News Details
A team of KLI Fellows, co-led by Laura Menatti and Corey Bunce, and including Anna-Katharina Brenner (KLI alumna), Joyshree Chanam, Marina Knickel and Hari Sridhar, contributed a book chapter titled, "Adapting to Heatwaves: Reframing, Understanding, and Translating Strategies from India to the EU" to the book "Strengthening European Climate Policy" produced by the European SSH CENTRE. This book chapter is the main outcome of an interdisciplinary project started in 2023, for which former KLI scientific director Guido Caniglia acted as facilitator. This book chapter proposes an innovative framework for understanding adaptation to climate change through an interdisciplinary approach.
Over the course of the project, team members brought together different disciplinary perspectives in order to integrate knowledge from philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, evolutionary biology, and sustainability sciences. They reflected critically on how ideas cross geographical, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
In the chapter, ‘adaptation’ is reframed so as to be understood as a situated, relational, and long-term process that takes place within a socio-ecological system. This emphasizes nature-oriented, place-based, and community-driven approaches. The chapter is policy oriented, and so draws examples and valuable lessons from India’s experience adapting to extreme temperatures. However, translating these learning opportunities requires careful tailoring of policies to local contexts, needs, and resources. This requires moving beyond expectations of mere knowledge transfer. Consequently, the chapter analyses concepts such as knowledge integration and translation while prioritizing social and epistemic justice and interconnectedness, hoping to motivate and inform searches for more equitable adaptation strategies which are happening around the globe.
The grant which funded the project was part of a wider EU-Horizon Grant managed by the European SSH CENTRE (Social Sciences and Humanities for Climate, Energy and Transport Research Excellence) https://sshcentre.eu/. The Centre’s goal was to fund projects that integrate knowledge from SSH and STEM for contribution to three books, on Climate, Energy, and Mobility, which would inform European policy. Interdisciplinary groups from across Europe received funding to develop chapters.