A library of Reports, Publications and White Papers exploring the Uncertain World
Action in the Face of Environmental Uncertainty: The Cabot Institute report arsing from the Uncertain World summits and discourses before, during and after 2015 (when Bristol was EU Green Capital). The Uncertain World entailed discussions around uncertainty, past and future climate, resilience, inclusion and empowerment in order to unlock new narratives around climate change and to help prepare Bristol for its participation in COP21. Funding was also provided by an ERC grant to RDP.
Cabot Institute Report on Living with Environmental Uncertainty.pdf
The Green and Black Conversation (by Roger Griffith): Inclusion of Bristol’s diverse communities (for example, represented by over 91 languages) was a major goal of Bristol’s year as Green Capital, but by all accounts this was not achieved. The reasons for this – and the issues underlying wider inclusion challenges in the environmental sector – were explored in a series of workshops hosted by Roger and Julz Davis (Ujima Radio), with support and funding from the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, Bristol Green Capital Partnership and the University of Bristol Policy Bristol. Funding was also provided by an ERC Grant to RDP.
The Green and Black Conversation 2015-2016-2f0l648
The Green and Black Ambassadors: Following the Green and Black Conversation, the partnership identified a range of needs and opportunities, including a) Training and mentoring a new generation of BME leaders; b) challenging institutional practices (including those of the participating organisations); and c) providing a wider public, media and political platform for BME-led environmental initiatives. The partnership included the Cabot Institute, Ujima Radio, BGCP and Up Our Street, with funding from Cabot and BGCP as well as the NERC and ERC via grants to RDP. The outstanding ambassadors for the pilot scheme were Jazz Ketibuah-Foley and Zakiya Mackenzie and you can learn more about them and hear there monthly radio show Soundcloud clips here. Their report on the pilot project can be downloaded here.
Green-and-Black-Ambassadors-Pilot-Report-2018-yo3y5k
Bristol Resilience Strategy: Bristol was one of the first cities in the world to be chosen as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative. You can learn more about the context to that process here; however, I think it is worth celebrating the Bristol, led by Sarah Toy at Bristol City Council and Ann Cousins at Arup, took a unique approach, foregrounding citizen engagement at the outset, thereby creating a unique focus on empowerment, agency and voice. I was a member of the Sounding Board and co-wrote the report’s introduction. The Uncertain World concepts are deeply embedded in our thinking, as Bristol understood the particular challenge of tackling the complex and unpredictable dimensions of long-term climate change on, e.g. health and food security. Importantly, this did not stifle our thinking but rather liberated it to consider the type of city we needed to be – from education to governance – to empower people, communities, businesses and anchor institutions to ensure a thriving future.
Bristol Resilience Strategy-2n5wmn3
Living on the Sharp Edge of Environmental Uncertainty
Newsletter from the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council with a focus on The Cabot Institute’s Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Conference. The Conference, in 2014 in Bristol, explored Living at the Sharp End of Environmental Uncertainty. Resilience is a contested term in these contexts, but at this conference SIDS drove the conversation, demanding action from the Global North and demanding the power to define resilience on their terms. An inspiring exploration of resilience from the perspective of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. And a likely prelude to the leadership of such states in procuring a 1.5C aspiration at COP21 in Paris 18 months later.