by business or government, you or I, will be informed, consciously or not, by the state of the weather and the risk around us.” 

Pelling is the lead on Governance, a sub-theme under UCL’s Grand Challenge of Climate Crisis that aims to bring together research across disciplines to inform climate policy, governance and institutional responses to climate change.

“I can't think of a more central driving concern or way of looking at climate change. Yes, we need technology, we need to mitigate, we need engineering to adapt, and we need maths to understand insurance, and culture to understand ourselves. But none of that is sufficient. What we need is to bring it all together in a process of change.”

Transformative adaptation and governance

Tomorrow's cities event

Adaptation has been central to Pelling’s research throughout his career. From an undergraduate degree in Geography, a Masters in Marine Resource Management and a doctorate involving flood hazard and flood risk reduction research in Guyana, he has worked throughout his academic career alongside grassroots organisers, political movements and researchers in other disciplines. His post-doctoral fellowship work in Guyana, Barbados and the Dominican Republic led to a book called Adaptation to Climate Change, through which he introduced the idea of transformative adaptation.

“Through adaptation, one affects fundamental change on the systems that you live in. It could be cultural, social, economic or political change, but adaptation is the vehicle for fundamental change rather than a product.”

Tomorrow’s Cities, an initiative led by UCL and the University of Edinburgh, of which Pelling is the director, is dedicated to reducing future urban disaster risk by working with marginalised communities to create risk-informed frameworks for decision-making. They partner with cities including Kathmandu and Rapti in Nepal, Chattogram in Bangladesh, and Nablus in Palestine, all of which face multiple natural hazards.

Through involving the cities’ community leaders, policymakers and urban practitioners in the kinds of futures they wanted to see, and creating a centralised set of tools that could be deployed locally, Tomorrow’s Cities demonstrates how it’s possible to move towards a safer future through collaboration and governance.

We can see another example of this in the UK. A project that Pelling co-leads with Professor Lauren Andres from The Bartlett was funded by the UCL Grand Challenge’s pump-priming initiative before he took on his role of sub-theme lead. The CADENCE: Consequences of Adaptation for DEmocratic AdvaNCE project explores the relationship between climate adaptation strategies and their impact on the democratic process, taking place in the inner city ward of Harehills, Leeds. 

“There is a very high rental population, with lots of people living in old back-to-back houses, where you have a front room with a window and another upstairs, but none on the side or the back. Air can’t circulate and they get very hot. We’ve designed an intervention with [local community facilitators] to reduce heatwave risk.”

Together with Leeds City Council and a local neighbourhood planning group, the project looks at the political consequences of adaptation. “We’re not interested in the big world of politics or political parties or voting records,” he says. “The aim is to strengthen local democratic practice through this intervention.”

This local group is working with other community-based organisations and Leeds Beckett University to ensure the decisions made to create new climate-resilient urban spaces are inclusive, collaborative and informed by science. 

“This is a very tangible way in which what could have been a superficially democratic process has been given roots, and people are now thinking intentionally about this going forward.”

CADENCE workshop, Leeds

Collaboration and living well together

These deeply-rooted changes can only be achieved through bringing people together, sharing expertise and development across disciplines, which is where Pelling’s own research aligns with the Grand Challenge goal of collaboration for practical solutions.

“I’m a social scientist but I love working with modellers and engineers,” says Pelling. “If you go to a policymaker, they are very respectful of engineering and the ability to make something tangible. Social science can’t so easily present [the costs]. But for engineering to be useful, to do its maximum good, you need to understand people and how they see the world and operate.”

The Climate Crisis Grand Challenge awarded pump-priming to a number of interdisciplinary projects focusing on such things as empowering cities to accelerate the green industrial transition (Prof. Neave O’Clery in the Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and Dr Rachel Wild in the Institute of Education), and progress reporting on climate change mitigation (Prof Mark Miodownik in Mechanical Engineering and Dr Olivia Stevenson of UCL Public Policy).

“You are able to have much more informed and useful conversations, with policy being much more impactful,” he says. “The world we're drifting towards is a not very well adapted, less equal world. That's our future. My friends who work in engineering can work on the adaptation bit really well. They can maximise efficiency and come up with new ideas. The bit I can contribute to is living well together.”

One area where governance can make meaningful change is in climate justice. We can’t deal with climate change without thinking about who is benefiting and whose livelihood is disappearing, and what will be threatened in 50 years time, he says. Governance helps us to think about these futures together.

“Our job now is to face that transformation well, and that places an interest in justice at the forefront. There will be unjust, unfair things that happen. There will be losers and increasingly more and more of them. They will be the poorest and most marginalised globally, nationally, locally, and in our families. I'm afraid that is the human story. So our job is to join the historical struggle for justice.”

The next generation of knowledge leaders

Tomorrow's cities workshop

One way that the Grand Challenges look to the future is through engagement with PhD students and early career researchers. Fostering emerging leadership is crucial to making sure we can meet the challenges of the climate crisis outside the university’s walls. 

“Students are going to be living through quite a big transitional arc,” says Pelling. “I feel there's a real responsibility and opportunity for us to work with everyone, but particularly climate change PhDs, to reflect on how they're going to navigate this world as knowledge leaders, not just in academia. Inevitably, they're going to be working with knowledge creation one way or another.”

How do we confront this challenge and grow?

“I liked to use the phrase: we either need to transform to meet climate change or we will be transformed by climate change. Well, that boat has sailed, I'm afraid. We are being and will be deeply transformed by climate change in very painful ways. Now it's about learning to live with a world where there's going to be disruption.”