PhD Project: Understanding adaptation to climate in the UK: 1800-2000

The prospect of substantial and sustained changes to our climate has altered perceptions of the sensitivity and vulnerability of society to climate (weather extremes, variability, incremental change, abrupt change), and also drawn attention to the processes of adaptation. Adaptation to climate change is now a major area of research and also of significant policy development. Yet the dominant perspective on adaptation is futuristic and predictive, as opposed to historic and interpretative. Concession and reference is made only reluctantly to the dynamic and socially contingent nature of adaptation to climate as it has occurred in the past. In particular, there are few well-documented historical and longitudinal accounts of the changing adaptive relationship between climate and society (see Coeur and Lang, 2008, for a rare example). This project will investigate the ways in which British society has adapted to climate over the past two centuries, 1800 to 2000. The project adopts a deeply contingent view of human adaptation to climate and seeks to reveal the changing contexts, social drivers and processes of adaptation at work: institutional, scientific, perceptual (Hulme et al., under review), regulatory. Particular attention will be paid to the role played by weather extreme