Who’s responsible for resilience? And how do we share the load?

On this episode of The Climate Resilience Podcast, host Phil Emonson asks a critical question: Who is responsible for resilience—and how can we better share the load?

Phil is joined by two dynamic guests for this discussion: Steve Scott-Bottoms, a Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, who has three decades of experience in using the arts to foster community dialogue on climate issues; and Jonathan Moxon, the Executive Manager for Flood and Climate Resilience at Leeds City Council, who shares insights from his two decades of experience in resilience planning.

Together, they explore innovative ways to fund resilience, the role of local government, and how the arts can bridge the gap between policy and people.

Thank you for listening to this episode. 

For any comments, questions or insights please contact phil.emonson@jbaconsulting.com.

Visit our website jbaconsulting.com
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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting. I'm Phil Emundsen and in this podcast series we unpick some of the complexities, the challenges, and the and the opportunities on the topic of climate resilience with some inspirational thought leaders. Now the title of this episode is Who's Responsible for Resilience and How Do We Share the Load? And within that, we'll also be looking at the role that creativity and arts can play as an effective engagement tool. Joining me are Steve Scott Bottoms and Jonathan Mox and welcome chaps, welcome to the podcast. And maybe we would like to start with some introductions. Steve, how about you?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Hello, yeah, I'm uh Steve Scott Bottoms. I'm uh professor of um contemporary theatre and performance at the University of Manchester. I also run a small social enterprise called Vesper Hill, about which we will no doubt say more.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Super welcome. And Jonathan.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Yeah, hi there, Phil. I'm uh Jonathan Mopson. I work for Leeds City Council. I'm the flood and climate resilience manager there, and um, I'm also a director for a new company called the Air Resilience Company.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Lovely, which again we will find out more about as we go on. So, some context then for this episode. The government has recently launched a consultation about how we can best uh distribute government funds for flood resilience and how we can embrace alternative and complementary funding sources. Now, this consultation is getting people all across the sector not just thinking about how we can fund all of this, but also the wider context of building whole society resilience to climate change. I suppose it's about how we fund the right things at the right time and in the right places. Now, as we've discussed on many previous episodes, what's worked in the past won't necessarily be the solution for the future. We need novel solutions. And talking of novel solutions, Jonathan, let's go back to the air resilience company that you've just mentioned. Maybe you could give us a bit more detail.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so the air resilience company is has been a project for the last two, three years um as a as a side project to the Leeds flood alleviation scheme. Um, so that's a 200 million pound, fairly traditional flood scheme in Leeds that has been done in phases, lots of engineering, lots of innovative moving parts that protect the city and and provide a one in 200 year standard of protection um with some allowance for climate change, which is pretty typical. But what we needed to do as well was to work with nature-based solutions and and work across the whole catchment. And so to do that, we've needed a different model. And so the extra climate adaptation we need for the Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme needs to come through land management changes and NFM, natural flood management. Um, money for that is difficult to find, and actually, revenue money to pay for the upkeep and the repeat activities and the maintenance and the hosting of those measures on private farmland or private land is difficult to find. And so, what we've been working on is to create a community interest company that is completely not for profit and puts whatever funding it has into the catchment to work with farmers and land managers to manage the land in a way that does have a tangible reduction in flood risk in Leeds. It has lots of other benefits. The work has lots of benefits around the catchment in different places, but its primary sort of outcome is that we can hydrologically model the impact of those interventions and the impact that it has on leads, and it and we aim to reduce peak flood flows in a very large flood to Leeds by 5%. And to do that, we've created a company so that private businesses that benefit from that flood risk reduction and the climate adaptation that comes with that, um, they pay into the company so that we've then got the revenue money to pay the farmers and to pay um the delivery contractors to do the interventions.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Yeah, good, good stuff. Thanks, thanks for that uh that background. And it is it is novel, and I think there are a lot of people in the sector watching with eager interest to see how it um how it performs and and how successful you are. Steve, I'll bring you in at this point then. So you have uh um an involvement and a role with um the Air Resilience Company as well through Vespa Hill, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yes, or or technically through through um some funding that I got through my university. Um I'll come to Vespa Hill in a second. Um so yeah, um we've got some impact acceleration money for anybody who cares what that means. Um, to work alongside my when I say we, I mean myself from a postdoctoral um research associate, uh Milo Harry's. Um we're working alongside Jonathan and his team and the ARC uh project team. Um and really we've been thinking about um engagement because a crucial aspect of the ARC uh project really is to is to is to say, well, we need to generate this revenue and we want to generate it through kind of um uh contributions from businesses in lead. So there's a kind of public-private uh collaboration going on, which goes to this wider question, uh, as you're saying, Phil, of like who's responsible. Um and the big question is, well, why would businesses pay into this? Um, and there are kind of good flood modelling reasons for it, and there's maybe good citizenship reasons for it and so on, but there's also a free rider problem because if you pay in and the person next door doesn't and they get the same benefit, then et cetera, et cetera. So there are all kinds of interesting questions around this. So what uh Milo and I have been trying to do is kind of engage um businesses in a kind of uh a dialogue that's somewhat on the side of the sort of uh, if you like, the sales pitch work that some of Jonathan's uh colleagues have been doing, just to really understand how people in in uh businesses and leads to think about um climate and flood and their responsibilities for those things. And we've had quite a diversity of responses that have come through the research interviews that that Milo's been doing. And then what we've done, because we're also theatre makers, is developed that into a performance piece, uh, which is then designed to further engage audiences and it's sort of set up uh the piece inundated is is stated as a kind of uh mock uh business network meeting. So it enables the audience to discuss the issues further as they're kind of put in a slightly playful, uh almost say slightly silly way in the performance itself. Um so yeah, and the performance is is kind of presented by Vespa Hill, uh, which is um the name of uh this social enterprise that I established with my partner, which is really uh a kind of front-end public entity that can do um performances, workshops, discussions around uh resilience issues, future uncertainty, um, you know, really kind of trying to do some of that social value work, if you like, in terms of getting people to engage with these with these questions.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah, fantastic. And I will say at this point, I had the luxury of um of watching uh uh Inundated. We we we put it on um as a fringe event um at Flood and Coast recently. Um so we we we hired the back room with a pub, we put some food on, and we we had a um uh a group of people from across the sector coming and uh we you you put you put it on and it was fantastic. It was really warm, witty, engaging, and we'll come on to I think the role that creativity and storytelling play as an engagement tool. But um just my feedback, uh Steve, was it's absolutely fantastic and and really does the job of um I think articulating what is quite a quite a complicated model for funding in a really accessible way. So um congratulations on the work that you and you and Milo have done on that. Um Jonathan then. So obviously, you and your team have been having these conversations with businesses in and around Leeds. Um how receptive are you finding they are to the proposals, the proposition, the context, and the the ask, really?

