The climate adaptation community is at an impasse: despite consensus that social capital and social organization are essential for adaptation and resilience, there is little clarity on which specific types of social organization really matter. We suggest that ethnographic research on historically-resilient communities may provide useful detail about climatically-meaningful social organization, helping us prioritize which institutions to protect, strengthen, and build. In this paper, we describe a historically-resilient agropastoral community in the French Basque Country. Our data show that solidarity economy institutions and collective ecological management likely reduce exposure and sensitivity to climate change and increase adaptive capacity, including by fostering experimentation and knowledge sharing and providing psychological support for confronting a future marked by constant climate disruptions. We argue that these impacts are particularly strong because farmers participate in diverse, multi-faceted, and overlapping institutions of solidarity. This allows them to tap diverse networks for diverse needs, and it turns mutual awareness and solidarity into core ethics. Drawing on these findings, we suggest that the largest social gains in resilience may be achieved when communities create economic and ecological interdependencies that shape multiple facets of people’s everyday lives, bind them in shared experiences or identities, and give them tools for navigating unexpected challenges. On a policy level, achieving this may require significantly more political and financial investment in sustaining and strengthening a felt sense of community and the actual institutions and economies of communities.

Growing cultural and political polarization is a significant threat to farming today. As the urban-rural divide grows, increasing fractures within rural communities can frustrate efforts to recruit young farmers, maintain vibrant rural communities, establish robust markets, and secure supportive policies. In this paper, we examine how livestock farmers in Xiberoa (Soule, in French), a pastoral province of the French Basque Country, confront these stresses. In particular, we interrogate how the region's well-established system of mutual aid provides social cohesion that reduces the negative impacts of polarization even while allowing for difference. This article is the outcome of more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork, including regular participant observation in pastoral activities and nearly one hundred interviews, conducted with livestock keepers in Xiberoa. By analyzing mutual aid as an everyday practice, we identify a set of socio-political arenas that facilitate encounters among farmers and non-farmers. We argue that in Xiberoa mutual aid operates as a distinct regime, complementary with other forms of solidarity such as commons institutions and cooperatives. Our research reveals that encounters triggered by pragmatic agricultural needs create a space of dialogue between individuals with differing ideologies, contributing to a more participatory and meaningful local democratic life. As an ancestral practice in Xiberoa, mutual aid also reflects a deeply internalized ethic that generates both conscious and unconscious strategies enabling farmers to confront challenges collectively. We therefore propose that mutual aid should be more vigorously supported as a powerful response to multiple crises, a resource for maintaining rural social relations at a local scale, and offers a valuable lens through which to rethink rurality and adaptation in the face of global change.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the need for transdisciplinary training programs to equip engineers and scientists with the skills required for planning, designing, building and managing natural infrastructure (NI) systems for sustainable and resilient water resources.Design/methodology/approachThe study describes an experiential, field-oriented course in NI delivered over an intensive four-day period at the University of Georgia, USA. The course explored the development of natural and hybrid infrastructure solutions. Through an immersive format, students engaged with real-world examples, interacted with design and management professionals and participated in hands-on group activities. Pre- and post-course surveys evaluated the effectiveness of the intensive format and the field-oriented approach in achieving learning objectives.FindingsThe study revealed that the field-oriented course significantly enhanced students' understanding of NI concepts and practical skills. These findings underscore the value of experiential, field-oriented education in preparing the next generation of practitioners for the complexities of NI and nature-based solutions.Practical implicationsThe findings presented are beneficial for educators, institutions and policymakers seeking to develop the next generation of infrastructure professionals who can address the critical intersection between natural and human systems.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the field by showcasing a successful field-oriented course design for training future infrastructure professionals on NI solutions. In addition, it presents a practical approach to transdisciplinary training, emphasizing experiential learning and industry engagement, with implications for education and policymaking in infrastructure development.

There is great variety in how different teams approach collaborative work, and many projects fall short of authentic knowledge co-production, even when they hold that as a central goal. Drawing on a longstanding collaboration between researchers and pastoralists in the northern Basque Country (southwestern France), we detail our approach to knowledge co-production, which entails "layering" multiple forms of participation that vary in intensity and time commitment. This approach seeks to support authentic collaboration that is respectful of the time and obligations of our farming partners. Here, we describe the frequent and deeply-analytical engagement with our core collaborators, as well as more "shallow" forms of engagement with a broader group of interested persons through ongoing ethnographic work and participatory workshops. In this paper we strive for a level of detail, and candor, that will allow other teams to evaluate if and how our approaches might be useful for them.

