HEIF: Pursuing a Climate Resilient and Net Zero Hull: Academics, Policymakers and Youth Voices

Project Description

HEIF Project

The project focuses on positioning the University of Hull as a community anchor to co-develop and plan for a Climate Ready and Net Zero Hull. It will utilize the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission’s Climate Action Plan and co-develop it for the Hull context in partnership with local councils, organisations (e.g. the Environment Agency), and communities.
There will need to be a plan to help Hull become ‘climate resilient and net zero’ and there are already plans for individual elements that exist – this research project will position the University of Hull and its academics at the centre of drawing all of these plans together, and in meeting the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission’s Climate Action Plan – which no other city has yet achieved.
Building on the ‘Climate Resilience and Net Zero’ workshop hosted in July? 2022 and the ‘Climate and Culture’ workshop in 2023 (both undertaken with NERC Discipline-Hopping funding), this project is a next step to utilizing University of Hull expertise for the climate emergency. The work will connect to ongoing projects such as Y-PERN (focusing on knowledge exchange) and the YHCC (bringing in Hull-based actors).
Multiple workshops will be held to i) identify relevant expertise and strategic planning within the academic community at the University of Hull, ii) policymakers and practitioners working in this space, iii) young people in Hull (including in socially deprived communities, international and new-to-Hull residents, and ethnic minority groups, individually and in mixed-groups.)
The first step will be to explore climate and net zero impacts on these different groups in Hull and the Humber region to make visual, place-based maps of risks and opportunities through 5 workshops. Secondly, these ‘Hull climate’ maps will be brought into further group sessions as a starting point to explore strategies for minimising these risks and maximising these opportunities in another 5 workshops. Within the second step, there will also be discussion of the moral, fairness and justice implications of these strategies with the aim to address social, environmental, economic inequalities for a just Climate Resilience and Net Zero Hull. The YHCC Climate plan and actions will be integrated into these steps for discussion on how they are relevant (or not) for the Hull context with the aim to feed this experimental form of knowledge exchange back into decision-making for other cities in the region to learn from.
For each step, there will be sessions run with specific defined groups to allow community-based thoughts to emerge and with mixed groups to understand the interacting interests and perspectives.
The project will lead to the creation of climate dialogue maps and a co-developed Hull-based strategy for climate resilience and net zero. Discussion will support efforts to empower a range of communities by increasing Hull-specific climate literacy as well as in terms of actions that can be taken. A Hull-specific, card-based ‘Climate Fresk’ will be developed with schools and community groups to be used as a legacy engagement tool in combination with the Climate Dialogue maps