SPEAKER_02 8:28

I think the honest answer would be it's really mixed, and I think that's because um all businesses are really different, and so even though we've c we've tried to keep the offer of what we're proposing and what the business model is for ARC fairly simple and straightforward, what we've then got to do a lot of the time, this is where, in fairness, as Steve's described, the sort of work that Steve and Milo in particular has done, is they've helped us to sort of reflect on how important it is to listen to businesses really, rather than go in and just pitch the idea. And and I think that's really helped. So, so where we probably got groups of businesses together in the beginning and talked about the principle and the theory of what we were doing, and everybody was sort of supportive of the idea, but then when we started to talk about a contract or a relationship, maybe they became a little bit less um positive because they weren't sure how to proceed. And I think that's one of the major learnings is that actually this is new and it's an innovative way to engage with businesses, and therefore, you're not necessarily plugging into an existing mechanism or you're not selling to a business that's got ARC or something like ARC in its existing business plan. And so we we probably needed to then have that time to do that learning and and to then to listen, listen back a little bit about what they thought of it. And then we went again and we've talked again, and and I think actually there's there's a real growing level of support for ARC and more, and I think is as well, it helps when certain businesses have provided some leadership in that space and and they are talking to other businesses on our behalf and talking their language. Um, but I think understanding each of those businesses first has helped us to get a better, more positive response. Um, and and yeah, the the response overall has been brilliant. I think we've gone from this being a concept and an innovation project to actually, you know, this is a bona fide community interest company, and we're gonna do this for real, and that feels that feels really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Well, you're launching next week, Jonathan. Officially.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

