What are they and how are people impacted?
Financial or material aspects of people’s lives. ‘Material’ relates to the tangible, physical aspects of life that a person has access to for meeting everyday needs and how adaptation may cause changes to these that, in turn, affect health and wellbeing.
Interactions and access to natural and built environments, as well as the physical and social aspects of place and environment. This includes place attachment and cultural meanings that reflect individual and collective processes of “place making”.
The physical and mental condition of an individual.
Perceptions of local flood management processes and authorities, and the presence and nature of community engagement and participation in decision-making.
Relationships and interactions with other people, as well as social dimensions tied to collective processes or community dynamics. This includes distinctions between personal and community resilience which refer to things experienced at the individual level, such as thoughts and feelings.
Financial or material aspects of people’s lives. ‘Material’ relates to the tangible, physical aspects of life that a person has access to for meeting everyday needs and how adaptation may cause changes to these that, in turn, affect health and wellbeing.
Where planned relocation is carried out, people can find it harder to continue their existing livelihoods. This may be because they are too far away to where they used to work, or because they have lost access to facilities they depend on part of their work.
People living in flood-prone areas can find it harder to access household insurance. For example, Mayhew et al. (2012) found that…
Interactions and access to natural and built environments, as well as the physical and social aspects of place and environment. This includes place attachment and cultural meanings that reflect individual and collective processes of “place making”.
The physical and mental condition of an individual.
Perceptions of local flood management processes and authorities, and the presence and nature of community engagement and participation in decision-making.
Where populations and infrastructure are moved from present locations to new lower-risk locations, either individually or as communities, with the objective of long-term sustainability.
The construction and siting of flood walls, levees, defences and drainage systems to prevent floodwater inundation in identified flood zones.
Adaptations from the household to catchment scale that increase resilience to flood risk and improve the ability to recover. It involves building capacity in advance and remedial actions to minimise impact, including flood proofing homes, nature-based approaches, forecasting and warning, insurance, development control and health and social services.
Find definitions for terms that are frequently used in the Healthy Adaptations Hub.
| Terminology | Definition |
|---|---|
| Affect | People’s emotional evaluation of experiences of everyday life. Affective responses to flood interventions are important for understanding the social consequences of adaptations and how these are distributed. Affective responses are also important for galvanising support for adaptation policies because of the way people can influence how they interpret social situations and their intended and actual behaviours. |
| Affective wellbeing | People’s emotional evaluation of everyday life experiences in terms of their preferences versus reality. |
| Place making | [Definition to come] |
The Healthy Adaptations project was undertaken by a team of social scientists, health economists, demographers and hydrologists at the University of Exeter, Maynooth University and the University of Ghana. You can get in touch with the Healthy Adaptations Team at healthyadaptions.org@
The project aimed to develop an evaluation tool for sustainable adaptation that comprehensively incorporates the health and wellbeing consequences of specific adaptation interventions, focusing on flood risk adaptation. Flooding is treated as one of the major climate driven risks given that it causes high levels of mortality globally every year, and has multiple and interacting health dimensions and outcomes. Across the climate change adaptation literature, there is often a focus on singular aspects of how interventions shape wellbeing (e.g. nature connection, mental health, etc.). Far less is understood about the ways in which multiple dimensions of people’s lives are affected by adaptation processes with knock-on consequences for wellbeing outcomes. There is thus a need for deeper understanding of the extent to which different areas of life, referred to in the Healthy Adaptations Hub as ‘Domains of Impact’, are impacted by climate adaptations.
Over the course of the project, the research team framed their analysis around three principal forms of flood adaptation: planned relocation, hard engineering, and living with risk. The team tested and validated new evaluative criteria in the context of real world interventions currently being implemented in Ireland, Ghana, and the UK, working with resident communities, public health and flood risk management practitioners across the three case study locations.
The Healthy Adaptations project established three Expert Panels corresponding to the case study locations:
Ghana
Ireland
UK
Social
Relationships and interactions with other people, as well as social dimensions tied to collective processes or community dynamics. This includes distinctions between personal and community resilience which refer to things experienced at the individual level, such as thoughts and feelings.