The UK is already experiencing the impacts of climate change and these are expected to increase in scale and severity in the coming decades. Preparing for impacts by undertaking adaptive actions can potentially reduce the level of harm. In the UK, the government’s adaptation program aims to develop a “climate-ready society.” However, achieving broad public engagement in adaptation presents a significant communications challenge. Here, we aimed to understand how UK residents use and interpret the terms “climate change impacts” and “climate change adaptation.” We conducted a secondary analysis of 22 interviews with UK residents, who were recruited for their diverse climate change views. The interviewees expressed a lack of clarity around expected climate change impacts, which did not prevent them from saying that they were already experiencing the effects of a changing climate. Further, threats to cultural norms and values were perceived as serious and emotionally charged. Adaptation was often conflated with mitigation, and responsibility for adaptation was contested. We discuss the implications of our findings for developing more useful public communication about climate change adaptation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10584-019-02455-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Media coverage of climate change impacts and adaptation will likely influence how citizens think society can and should adapt. Here, we undertook the first analysis of UK newspaper adaptation coverage. We identified five prominent adaptation narratives: (1) the government should build more flood defences, (2) home owners should buy flood insurance, (3) individuals should become more informed, (4) the farming industry should innovate, (5) and the natural environment should fight for its survival. We find that only some of the more immediate climate change impacts likely to affect the UK are presented as necessitating a response. The government is considered primarily responsible while UK citizens are given few and narrow responsibilities. The range of adaptive actions under consideration is limited and unchallenging to the status quo. In summary, newspaper coverage presents a restricted view as to when the UK should adapt and how it could adapt.

Engaging people in preparing for inevitable climate change may help them to improve their own safety and contribute to local and national adaptation objectives. However, existing research shows that individual engagement with adaptation is low. One contributing factor to this might be that public discourses on climate change often seems dominated by overly negative and seemingly pre-determined visions of the future. Futures thinking intends to counter this by re-presenting the future as choice contingent and inclusive of other possible and preferable outcomes. Here, we undertook storytelling workshops with participants from the West Yorkshire region of the U.K. They were asked to write fictional adaptation futures stories which: opened by detailing their imagined story world, moved to events that disrupted those worlds, provided a description of who responded and how and closed with outcomes and learnings from the experience. We found that many of the stories envisioned adaptation as a here-and-now phenomenon, and that good adaptation meant identifying and safeguarding things of most value. However, we also found notable differences as to whether the government, local community or rebel groups were imagined as leaders of the responsive actions, and as to whether good adaptation meant maintaining life as it had been before the disruptive events occurred or using the disruptive events as a catalyst for social change. We suggest that the creative futures storytelling method tested here could be gainfully applied to support adaptation planning across local, regional and national scales.

<p>Even with the successful implementation of the Paris agreement, a certain amount of climate change is now unavoidable over the next few decades and high warming levels by the end of the century cannot be ruled out. Therefore, urgent action is needed to build resilience and accelerate adaptation to climate variability and change. Informing the extensive range of actions needed to manage climate risks, reduce damage without exacerbating existing inequalities, and realise emerging opportunities, is a critical scientific and societal challenge. The UK has been at the forefront of climate adaptation policy with the Climate Change Act 2008 requiring the UK Government to conduct a five-yearly Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) and National Adaptation Programme. Another important recent driver amongst UK organisations has been compliance with the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. The UK Climate Resilience (UKCR) Programme emerged as a response to these policy and societal needs. It aims to enhance the UK’s resilience to climate variability and change through frontier interdisciplinary research and innovation on climate risk, adaptation and services, working with stakeholders and end-users to ensure the research is useful and usable.</p><p>The UK Climate Resilience Programme, led by UK Research and Innovation and the UK Met Office and running from 2019 to 2023, has funded over 50 projects worth £19 million. It is part of the Strategic Priorities Fund initiative which provides research funding to develop strategically important research for the national government. Topics central to the programme’s research agenda have included improved characterisation and quantification of climate risks, enhanced understanding of the management of climate risks, and the development and delivery of climate services. Amongst its achievements, the programme has: developed a set of future UK socio-economic scenarios to be used alongside climate scenarios, delivered a step change in climate change risk assessment capability, and produced a roadmap for the development and implementation of UK climate services. It has funded arts and community based projects and pioneered an embedded researchers scheme in which the researcher collaborates with a host organisation to address their real world needs. The programme has also developed a more coherent community of climate resilience researchers and practitioners in the UK.</p><p>In this talk we will provide an overview of the programme, focusing on the nexus between UKCR–funded research, and UK policy and practice. For example, we will consider how the national CCRA process shaped the programme’s research agenda while at the same time the availability of research sets the parameters of risk assessments. We will also provide examples of co-production undertaken by researchers and practitioners and comment on what can be achieved in terms of societal resilience when there is collaboration on shared objectives. This programme is unique in dedicating significant time, funding and other resources to researching national resilience while working in close partnership with the national government. We anticipate that our learnings from this process will be of interest to other researchers, as well as policy makers and practitioners who work with researchers on climate resilience issues.</p>