Climate Collaboratorium

Project details

Full project title: Climate Collaboratorium: Co-creation of applied theatre decision labs for exploring climate change adaptation and mitigation

Duration: 1 August 2024-31 July 2027

Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Project lead: Professor Lindsey McEwen, Principal Investigator

UWE Bristol project team: 

• Sarah Berridge
• Dr Kwok Chun (Sun)
• Dr Kate Monson
• Clio Ryan, PhD student

• University of Saskatchewan, Canada
• University of New Hampshire, USA
• Dresden University of Technology (TU-Dresden), Germany
• UFZ, Germany

Industry partners:

• The Roses Theatre (Tewkesbury)
• Theatre Severn (Shrewsbury)
• Severn Rivers Trust
• Environment Agency
• Severn Trent Water

Project summary

The Climate Collaboratorium Project is co-designing, implementing and co-evaluating a process involving creative workshops and drama methods to co-develop adaptation and mitigation options based on salient place-based climate change scenarios. While climate mitigation needs a global focus, climate adaptation requires strong tailoring to place. The scenarios and adaptive options will then become plot points in co-created scripts that are performed to local audiences to stimulate further discussions.

Involving teams from the UK, Canada, USA and Germany, the project brings together academics and professionals from different disciplines and practices ready to explore how arts-based insights can support climate action to enhance infrastructure, water, and livelihood security within specific river catchments at community level.

The UK team combines drama, geography and hydroclimatic modelling expertise – with colleagues from UWE Bristol as well as Acta Community Theatre company in Bristol. The theatre productions created from the community workshops in Tewkesbury and Shrewsbury on the River Severn are bringing audiences into new decision spaces where they consider and propose a range relevant adaptation options to enhance water security in their local watershed. The project’s community-facing title in the UK is Severn StoryLab.

The Climate Collaboratorium project is supported through the New Frontiers in Research Fund 2023 (International Joint Initiative for Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation). In the UK, the project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

View project website