Talking together about climate risks and dynamics so it enables resilience and trust

The topic of risks in our climate and geosciences setting is highly emotive. When a sudden and extreme event occurs, the emotional consequences of an absence of any planning or mitigation can be severe to the communities and people involved. There are multiple parts of society that are impacted across these events. Where there is an absence of awareness around the issues of equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) then, disappointingly, it is typically the disadvantaged groups in that society that are the most impacted. With the raised awareness around the consequences of anthropogenic heating of the planet, we are now faced with increasing occurrence of sudden extreme events and where the underlying dynamic baseline is changing. The hazard probability of extreme levels for an environmental process can be estimated using methods based on statistical extreme value theory (see for example Bruun and Tawn, 1998, Appl. Statist., 47, 405-423). Also the dynamics of the system can be evaluated using non-linear methods (e.g. see Bruun et al, 2017, JGRO, 122, 6746– 6772 and refs in this). These methods are generic and are applied in seismic, flooding and weather based settings. I’ll show with graphics examples of precipitation hazards for the tropics to explain sudden and long term dynamics. These methods are being deployed more and more in terms of framing climatic hazards, however there are analytical challenges in building in the slow-variation to the methods so that real long term hazards are skilfully assessed. Also the mathematical formulation these methods are typically utilized by analysts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians. It is found that the mathematical formulations present a communication barrier to hazard and resilience practitioners, especially as the contemporary EDI framing of this skill set is often not very diverse. In this talk, to help re-frame this, an open discussion of this topic is invited – please do join – to enable a wider community access.  To help this I will share and  some contemporary thinking developed i) at the University of Exeter: where I am a Mathematics Lecturer, Diversity Champion for our College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences and also ii) from the Institute of Physics (IOP) and its Limit Less campaign. By re-framing – together - how we communicate about these hazards, using an EDI lens, it can help us to better connect through our communication, and so to build more trust in the knowledge. This type of discussion can help hazard practitioners, stakeholders and importantly to help build trust and resilience for all groups how are impacted by such extreme events.