Highly participatory research and the co-production of knowledge are widely recognized as key to advancing sustainability research that produces useful and usable results. There is great variety in how different teams approach collaborative work, but the initial problem-framing stage is a critical moment of engagement. In this article, we describe our efforts to create a collaborative research project on climate and pastoralism in the northern Basque Country (southwestern France), focusing on our process for determining the research focus. We use the various funding proposals submitted along the way to illustrate concretely the ways in which integrating our different ways of knowing and different approaches led to different research questions than would have been the case had the scientists developed the project alone. We also discuss the difficult choices that must sometimes be made. Researchers and pastoralists worked together to produce this analysis and to make recommendations to others interested in following a similar path.

Rapidly growing cities along the Interstate‐85 corridor from Atlanta, GA, to Raleigh, NC, rely on small rivers for water supply and waste assimilation. These rivers share commonalities including water supply stress during droughts, seasonally low flows for wastewater dilution, increasing drought and precipitation extremes, downstream eutrophication issues, and high regional aquatic diversity. Further challenges include rapid growth; sprawl that exacerbates water quality and infrastructure issues; water infrastructure that spans numerous counties and municipalities; and large numbers of septic systems. Holistic multi‐jurisdiction cooperative water resource planning along with policy and infrastructure modifications is necessary to adapt to population growth and climate. We propose six actions to improve water infrastructure resilience: increase water‐use efficiency by municipal, industrial, agricultural, and thermoelectric power sectors; adopt indirect potable reuse or closed loop systems; allow for water sharing during droughts but regulate inter‐basin transfers to protect aquatic ecosystems; increase nutrient recovery and reduce discharges of carbon and nutrients in effluents; employ green infrastructure and better stormwater management to reduce nonpoint pollutant loadings and mitigate urban heat island effects; and apply the CRIDA framework to incorporate climate and hydrologic uncertainty into water planning.

Natural disasters interact to affect the resilience and prosperity of communities and disproportionately affect low income families and communities of colour. However, due to lack of a common theoretical framework, these are rarely quantified. Observing severe weather events (e.g. hurricanes and tornadoes) and epidemics (e.g. COVID-19) unfolding in southeastern US communities led us to conjecture that interactions among catastrophic disturbances might be much more considerable than previously recognized. For instance, hurricane evacuations increase human aggregation, a factor that affects the transmission of acute infections like SARS-CoV-2. Similarly, weather damage to health infrastructure can reduce a community's ability to provide services to people who are ill. As globalization and human population and movement continue to increase and weather events are becoming more intense, such complex interactions are expected to magnify and significantly impact environmental and human health.

Despite long-standing knowledge of the benefits of riparian buffers for mitigating non point source pollution, many streams are unprotected by buffers. Even landowners who understand ecological values of buffers mow riparian vegetation to the streambank. Do trends in rural riparian conditions reflect the development of riparian forest science? What motivates residential riparian management actions? Using high-resolution orthoimagery, we quantified riparian conditions and trends between 1998 and 2015 in the rural upper Little Tennessee River basin in Macon County, North Carolina and explored how landowners view riparian zone management and riparian restoration programs. Buffer composition in 2015 was as follows: no buffer (32.5%), narrow (19.3%), forested (26.7%), shrub (7.2%), and intermediate (7.0%). Relative to 1998, the greatest decrease occurred in the no buffer class (-17.7%, 46 km) and the largest increases occurred in the shrub (+72.5%, 20 km) and narrow (12.6%, 14 km) classes. Forested buffer marginally increased. Semi-structured interview data suggest that landowners prioritize recreational and scenic aspects of riparian buffers over ecological functions such as filtration and bank stabilization. Riparian restoration programs might be made more enticing to non-adopters if outreach language appealed to landowner priorities, design elements demonstrated intentional management, and program managers highlighted areas where ecological goals and landowner values align.

While peer-to-peer accommodation research is increasingly cognizant of various stakeholders impacted by the rising popularity of this disruptive phenomenon, one stakeholder remains understudied – the host. This study uses a Deductive Qualitative Analysis to explore a tripartite of peer-to-peer accommodation host identities (entrepreneurial identity, residential identity, and sustainable entrepreneur identity) within the US City of Savannah, Georgia. Peer-to-peer accommodation hosts are agents of change in the communities in which they operate. This study posits that their impacts, whether positive or negative, on communities in which they operate depend on the existence of these identities. Potential opportunities for collaboration between hosts and local municipalities are discussed in light of the proposed identity framework.

