RETRACE

ResilienceS to climate risks: lessons from arctic and pacific communities

Climate & Cultural Heritage Joint CallClimate science

Since the 2000's and in a climate change context, 2.3 billion people have been impacted by natural disasters. Faced with complex issues, risk management has evolved to analyse risks in a systemic way, integrating the resilience concept which is now an imperative for territories. However, few local actors manage to transform this concept into effective risk management strategies. Existing decision-support tools are mainly focused on technical-functional approaches. Although based on rigorous and scientific approaches, they don't represent reality with veracity, subtlety, accuracy. Local communities are therefore struggling to deal with it.

About

It’s now essential to find an effective way to enhance the resiliencies of local communities, in order to develop more inclusive approaches to implementing resilience strategies to climate risks. The consortium believes that some elements are pillars of local resiliencies: experiences, intergenerational, traditional, vernacular and local knowledge, etc. Integrating these forms of local, intrinsic, and cultural resiliencies into decision-support tools is not only a challenge for understanding resilience in its diversity but also a guarantee for the appropriation and adoption of such tools.

Two geographical areas are identified as most vulnerable to climate risks:

the polar zones and the Pacific islands. Communities with strong cultural dimensions have been selected;
the Marquesan (French Polynesia), the Sámi and Kven (Norway) and the Ahtna (Alaska).

RETRACE project aims to produce a decision-support system that enables the representation, understanding and implementation of resilience strategies adapted to local issues. The methodology is based on a mixed-methods approach: qualitative data from a collaborative approach aimed at identifying resilience factors in local narratives, traditions, experiences, sensitivities, knowledge, etc., and quantitative data derived from open source data.

The aim is to develop long-term resilience strategies to climate risks in these communities and to ensure the reproducibility of the methodology.

Charlotte Heinzlef

Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Charlotte Heinzlef is an associate professor in Climate Risk and Resilience Strategies at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin since 2021. In 2019, she completed her PhD thesis "Modeling indicators of urban resilience to flood risk. Co-construction of a spatial decision support system to contribute to the operationalization of the concept of resilience" in co-supervision between Avignon University (France) and the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of Mons (Belgium). After defending her PhD, she did a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of French Polynesia. She participated in the development of an observatory of resilience in the Pacific Islands. Her research focuses on the resilience of vulnerable territories (urban, insular, coastal, etc.) to risks in a context of climate change.

Project consortium

CEARC Research Center
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Pennsylvania State University

Show all partners

Funding agencies

French National Research Agency
The Research Council of Norway
National Science Foundation

Documents

No items found

News & Events

Parent programme

Climate&Cultural Heritage

Collaborative Research Action by the JPIs on Cultural Heritage and Climate and the Belmont Forum

This Call is jointly organised between the Joint Programming Initiatives Cultural Heritage and Global Change (JPI CH) and Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate) and the Belmont Forum. The Call aims to support transdisciplinary and convergent research approaches on cultural heritage and climate change, to foster collaboration among the research community across several regions, and to contribute to knowledge advances and policy change at the global level.

15

countries

59

partners

16

projects