Find out more about the research and case studies produced by the Healthy Adaptations team.
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Climate adaptation must go beyond technical fixes to address the full spectrum of human well-being—objective, subjective and relational. Measures like hard infrastructure or relocation can unintentionally disrupt identity, community bonds and mental health, especially for vulnerable groups. Transformative, co-designed, context-specific strategies that integrate psychosocial factors are needed to build truly resilient and equitable futures.
Date: 06/05/25
Planned relocation as an adaptation response to climate change can unintentionally undermine the very well-being it aims to protect. Research in Ghana’s Volta Delta shows that those moved by government-led interventions reported lower overall life satisfaction, higher anxiety, weaker sense of safety, and diminished community attachment and identity compared with a nearby, non-relocated village facing the same risks. These findings highlight that effective adaptation must go beyond engineering: successful relocation requires inclusive planning, livelihood restoration, and ongoing psychosocial support to safeguard both physical safety and mental health.
Date: 06/05/25
Looking across different forms of adaptation to floods, we use existing literature to develop a typology of key domains of impact arising from interventions that are likely to shape health and wellbeing.
Date: 02/10/23
We examine how elements of well-being are at risk from climate change, and propose policy and research priorities that are oriented towards supporting well-being though a changing climate.
Date: 02/10/23
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