We are launching officially on Tuesday um next week. Um, I'm not sure when this goes out, but that's in the middle of June. Um so I think yeah, we're launching in June, and that is the culmination of a lot of work to get to a point where we've got enough confidence that enough businesses are ready to sign a contract and enter into an agreement. Um, with there's some complications there in that um they're not a hurdle we can't overcome, but what we've had to do is make sure that it's transactional between the people who manage the land and the businesses. So all the businesses are signing up to contracts that commit us to doing work on the land, so therefore, we also need to make sure that we've got all those contracts lined up with the landowners so we can we've got enough supply for the demand. Um, but yeah, we we launched uh in June, which is which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Oh all all the very best and good luck, good luck with that. I hope it goes well. And yes, by the time this this podcast is um is is available, um, I think you will have had that launch. So, yeah, wishing you all the very very best success with that. Um let's dive in then to the slightly broader topic of the role of creativity and the arts and storytelling and what they can do as an engagement tool. Now, now, Steve, we've worked together over the last three or four years. You were the um architect, designer, creator of the uh pioneering theatrical performance for JBA called The Boxer's Guide to Climate Resilience, which again is a fantastic piece. If you've not seen it, get in touch. We'll uh you know, we'll be able to um to arrange something. But why, Steve, do you think the arts and storytelling are so powerful in the context of flooding and climate resilience? What is it?

SPEAKER_01 12:29

I mean, uh that's an excellent, a very, very broad question. Um, I suppose for me, the thing about um the thing about storytelling of any sort, really, and and so I'm primarily a uh theatre maker, a storyteller in that sense, um, but uh, you know, this is true of film and of of fiction and and and so on. But you know, a a good story well told uh is accessible to anybody, right? And so um one of the problems I think that we deal with in Flood World, if you will, um, insofar that I even belong in Flood World, thank you guys for letting me in, um, is you know, that a lot of it is quite technical and a lot of it's quite complicated, and then there may be difficulties in communicating with the public around that, and often there are public consultation exercises, but they can be quite dry and you know, not necessarily very appealing to people. Um, and so, you know, and in fact, in the past, uh, and Jonathan will remember some of this, we've done, you know, theatricalized public engagement exercises to try to kind of make them a bit more fun for people, which which have which work really interestingly, actually, when we particularly when we launched the first, the first stage of the Leeds Floodly Aviation Scheme. Um and uh yeah, I just think it kind of changes the dynamic. And I think um it means that uh, yeah, so if you're an ordinary member of the public, if you're a uh, you know, we've had children engage with this stuff um even, you know, and it's not particularly aimed at children, but you know, a an intelligent kid can follow a story, you know, and so um people are coming at things from their own place, but also if you've built the piece right, um, it's it may also be that professionals in the sector are kind of learning something new, are kind of seeing things from a different angle because of the way that the story's been told. And one of the things that's that's often come through from feedback for these performances that we've been making is that it's helped people to kind of connect their kind of personal lives and personal values, if you like, with their professional roles, which is, you know, for me like the the real the best kind of uh endorsement you could have, you know, that um, because in the end, storytelling is about who we are as human beings, right? Um, and and what we feel and what we think. Um, and so trying to kind of use that to talk about maybe sometimes quite technical issues like you know, nature-based um flood solutions and so on is a challenge. But also, I mean, anybody who works in the sector knows how exciting that stuff is, so it should be possible to communicate it right um in an engaging way.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

And uh what what what you were uh describing there, Steve, really resonating with me because we've done quite a bit actually in JBA over the last few years where we've engaged with um different artists in different contexts, and it's always been about um uh taking the the rational, um, the empirical, the data that we use, which as you as you rightly refer to is very complex, and you know, we're dealing with with climate science, climatic data, but also using then the arts and creativity to enable a conversation that uses emotion and sentiment, um, as well as um the the the power of data. Um so I I think it's it's really powerful to to combine the two. Jonathan, bring you in here. You've obviously worked with Steve in the past and you saw the potential for the the the inundated piece um as a means of communicating um uh uh around the arc. Um how beneficial have you found it? Any feedback um so far? What are the what are the benefits to you and the project?

