The ARISE Initiative

ARISE is a ground-breaking research project, funded by UKRI, which seeks to develop resilience within the UK’s coastal seas and communities.

Over the course of five years, the project team will work with local stakeholders to design and test different ‘interventions’, or ways of tackling difficult and long-standing problems.

At the end of the project, we will have a powerful and practical toolkit which local councils and other organisations can use to address the challenges facing our coast.

Background

UK coasts provide recreation, transportation, commerce, natural beauty and food for coastal communities. However, they face interrelated challenges from issues such as climate change, coastal realignment, demographic shift and infrastructure development.

Managing such issues can be diffcult, with coasts and their seas providing diverse meanings and values for their stakeholders and communities. In this respect, coastal residents, users, and managers experience challenges in coherently and meaningfully attending to livelihoods, health and wellbeing, as well as natural biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and conservation.

This complexity highlights the need to develop and evaluate fair and transferrable approaches to promote sustainable use of diverse coastal resources. This will be critical to strengthening resilience: the ability to anticipate, withstand, adjust to, and thrive after disruption and change.

Such interventions may work in one place, but not the other, or may disparately strengthen certain capitals of local concern at the expense of others. We thus come to a conundrum. If policy interventions are influenced by place-based community values where they are designed and implemented, how can we take transferable lessons from one coastal community to another, using interventions that reliably account for each of the five capitals?

The project

‘Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment’ (or ARISE) is designed to propose, develop and evaluate an intervention framework to practically address this puzzle. We will gather evidence to develop best-practice intervention methods, applicable across places and regions, focussed on achieving balanced strengthening across each of the five capitals.

Over the first three of four-and-a-half years of the project, we will design and deliver twelve place-based interventions throughout the Norfolk-to-Kent coastlines, including education campaigns, enforcement initiatives, and community engagement events.

Before, during, and after each intervention, our research team will monitor and evaluate the local impacts of our interventions accounting for each of the five capitals. From the lessons learned, and over the last one-and-a-half years of the project, we will then develop a toolkit of best practice to achieve transferable and scalable interventions that work across dierent communities and places while encouraging more balanced approaches to strengthen each of the ve capitals.

An inclusive collaboration

ARISE is an inclusive collaboration among: local, regional, and national authorities; coastal residents, heritage groups and people who care about UK coasts; and experts in policy analysis, cultural engagement, creative practice, health sciences, biological sciences, computer science, pollution management, disaster studies, environmental sciences, economics, and geography.

As such, development of our framework, methods and toolkit for intervention will follow strong participatory principles, with continuous opportunity for renement by an ARISE Community of Practice.

At regular intervals, we will provide opportunities for stakeholders to gather and voice their opinions, needs, concerns and advice for ongoing project work. Only by working together can we achieve our goals towards practical, evidence-based guidance for interventions that can be applied across eastern coasts of England, to the rest of the UK, and beyond.