The fast-paced advances in technology and scientific knowledge in the 21st century call for learners to possess professional skills that complement their technical skills to make meaningful contributions in communities. This article introduces a cross-disciplinary leadership training program, Graduate Scholars Leadership, Engagement, and Development (GS LEAD), that was designed and implemented to train students in professional skills including problem-solving, interdisciplinary teamwork, leadership, communication, and engagement. This training program provided learning opportunities for incoming graduate students to work beyond their laboratories, across disciplines, and into communities to identify real-world problems and design sustainable solutions. The design and implementation of the program, the findings of participating students’ development in Program Year 1, and suggestions for future program design are discussed.

This paper examines how residents of Southern Appalachia observe changes in their natural environment, the values that they assign to plants and animals in that environment, and their understandings and explanations of environmental change. We use semi-structured interviews and participant observation to determine that multigenerational residents and newcomers to the region are observing and noting change in different components of the environment and that they have different determinations of both the causes and likely consequences of that change. While multigenerational residents focus their observation and commentary on staple crops and culturally-important species, newcomers to the area concentrate on species related to recreational pursuits, giving each group insights into different aspects of environmental change. These findings are translated into recommendations for more inclusive and effective environmental and conservation planning.

Climate change and exurban development present significant social, economic, and environmental challenges in Southern Appalachia. Addressing those challenges—whether to prevent them, mitigate them, or prepare for them—will require individual action and collective action at community and regional scales. However, the coordination necessary for such action will be difficult to achieve in a region long opposed to regulation, suspicious of newcomers, and characterized by increasing social diversity. One particularly salient difference that is likely to shape collective responses to climate change is the distinction between “newcomers” and “multigenerationals,” descendants of people who have lived in the region for generations. In this chapter, we draw on nearly 80 interviews to address three questions: What indicators and consequences of climate change do people observe in their everyday lives and view as relevant? How does one’s connection to this landscape shape the indicators and consequences they observe and care about? And what differences exist in how people theorize the causes of climate change? By examining this diversity of climate knowledges and climate cultures in Southern Appalachia, we hope to identify complementarities, bridges, and provocations that might help natural resource managers and community members identify effective and inclusive responses to climate change.

Using surveys and interviews in the aftermath of Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, we investigated people's reasons for living on the coast of Georgia, their expectations for the future, and their intentions to stay in place or migrate away from the coast. We found that age, income, and ethnicity all play small but significant roles in determining intention to migrate, but that more intangible elements such as changes in quality of life or lifestyle may be more important. Many residents indicated a preference for remaining close if they were to permanently leave their homes, and residents were more likely to indicate a preference for staying in place after Irma than after Matthew. Residents may have many reasons for becoming more reluctant to move – complacency borne out of repeated “near misses”, increased awareness of the likely costs and inconvenience of re-location, or the realization that specific impacts are highly variable—making responses by coastal planners and managers more challenging.

Vulnerability and resilience of coastal communities is increasingly important in the face of sea level rise and severe storms. Situated at the nexus of geographic information systems (GIS) and natural hazard vulnerability, this study compares and integrates a GIS-based approach that produces social vulnerability indexes from census data and a human subject survey-based approach that learns local perceptions of coastal hazards in the aftermath of Hurricanes Matthew and Irma. It applies statistical and geovisual analyses of data from both approaches. We find significant variations in perceptions across the vulnerability spectrum and relate these differences to theories of expert and nonexpert knowledge. It is believed that both sets of results are useful and revealing from different perspectives, although each has its own weaknesses. Integration of both can provide a fuller picture of social vulnerability. To this end, the study demonstrates several geovisualization methods for integration. Key Words: coastal resilience, critical GIS, geovisualization, mixed methods, social vulnerability.

Projections of climate change, biodiversity loss, and associated socioeconomic impacts are increasingly dire. In this volume, we turn our attention from the spectacular scenes of climate disruption to the slow and subtle, the small but consequential shifts in the species and landscapes that we humans interact with on a constant basis. This introductory chapter offers an analytical framework for the chapters that follow. Synthesizing lessons from environmental anthropology, we argue that microexperiences of change offer a critical but neglected lens for understanding the Anthropocene as a new geological, cultural, and political era. Focusing on microexperiences allows us to examine how individuals and communities are experiencing climate change in intimately meaningful ways, how they are constructing knowledge based on these experiences, and how that knowledge shapes their responses. This in turn provides unique insights into the diverse ways that people are embedded in their environments; the dynamics of differentiation, inequality, and violence that result from that; and how these affect knowledge, denialism, and climate responses. Perhaps most importantly, examining climate change at the resolution of microexperiences has the advantage of showing us change where many people—perhaps especially those whose livelihoods, social relations, and cultures are most intimately linked to the environment—see it, feel it, and make sense of it. Careful analysis and appreciation of these microexperiences and the resulting knowledge systems may therefore broaden the foundation for shared understanding and collaborative action to address climate change in an inclusive and effective manner.