A visit to Dawlish

The recent storm impacts in Dawlish have received a lot of media attention. Various news items have been published by newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times and The Independent, mentioning the expected 6-week closure of the railway line for repairs, the evacuations of the houses behind the sea wall, the impact on the economy of the train disconnection between Cornwall and South West Devon to the rest of England. The BBC has also published various news items on the recent events at the Dawlish coast, including an interesting item on 'How to fix the Dawlish problem?' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26068375).

Last Sunday (the 16th), I went out to visit Dawlish and see some of the impacts of the recent storms for myself. The site where the major damages have happened to the sea wall and the railway, and where the houses are evacuated due to flood and landslide risks, has been closed off to the public. What it looks like to a visitor is like a big construction site, closed off by fences, with a lot of construction trucks and concrete grinders, and many construction workers in orange suits and helmets walking around. While being there, I realised how invasive it must probably feel for the inhabitants of Dawlish to have such a large part of their village turned into a construction site. I took some pictures that maybe give an impression on the situation: 

 

 

& The sea wall broke...

As an update to yesterday's post: the sea wall at Dawlish has collapsed overnight; leaving the houses behind it very vulnerable to flooding, and the railway damaged and even inaccessible to start repairs. See this news item at the BBC website, which includes a short video and several pictures illustrating what's happened (pictures below come from this BBC site): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26042990












And here another short you tube movie from today (Feb 5th) of the waves coming over the sea wall at Dawlish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSfr6U4chfI

First Great Western, the railway company, has even increased their warning notice about the train service west of Exeter (http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/): 
Wednesday 05 February 2014.

Disruption to First Great Western Services

Severe Weather Notice.

All lines between Exeter St Davids and Penzance are now closed - Update at 1200

We are unable to offer a  train service West of  Exeter St Davids towards Penzance due to further overnight severe weather conditions. We are working with Network Rail to evaluate the rail conditions in many areas. Some Branch Line services in Devon and Cornwall are now operating . We are unable to procure road transport as many of the roads have been affected by the weather conditions.

We would strongly advise customers not to attempt to travel for the rest of today.

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Please check  JourneyCheck website and Twitter feed @FGW for up to date information before attempting to travel.

High waves & no trains

Is climate change something that we should anticipate on because of future impacts? Sometimes impacts can be experienced in the very present. Whether attributable or not to human-induced climate change, or 'just an extreme weather event', the Southwest of England and the Midlands are currently experiencing the impacts of sea level rise and heavy precipitation for a relatively long period. Especially the county of Somerset has been severely hit by flooding last month. The Met Office (i.e. the weather forecast and climate research institute in the UK) has issued several weather warnings in the last month about flood risks in these areas, and expects the heavy weather to continue in the next week. 

The impacts of a high sea level can also be strikingly observed in one of our case studies, the South Devon Coast between Dawlish Warren and Teignmouth. The combination of a high tide and strong winds, pushed the waves so high that the railway tracks along the Dawlish sea wall were damaged. A news item from the BBC explains that the supporting ballast under the railway tracks has been washed away by the waves (photo below from the BBC site): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-26038912




Here a short movie on you tube from the waves at Dawlish on February 4th: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR0fWDSz5DM

The railway company First Great Western, which runs the main train services along this part of the coast, issued the following statement today:

http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/

Tuesday 04th February 2014.

All lines blocked between Exeter St Davids and Newton Abbot - Update at 1200

Train services between Exeter St Davids and Newton Abbot continue to be suspended due to yesterday's high seas and strong winds that caused significant damage to the track along the Dawlish sea wall.  Network Rail have already started to carry out repairs but we do not expect the affected lines to reopen until Friday 07th February at the earliest. Road transport is now operating between Exeter St Davids and Newton Abbot serving all stations on half hourly shuttle service.

To assist customers with journey's, all ticket restrictions have been lifted for all First Great Western services from, to and within Devon and Cornwall until further notice.

Before travelling, please check our JourneyCheck website and Twitter feed @FGW for up to date information.

This also shows how vital this part of the train line is for connecting Cornwall and the west of Devon to London and the rest of England. The map below shows the train lines in Cornwall and in the west of Devon in the lower left corner, marked in pink color (http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/Your-journey/Route-Updates/All-services-in-Devon-and-Cornwall). It shows how important the connection is between Newton Abbot and Exeter, which runs along the Dawlish sea wall.

Limits to adaptation, knowledge and power, institutional capacities, and working together

I had made some notes for a blog post just before the Christmas Holiday, but didn’t have the chance to post them then. So, here a few notes from December.

On Monday 16 December, I attended a lecture by Frans Berkhout, from King’s College in London, about limits to climate change adaptation. He explained that he and several co-authors studied limits to climate change adaptation as a concept, in a chapter for the Working Group 2 part of the coming IPPC report (scheduled to be released end of March 2014). They developed this concept of limits to adaption on the notion of discontinuity of current practices. That is, adaptation limits have been reached when adaption actions can no longer secure the practices and objectives strived for by an actor; and when losses due to climate change are considered intolerable. Afterwards, the discussion centred around the question: but who is to decide and identify what unacceptable damages are, and based on what? The announcement poster with an abstract of the presentation can be found here: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/includes/documents/events/2408/101-Limits_to_adaptation_to_climate_change.pdf

There were two papers that week, which had caught my attention. The first one I found on the blog from Art Dewulf (from Wageningen University in the Netherlands). This is the link to his blog: http://artdewulf.blogspot.co.uk/. He announced that an article on ‘The role of knowledge and power in climate change adaptation governance: a systematic review’ authored by Martijn Vink, himself and Catrien Termeer, has recently been published in the journal Ecology & Society (link to the article: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol18/iss4/art46/). In this article, they observe that knowledge and power are discussed in rather a static way in the far majority of the literature on governance for climate change adaption. They argue that a more dynamic understanding of knowledge and power would better reflect the complex and ambiguous context of climate change adaptation.

The second paper that got my attention was an article on ‘The adaptive capacity wheel: a method to assess the inherent characteristics of institutions to enable the adaptive capacity of society’, by Joyeeta Gupta, Catrien Termeer, Judith Klostermann and five other co-authors, published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy in 2010. In this paper, the authors propose an assessment framework assisting “academics and social actors to assess if institutions stimulate the adaptive capacity of society to respond to climate change” with six dimensions, being: variety, learning capacity, room for autonomous change, leadership, availability of resources and fair governance (Gupta et al., 2010, p. 459).

On Wednesday the 18^th, Duncan Russel and I had a skype meeting with our colleague Tim Taylor to discuss the approach to study the UK climate change adaptation cases, for the BASE project. Our colleague Tim Taylor also works for the University of Exeter, though not in Exeter. He is located at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, in Truro, in Cornwall; which is a 3-hour-journey from Exeter. Tim Taylor will study climate change adaptation in relation to human health, for the case of Cornwall, and for the case of the UK. We made a start in coordinating the research approach; we will work on further, and meet again early February. The meeting in February will be a live physical meeting, and Duncan Russel and I will go down to Cornwall. I haven’t been in Cornwall yet and I am very much looking forward to doing so!

Boomerang

Well, the boomerang of traveling the last couple of weeks, the airplanes, doing too many things in combination with not enough sleep hit me this week: I got sick. My throat got sore and swollen, my ears cloggy, my nose stuffy, my head aching, and my bronchi producing a painful cough. My energy levels dropped to basically zero and my appetite sort of stagnated. It was a clear sign saying: “Roos, you got to rest and recover”. So that’s what I did this week, I slept as much as I could, tried to do as least as possible, and drank plenty of tea and hot ginger lemon honey. And took as many painkillers as the prescription text on the package allowed :-)  Whilst being sick this week, I also noticed a certain impatience, a certain urge to get back to work and to start doing things again. But I also know it’s wiser to accept it and sit it through. I do hope to be able to do some things again after the weekend. 

Workshop in Berlin 5-6 Dec 2013

On 5 and 6 December, I attended a meeting in Berlin – hosted by the Ecologic Institute and prepared by Mikael Hilden from SYKE in Finland and (my own supervisor) Duncan Russel from University of Exeter – on policymaking for climate change adaptation. I met even more participants from the BASE project; all different people than from the meeting 27 and 28 November in Delft. And again, the participants included a nice mixture of backgrounds, nationalities, ages and gender. We discussed possible topics and outlines for papers with analyses of policymaking at national level for climate change adaption. And we exchanged ideas and experiences with policymaking for climate change adaptation from different countries, such as Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy. Here some pictures taken during the meeting:

Although it was a very brief visit to Berlin (only two nights), I did enjoy it very much. One of the things I love doing in Berlin is to wander around and just see what you'll encounter. But time was too short for that this visit. Yet every time I visit the city, I get a sense of feeling at-home. And the thought comes to mind ‘I could live here’. Hopefully, next time the visit will be longer (and Anna, if you happen to read this, the visit was unfortunately too short for a cup of coffee, next time I’ll fit in at least a cup of coffee).    

Adaptation Pathways and Economic Evaluation

On 27 and 28 November 2013, I attended two workshops organized by the BASE project, at Deltares in Delft, the Netherlands. The workshop 27/11 focused on adaptation pathways and was hosted by Marjolein Haasnoot (from Deltares), the workshop 28/11 focused on economic evaluation and was hosted by Volker Meyer and Oliver Gebhardt (both from UFZ, Leipzig). Both workshops included a morning session with introducing approaches, and an afternoon session with presenting and discussing case studies in relation to these approaches. It was very interesting to be introduced to the other case studies in the BASE project. Other cases include for example dealing with flood risk management in Copenhagen, Prague and Venice, and in an area Midwest in Finland. Here some pictures taken during the workshop on adaptation pathways; where we had been practising with applying the adaptation pathways approach (as developed by Marjolein Haasnoot) to our own case studies:

These workshops were my first encounter with other participants in the BASE project. And it was very interesting to see who some of the other colleagues are in the BASE project! To get some faces and voices behind the names which pass by on the emails. There was a nice mixture of nationalities, backgrounds, ages and gender, and a friendly atmosphere and interest in each others’ work. At the same time, I was also surprised by the high number of laptops that were opened and used during the various meetings – meaning most of them were not used for taking notes J Is multitasking with open laptops the new standard at professional meetings?