Theme 3: Bridging the Climate Gap
Models help understand climate change’s physical processes but often fail to explain vulnerability across social differences. This theme strengthens vulnerability modeling by incorporating grounded research. Direct community engagement focuses on local knowledge, climate risks, and mitigation strategies, considering structural and institutional influences. Findings refine model development, interpretation, and communication for a comprehensive approach.
The community-based engagement model integrates diverse perspectives through the spiral learning model and networked chain approach, emphasizing local knowledge and shared experiences. These methods counter colorblind adaptation planning and the racialized climate gap. Focusing on agriculture and infrastructure, the study examines large-scale landscape dynamics alongside individual and community impacts, particularly affecting African American farmers in the Delta. It also explores how infrastructure shapes climate change experiences.
Using qualitative and quantitative methods - interviews, surveys, archival research, focus groups, and participant observation - the research team refines spatial and statistical models. This data-driven approach clarifies systemic patterns of vulnerability, aiding sustainable community adaptation. The team’s expertise ensures a thorough examination of justice-based economic development, ethnographic engagement, and climate change impacts on agriculture and food security.
Objectives
Three key questions animate this research:
- How do Delta residents and farmers narrate and understand personal and community climate impacts?
- How do structural and institutional factors shape climate impacts and lived experiences for Delta
residents across social differences? - What opportunities and challenges arise when spatial and statistical climate and climate vulnerability models are put into conversation with people's personal experiences and everyday knowledge of climate change?
These questions guide the work toward achieving the central objectives of this theme:
- Examine experiential knowledge and place-based understandings of climate change and climate impacts.
- Investigate the structural and institutional factors that shape climate impacts and experiences for Delta residents and communities.
- Compare spatial indicators of vulnerability against lived experiences of climate risk.
Methodology
Conducting this research involves utilizing a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach to enhance understanding of the experiences and place-based dynamics of climate change and climate risk, within the context of structural and institutional drivers of unequal vulnerability. The research includes focus groups and interviews with farmers, residents, and institutional actors; participant-observation with our organizational partners; archival research into historical climate events and climate-related infrastructure; and institutional and policy analysis. These multiple methods are intended to provide insight into the multi-scalar dimensions and determinants of regional vulnerabilities, in service of our primary goal of understanding and contextualizing the experiences and knowledge of residents and communities and connecting and comparing these experiences with spatial indicators and models of climate risk and vulnerability generated by the team in themes 1, 2, and 4 (e.g. Activity 1.2.2, Activity 2.3.1, Activity 4.3.2).
Evaluation
Early success will be measured by progress towards answering the key questions accompanying each objective, and successful progress in each area and method of research. Success will also be measured in the team's ability to relate various forms of data (focus groups, archives, interviews) with each other through iterative coding, and in service of addressing the guiding questions. The research team has a goal of at least two peer-reviewed publications focused on each objective, with the intention that all personnel in this goal, including graduate students, serve as lead on one or more authors. Research will regularly be discussed with community partners, and effective performance will also be measured by the ability to produce and communicate research that is clear and relevant for partners and communities. For graduate students, success will be measured in terms of progress towards degree, active involvement in research and dissemination, and success in pre- and post-graduation outcomes.