SPEAKER_02 16:11

I think um there's a few things come out of this, and like Steve said, we we've worked in a few um on a few projects or in a few um different ways over the last few years, and I I always find that it's it's a really useful way to hold a bit of a mirror up to yourself as a sort of industry professional where you Steve's very good and and Milo's got the same skills, they're really good at properly listening, and they and they play it back to you really well, so that it it allows you to sort of do that reflection piece around actually what I think I'm saying to people, they're not necessarily hearing it in the same way I intended it or wanted them to hear it, and and therefore it helps you to sort of reflect on what that it's about how you say things and it's about how it's presented rather than just the content, you know, just picking up on what you've just said, and and that's been really true for ARC. I think we've had some really tangible impacts on the project where we've literally changed the phrasing, the timing, the focus of what we've done to create the company has changed directly as a result of the feedback and the sort of links that Steve and Milo have made because they've gone and spoken to people properly and listened and fed that back, and they've got this really good sort of feedback loop around listening and seeing what emerges from that, and then and then sort of taking that action and putting that back into the mix and starting again. And I think that that's been really good for the project because we could have gone down a really technical route, or we could have gone down quite a hard-nosed business negotiation route, and we haven't. We've we've softened our approach in terms of being much more about listening and engagement. And I think I think the inundated piece in particular is brilliant because it it plays back actual interviews, it's real people's interpretations and stories and experiences, and it puts it in the context of ARC, and it isn't it's not selling ARC. What it's just doing is explaining a situation from real-life experiences and giving people an opportunity to think about that for themselves and put themselves in that story and and so that they can relate to it, which is loads better. I I feel we've had a better result when people have engaged with it like that than when we just give them facts and figures, uh that they sort of become more involved in the vision and the story and the purpose of it, and I think maybe the climate resilience agenda needs that because we need to get people to feel passionately about it and want to do something about it, even if it's only small. And and I think taking climate resilience actions and adaptation is challenging for lots of people because they don't know what what to do and where to do it. But if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take take a step into it. So, yeah, I think we've had some really specific and tangible um outcomes from Steve's work.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

If if I can come in there, I think it's quite, I mean, it's very, very kind of you to say all that, Jonathan. I think what I would point out based on that is that the this kind of work, this arts-based uh engagement work is not just about making the play or making the the kind of artistic outcome, if you like, because um that is a that that kind of gives us a nice thing to work towards. Um, but even then when you've made it, you're playing it back and you're using it again to kind of get further conversations going. Um that so inundated is is shaped in the in the framework of a kind of business network meeting, as I said, and and it's in three parts. And part three is where the audience pretend to be members of this network and have a debate about what we've been talking about in part two and so on. So um, and and that kind of mimics really the framework that Jonathan was just describing of listening, seeing what's emerging from those conversations, taking action, uh, and then feedback. Uh, Milo calls this leaf, a listening emergence action feedback, which is a really useful way of articulating the model, I think. Um, and we're doing that through the whole process of interviewing, talking to people, sitting in conversations and so on and so forth. And and again, yeah, that so almost regardless of making the play, those kinds of improvisatory skills um that go into that process are making a difference, we hope. And as Jonathan has just said, they and I know that when we made um the Boxer's Guide for JBA, um the kind of objective there initially was to interview a kind of cross-section of JBA staff confidentially, um, understand the extent to which they understood the JBA climate resilience model, aware, adapt, respond, recover, and then feedback our kind of key findings from that to the the um the director, directors team. Uh, and that again apparently had some uh really kind of valuable uh outcomes in terms of you know the the sort of senior leadership, if you like, understanding you know how the staff understood the model, you know. So um, yeah, so it's a it's a real kind of it's a it's a whole process, not just uh a kind of a nice shiny thing, if you like. And that's you know, in in the arts in in universities in particular, we sometimes get people in other fields, you know, like social sciences or whatever, and they'll they'll come and go, look, we've done this great research. Will you now dress it up for us so we can show it to the public? And my response is always, well, that's not really what we do, because actually arts research is an entire thing from start to finish. You know, we don't just like we're not just an an add-on, if you like, you know.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, really interesting to hear about, as you say, the process, the end product, and and also Jonathan, your experiences of of of just Seeing this first hand and seeing how you know receptive businesses and and and people have been. Um Jonathan, in uh The Inundated Peace, Steve talks about distributed or collective responsibility. And we've had conversations about this on previous episodes of the podcast. I know episode nine, we had Carl Asprian and Toby Jones from JBM. We spoke at length about the whole society. Now, this this episode is as I say entitled Who's Responsible for Resilience and How Do We Share the Load? So, Jonathan, uh final sort of uh 10 minutes or so of of of question, really. So, why is distributed involvement and shared responsibility important then in building a whole society um resilience to climate change?

