Rapid Climate Change Project

What is it that allows some organisations (businesses, government departments or voluntary sector associations) to respond to environmental change more easily and satisfactorily than others? The Rapid Climate Change Project was a one year research programme funded by the ESRC Environment and Human Behaviour Programme, designed to investigate this question.

The aim was to open up an enquiry in this area by drawing together perspectives on flexibility from organisational management theory, with economic and sociological research into the constraints that organisational cultures can impose on adaptation. This theoretical synthesis was framed by ongoing research on organisational adaptation to climate change and natural disasters conducted mainly by geographers. The project sought to identify the key elements of institutional and organisational structures and processes that facilitate adaptation.

The resulting framework was tested and refined based on feedback from a series of workshops and individual interviews with stakeholders drawn from the UK's rural sector - both government agencies and industry. The empirical work also drew on the experiences of individual organisational adaptation and the adaptivity of the UK rural sector as a whole to past environmental crises (foot-and-mouth, BSE, flooding), and saught reflections on possible future rapid climate change.

This website forms part of the dissemination strategy of the project, making project documents available to research stakeholders.

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