Pathways of Renewal – Adapting to a New Reality

As part of the launch of our new research cycle, The Rift, we’re publishing three articles to introduce each of our core research strands: Collapse, Uncertainty, and Renewal. This week we’re turning our attention to our final research strand: Renewal.

Our first two research strands examine ideas of collapse and uncertainty - dilemmas that are often not well addressed within decision-making and geopolitics more generally. Our third strand interrogates the opportunities and implications of transition pathways that engage with these issues – whilst exploring the policies and politics surrounding deeper processes of both resilience and renewal.

Of particular relevance is a growing body of thinking and practice that is coalescing around ideas of transformative (or 'transformational') adaptation. As outlined in IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, adaptation can take several forms. Incremental forms of adaptation tend to focus on ways to respond to climate change that preserve existing structures and practices. To take an example – for agriculture, incremental adaptation might include strengthening flood protections for existing farmland, or improving agricultural irrigation to deal with drought. By contrast, transformative adaptation strategies will consider deeper shifts in underlying structures and practices. In the context of agriculture this might explore more ambitious reconfigurations of environmental and social systems – including diversification of crops, relocation of communities or the redesign of supply chains and market systems to reduce vulnerabilities.

As climate impacts worsen, transformative approaches to adaptation are receiving increased attention in many parts of the world. Varied in approach and objectives, they commonly share a number of characteristics. First, a thrutopian spirit, that plans for a future in which severe climate shocks are understood to be inevitable, and will generate significant, enduring impacts to existing natural, social and economic systems. Second, a systems-thinking lens that thinks expansively about the provision of a range of societal services – and the integrated ways in which government, business and citizens might evolve to meet them. And third, a place-based approach that engages deeply with the specific challenges and opportunities of different geographies.

Situated within a think tank focused on international affairs, this third attribute is of particular interest to us – as renewed emphasis on place-based systems drives broader shifts in regional and geopolitical dynamics of organisation, collaboration and competition. In the context of a new climate reality, renewal will mean a rethinking of the scope and scale of collaboration and governance at all levels; an aspect which will from the core of our work around the topic. From the local to the global, here are some examples of how renewal is playing out at the moment...

We’ll come to the international perspective in a moment. But let’s begin small.

With transformative adaptation still at a relatively early stage of development, many of its most compelling examples are made manifest at smaller and more local scales, often within urban environments. Take Civic Square in Birmingham. Operating in the heart of the city, Civic Square describe their mission as bringing the ‘spaces, tools, resources and infrastructure that neighbourhoods need to co-lead the social, ecological, economic and climate transition of the 21st century’, offering ‘a street- based systemic demonstration of carbon, energy, ecological, and built transitions that are designed, owned and governed by the people who live there’. Adopting participatory approaches to local decision making and the built environment, they view climate adaption through an expansive lens that integrates a restructuring of social relations, economy and governance at the community scale.

Civic Square remains a particularly compelling (and well-documented) 'system demonstrator'. The project threads together a range of innovations to form an integrated response to a changing climate reality, taking in circular economy, participatory decision-making, ecological governance and regenerative forms of material production and construction. But it is far from alone. Across the world, we see numerous examples where citizen-led innovations are combining with new business models and supportive policies to generate a flourishing of city-scale innovations in the face of growing climate risk.

Many projects focus on continued expansion of circular economy principles (like Repair Cafes – which operate in over 2500 spaces across 6 continents) and new material innovations (like decentralised manufacturing and 3D printing – such as the Dipdii Textiles Project in Bangladesh) to generate more resilient and efficient approaches to material use and production. Others deploy new urban farming techniques (like vertical farming) to increase resilience of urban food networks and to promote food sovereignty amongst vulnerable communities. And as modular forms of renewable energy bring down costs of the energy transition, city-scale efforts to improve resilience and energy sovereignty are gaining ground.

From Detroit to Dakar, place-based innovations like these are remaking material supply chains and market structures in ways that not only reduce vulnerabilities but plot new paths for more resilient societies.

City-scale innovations provide compelling examples of how climate impacts are driving a renewed emphasis on the specifics of place. But similar dynamics play out at regional and global scales too. In 2024, Chatham House’s Land Use Report explored how increased climate stress and proliferating demands on productive land would lead to an increased politicisation of land within and across regions. Recent geopolitical events have made these ideas ever more visible. To take one example, we can see how the complex overlaps of glacial watershed and nation-state boundaries are reshaping the politics of climate resilience in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. More broadly, a return to the specifics of place can be seen to underpin broader shifts back towards a 'spheres of influence' approach in international relations visible in the Americas and elsewhere.

Whilst such examples highlight increased tensions, a renewed emphasis on the specifics of place can also generate new forms of multinational collaboration, too. As explored in our recent report, growing interest in bioeconomies is enabling novel opportunities at multiple scales. At a sectoral level, integrated biorefineries open up opportunities for collaboration across energy, material and chemical sectors. And as growing enthusiasm for bioeconomies combine with organising logics of place-based bioregioning, new pathways for collaboration cut across traditional boundaries of nation-states, whilst also generating new models of collaboration between governments and global supply chain business. As we heard in our Climate & Energy Conference – climate stress is not only a multiplier for international tension, it can act as a multiplier for renewal, too - as one speaker put it: 'scarcity is a powerful incentive for collaboration.'

As the saying goes – ‘the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed.’ From local to international levels, we’ve brought together just a small sample of how societies are adapting to a changing climate reality in ways which engage with broader social, economic, environmental and political conditions. Many remain at relatively early stages of development. Others exist at the fringes of dominant forms of social and economic organisation.

Many questions remain. For example - in a context of increased climate shocks and budget constraint, where and how might states enable forms of place-based adaptation that are more sensitive to local conditions? What might this mean for the evolving roles of business, civil society and finance? Where might the established institutions of the post-war international consensus act in stewarding these efforts? And where might new configurations of global influence play a more dominant role? From coalitions of bio-rich nations to international city-networks, what new forms of power might shape the next era of climate reality? It is to questions like these that our work on Renewal will now turn.

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