SPEAKER_02 22:52

That's a good question, Phil. That's a big one, really. And I suppose I think the short answer that I'll I'll build on is it has to be, and I think that's because the either the sort of the model for sort of almost like single issue funding or single issue solutions and projects isn't really going to crack the nut. And therefore, we do have to reach past the point where everybody can stand back and think, well, that's technically not my job. And I think climate resilience sits outside of that for me, in that it affects so many different things in different ways that it isn't a sole organization, certainly not an individual's job in a place to make a place more climate resilient. And that's partly because sometimes the answer is about action and intervention and infrastructure or whatever it might be. But a lot of the time it's about behaviours as well, and it's about a collective responsibility for you know the things that are contributing to a changing climate, but then also the things that mean that we recognise that a change has to happen. And and so, you know, that therefore most of those things that we would need to do are either actions we have to think about as individuals, or lots of different organisations also have a role to play in that. And I think uh part of the work that I've done with Steve previously was around it came out of or who do we need to speak to at Leeds City Council about climate change? And there were there was probably like two names that came up, and I was one of them. And and the reality is that's a really bad answer because actually every function across a local authority will be affected or could affect how climate resilient leads is, and and therefore that but that's not sort of where we start from normally, but it's absolutely true. You know, the activities that you do, the services that you provide, the decisions that you make, the funding that you put into things, all of those have a bearing on this, and therefore we do need to sort of have that sort of cross cross-service approach or cross-organization approach, and and be that, you know, whether that's us as an employee or us as a citizen. And I think when we've been doing a resilience company, one of the initial questions would be, well, why is the public purse just not paying for this? Or why do I pay for it and my neighbour doesn't? And it it's a really they're really good questions, and but I think what's come out of it is that, well, actually, if we all think like that, we're all going to be in quite a bad situation, really, because there isn't there isn't a policy waiting in the wings to come and solve this, and there's not a pot of funding that works in a way that we need it to to solve all these issues, so therefore, there are a range of things we all need to be able to do, and obviously, there'll be different things for different people, and and us taking an opportunity to reflect on what that should be for us is really important. Um, so yeah, I think I think what's coming out of it is that the single issue approach and siloed thinking isn't going to work because it isn't any one person or one organization's responsibility. This it's it's a broader thing, and we need to think of ways of getting people to engage with that.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

I was waiting for the silo word to crop up there. It happened, it occurs uh probably on every podcast that we've recorded. So, yeah, um, I think it's uh I think you're absolutely right, Jonathan. It it is we we do need to break down those silos, and climate resilience by its very nature is, as you say, cross and multi-sector. Um, Steve, I'd really be interested in your views on that same question, really, in terms of why collective involvement and shared responsibility is important. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on it from the work that you've done.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Um I I mean I have all sorts of thoughts. I think as Jonathan is speaking, um, the thing I'm thinking of is the prisoner's dilemma, um, which uh your listeners may be familiar with from game theory and uh and so on, which is that that um model where which is a non-zero sum game, right? So traditionally games are played zero sum games, there's a winner, there's a loser. A non-zero sum game is where you both act independently, and depending on what the other person does, uh whatever you do might or might not turn out well, right? And so, uh, and there's a psychologist whose work is really interesting to me, Morton Deutsch, who did a lot of work with this kind of game theory model, uh and basically pointed out that there is actually a rational way to play a non-zero-sum game if you have a basis for trusting the other player, right? And so it basically what it all comes down to is how do you build trust with people in the sector, across the sector, um, with businesses, with with uh local communities and so on and so forth. And that that takes time and it's not easy. Uh, and I think the arts can be a tool in that. Um, but it's really important, you know, if we talk about distributed responsibility, for example, one of the immediate kind of red flags that that throws up is is that just government trying to like make homeowners responsible for their own flood risk rather than doing whatever needs to be done? But of course, we also know that homeowners do need to take some responsibility because the government can't just flood defend every home in the country, right? So there is a kind of a sense that we're all in this together and we all have our own roles to play. And it's about people understanding that and doing what they can in their own context, around communities, uh, and so on. And and resilience at community level is really about people knowing their neighbors and and looking out for each other, you know, fundamentally. So, and that also is something that we've kind of played with um in previous projects. Super, super.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Um, guys, that's been a really uh fascinating conversation. Genuinely, thank you so much for taking some time out and and joining the podcast um this afternoon. It's been um it's been really fantastic. Um and so we've reached the end of our time today. As always, if you have enjoyed listening, then please hit the subscribe button so you're ready for our next episode in a month's time. Till then, thanks for joining us. I'm Phil Emonson, and you've been listening to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting.