Week 16 [Sea levels, spreadsheets & socialisation]

This week was mostly spent reconvening a bunch of undergrads to complete their regional economic reporting as I run out my lecturing hours before I hit sabbatical. Like every, single final year cohort that has preceded them on this module it’s all running a bit behind. I start with this reflection as in many ways it is useful to observe the undergrad scrabble to deliver in their final semester with the competing and (sometimes) contradictory timelines I’m working with already on my PhD. The collective terror of delivering a half dozen short form projects seem almost wasteful anxiety considered against my own efforts in trying to calculate the best possible trajectory to unite academia, sector and state in working towards the social and political solutions to our shared environmental challenges.

That said our stresses are both as real and valid as each other’s. It would be too easy to be consumed by this kind of hubris and self-importance, especially with it all seemingly landing precisely as planned as we go. There is still so. much. to. do. and watching a final year undergrad stress over a 1,500-word assessment point helps to reveal my own truth: there are multiple layers of cognitive dissonance we all have to subconsciously harmonise in order to just ‘get on with our day’ and our daily stresses makes so much noise it can become difficult to focus on anything outside of our personalised scopes.

My favourite meeting this week came in the genre of what I’m starting to call “depressing hope” in my head. When you work on the fringes of climate adaptation and social challenge some of the stuff you get to see is pretty hairy. It comes in many forms: a case study of real-world impacts, a line graph that either goes up or down, linear or exponential, but always towards the bad, never the good. You can imagine then how brutal the graphs and visualisations presented by Marta and Michaela from the National Oceanography Centre looked when we met. With 41% of the world population living in coastal regions it looks like rough seas ahead - literally - with a combination of sea level and storm surge rises set to pincer the global social and industrial complex on our coastlines.

Visualisation from the National Oceanography Centre (copyright NOC)

Profit extraction will become increasingly difficult if all of the extraction equipment is underwater, so the good news here (if we can call it that?) is there is at least a natural ceiling for destroying our planet in our future somewhere, no matter how hard we try. Watching a map of various parts of Liverpool go underwater, sometimes for a bit, sometimes forever, whilst two incredibly intelligent humans talk to me and the MusicFutures Co-Director through the likely impacts on the city and its waterfront makes for surprisingly disconnected discourse. The purpose of this chat? To see if we can combine sea-rise level data with cultural economic impacts to help with calculating the financial loss to the sector from non-investment through climate change intervention now. Turns out we can 👍

Marta and Michaela have even commissioned a graphic designer visualise different parts of the city underwater. My only concern in this meeting is how we can translate this knowledge into discussion points that can help socialise policy asks that will create real change. In fact, that’s just about my only concern nowadays: how can we turn the overwhelming evidence of the social and environmental impacts of human activity into an evidenced case for progressive policies that can be economically justified in terms of investment for growth obsessed governments.

The cumulative effect of continuous exposure to this kind of raw reality is enough to give even the staunchest of activists a bout of eco-anxiety, lucky it is then I see myself as a little bit of an unfeeling monster, where my particular brand of autism seems to offer a shield against the various impending horrors. I try to keep in mind that there has been, for many years, reports that a minority of companies and economies are ultimately responsible for varyingly large percentages of carbon emissions globally. This is why I don’t necessarily buy into the Net Zero conspiracies, but I do understand why people are angry that governments and large corporations are suggesting the public take personal responsibility for climate change through individual behaviours. My personal belief is we should all take a little bit of responsibility for each other and our planet, after all our species ultimately has nothing without each other and our planet. I’m lucky that this PhD has the potential to help a little bit towards that, so I’m hoping that I can keep my focus on achieving the goals of my studies and creating an output that will really help cities find a way to leverage cultural activities to facilitate rapid civic and infrastructural changes at scale.