Common ground: exploring methods of communication at a system and landscape level for floods and other risks in the UK

Project overview

This Collaborative Doctoral Award would give you the opportunity to shape the UK’s climate adaptation programme. Partnering with Arup and the EA in their recently launched FENS2100+ project, you will gain privileged insights from practitioners and the local communities at risk and pilot their research-led designs during their PhD. The aim of this project is to explore and propose methods of communication at a system and landscape level for floods and other risks in the UK.

The UK’s annual costs of flooding is expected to rise to £15-28 billion by 2080. Reducing the exposure and vulnerability of communities and empowering them with means to adapt is of national importance. In the recent study Public Dialogue on Climate Adaptation carried out by the University of Leeds, two key messages stood out: if people do not perceive themselves at risk they are unlikely to invest time and effort in adapting; secondly, that people feel limited by a perceived lack of knowledge and self-efficacy, uncertainty about the appropriate allocation of responsibility, and questions regarding the effectiveness of individual action. This study built on the nationwide Public Dialogues project (2013-2015) established by the Environment Agency (EA) exploring perceptions of flood risk. The EA study called for new methods and techniques to be developed to help individuals and communities better understand their risk of flooding and consequences they could endure. Unfortunately, little has changed in the past decade in the methods used to communicate hazards, and our ability to turn messages they convey into climate adaptation actions. We need to do much more to understand the barriers to climate adaptation, only then can one make headway in increasing a community’s understanding of risk and allow them to experience and perceive an alternative narrative, one in which they can adapt and live with floods, mitigate the impacts, and recover from floods quickly.

We are inviting applicants to propose a project that explores approaches of communicating climate induced hazards to a wide range of audience. The themes and structure of the project are entirely open, provided the proposal is interdisciplinary and suggests a framework and methods for stakeholder engagement —in novel, creative, and productive ways.

Arup is a global multi-disciplinary consultancy company, dedicated to sustainable development. Arup helps its clients and partners to respond to the most urgent challenges in the built environment today. Its members have a wealth of knowledge directly relevant to the project, both through study outputs and implicitly, through the day-to-day work of conducting applied research and running programmes and understanding of the context of findings. Through Arup University, and its 58 Global Skills Networks, Arup can rapidly access members working across its 83 offices, from climate scientists to social value practitioners, as well as engineers delivering EA projects. The main benefit to Arup is in surfacing crucial practice-based knowledge from across the field that may be overlooked in a fast-paced consultancy environment, reconstructing this knowledge into viable approaches for engagement with stakeholders and adding unique insights to the Fens 2100+ programme. Arup has worked with doctoral students on multiple research projects over many years, and its ‘University’ provides the structure and knowledge to facilitate this. As a student on this project, you will be able to access real life issues, especially those relating to flood risk in the Fens. We envisage plenty of opportunities to get involved, for instance to observe project meetings, conduct interviews and analyses, and pilot their communications design tools.

Supervision

The Cambridge supervisor is Professor Emily So, Professor of Architectural Engineering at the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art. The Arup supervisor is Dr Juliet Mian, Fellow, and Infrastructure Resilience & Global Resilience Skills Lead.

How to apply
We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and ethnicities who have an interest in design and communication. Applicants should meet the eligibility criteria for Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC studentships.

You should apply to the Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Cambridge using the Applicant Portal by 7th January 2025. Applicants for the OOC-AHRC-DTP studentship should follow the university’s standard admission process explained at https://www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/application-process/how-do-i-apply. 

Should you have any questions, or for an informal discussion about how you might approach the CDA project, you are welcome to contact Professor Emily So at ekms2@cam.ac.uk and Dr Juliet Mian at Juliet.Mian@arup.com

Please see the advert on the Cambridge jobs site.