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Description
This project will connect the abstract, global and seemingly disconnected natural and physical occurrences with people’s local knowledges and embodied experiences. Our aim is to understand how people experience climate change on a daily basis, and to explore climate change as both an environmental and social phenomenon. The project focuses on urban overheating. Urban overheating and heat waves in cities have been increasing the rates of deaths and diseases. By combining natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, this project aims to connect the environmental and biological aspects of urban overheating with people’s social experiences. There are two main goals of this research project: (1) to understand how climate change and urban overheating have been impacting vulnerable groups, and (2) to understand people’s embodied and socially situated experiences of overheating. More specifically, the project aims to study and explore the bio-social adaptive and coping mechanisms of dealing with urban overheating. An important goal of this research project is to develop a transdisciplinary methodology to study climate change. The project includes researchers who come from a diverse set of disciplines, such as physics, sociology, environmental and climate science, and social anthropology. During the entire research Project Partners will exchange knowledge and collected data, and let the different scientific perspectives of the research project inform each other. While this research project will be especially valuable for local governments in the two studied cities, we believe that new data on bio-social coping and adaptive mechanisms will be of interest to other policy makers across Europe as well. Moreover, since this project aims to humanize climate science, it will also contribute to the public’s perception, awareness and understanding of climate