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CALENDARS Project
Progress report #1

A fast-filling Calendar

The CALENDARS project started on New Years day 2019, and it is off to an energetic start!

Landscape
Photo:
Anne Bremer, UiB

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We’re assembling a well-qualified, experienced and creative team of researchers, and setting up project infrastructure.In Bergen we’ve hired PhD candidate Elisabeth Schøyen Jensen and Project Support Sissel Småland Aasheim, with Ms. Mari Knudsen taking care of the accounts. And on the Coromandel Peninsula we’ve just engaged Dr.Paul Schneider as a post-doctoral fellow, to lead the work there. Paul’s first job will be to help us find a PhD candidate in New Zealand to complete the team. One of the team’s strengths is its interdisiplinarity and diversity of backgrounds, which you can read about on the website under the person heading. 

We’ve started exciting work on how climate change is influencing institutional cultures. In February we were invited to submit a chapter to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard risk titled “How climate change disrupts nations of natural hazard risk in institutional cultures”, co-authored by Dr.Scott Bremer, Dr.Paul Schneider and Prof.Bruce Glavovic. This manuscript uses examples from Bangladesh, New Zealand and Norway to show how ideas of climate change are reframing institutions’ understanding of natural hazards like floods, and how they manage these risks; through drastically over-engineered solutions for example.
In parallel, Dr. Bremer is writing with others about how climate change is emerging as a ‘matter of concern’ that pervades Bergen’s public spheres, giving it an identity as a ‘climate city’. This manuscript will be presented by Dr.Bremer at the European Climate Change Adaptation (ECCA) conference in Lisbon on the 30th of May. It will also be one of nine papers comprising a special issue of open access journal Climate Risk Management on ‘Narratives of Change’, which Dr. Bremer is guest editing. The special issue looks at how a focus on place-based stories of change can make climate research more meaningful for people living in these places. 

Meanwhile, CALENDARS is impacting on how people think about climate in Bergen. We’re building on an ongoing ‘citizen science’ initiative of the CoCliServ project – where people in Bergen build and set up their own weather stations – to help people reflect on changes in seasons. On the 12th of June we will give a presentation at a public event at Bergen’s Media City on the future of meteorology, followed by a workshop where 40 citizens will build their own sensor. Looking further ahead, on the 20-21 September, CALENDARS will have a stand at the University of Bergen’s ‘Forskningstorget’ (Public Research Marketplace), attended by several thousand school children each year. Visitors to the stand will be confronted with a traditional ‘primstav’ - a plank carved with the agricultural seasons – and a futuristic primstav showing projected changes in Bergen’s seasons. Visitors will also be able to voice what the seasons mean for them.

Finally, from 20-25 October, the CALENDARS project is co-organizing an intensive Autumn school for PhD and masters students on ‘Co-producing climate adaptation research’. The school is based on CALENDARS research, and other inputs from invited instructors. The 31st July is the deadline for applying to participate in the Autumn school.