Landscapes, communities and individuals have historically and continue to cope and adapt to climate change, some through incremental changes (potentially unnoticed), whilst others make rapid adjustments, reflecting abrupt changes in their environment, through landscape loss and gain. However, the impact of these activities and the effectiveness of adaptations leaves traces in our modern landscape. Understanding how communities have interacted with their environments and adapted to changing circumstances provides a basis for examining how future changes may be managed and communicated through a variety of mechanisms, building resilience at a range of spatial and temporal scales across landscapes. Information on past adaptations is often recorded, but poorly integrated into discourses around community resilience. As a result communities can be ill equipped to make informed and appropriate adaptations for building climate resilient futures. This co-created project addresses this information and process gap. Geographical contexts and circumstances influence how people and communities experience the world and interact with their landscapes. Local knowledge, practices and experiences emerge in place and reflect their specific environment. These knowledge's, practices and experiences become embedded in materialistic and adaptation responses and behaviours, and technological developments. In doing so they make a distinctive contribution to community trajectories of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience over time. This work will afford important insights into how societies in the past have been affected by, coped with and conceptualized environmental changes. It will also explore the nature of the individual, community, institutional, regional and national responses and adaptations following these changes. These insights can help inform future climate resilience provision. Understanding and capturing local environmental knowledge is key to the successful development of community adaptation systems that embed uncertainties associated with climate change and assist communities to interact with their landscapes and environments sustainably. The project, co-developed with existing and new partners (Historic England; Fjordr; Staffordshire Record Office and Museum & Tasglann nan Eilean Siar - Museums and Archives of the Outer Hebrides) will investigate how communities have lived with and are living with and adapting to climate change to build climate resilient communities. Through the development of a toolkit we will support and facilitate decision making in respect to current landscapes and environments. The toolkit will develop a multifaceted approach of cataloguing features (historic, material and archival), supplemented with contemporary oral histories within a Geographical Information System (GIS), using an co-creation approach that engages with communities throughout the process. The project will help all of the partner institutions better appreciate the cultural and socio-economic implications of extreme weather and climate in the regions and communities within which they operate, and the ways in which they might anticipate future impacts in their work. This research addresses the current need of agencies and authorities (e.g. Historic England) for tools that facilitate understanding and value of cultural heritage and the ways in which it can underpin informed decisions about sustainable futures, which supports community communication and engagement in future decision making, which is fundamental in building resilient communities. There is clear potential for the toolkit to become an embedded aspect of future CCRA4 and of immediate value to environmental organisations and local/regional community groups (e.g. flood forums and local historical groups) and shape future policy debates (e.g. FCERM strategy) across the UK.

The Old Poor Law in England and Wales, administered by the local parish, dispensed benefits to paupers providing a uniquely comprehensive, pre-modern system of relief. In the process, it also offered entrepreneurial or employment opportunities to the people who supplied and administered the system. This project will investigate the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. Very little is known about the midwives, tailors, workhouse mistresses, butchers and others who serviced the parish, and this research sets out to redress this omission by drawing on a class of little-used sources and on the collective support of volunteer researchers. Overseers' vouchers are the ephemeral, handwritten papers typically generated whenever the parish incurred a debt. These vouchers survive in very large numbers for selected parishes, such as the 2063 for Colwich in Staffordshire. They provide information about the identities of those who were paid for goods and services for the poor, and also reveal the scale of income to be gained by working on behalf of the parish. Additionally, these vouchers expose the networks of traders who benefitted from the business - and those who did not - and the longevity of these relationships. The social and economic bonds forged between the poor and the non-poor are fully reflected at the most granular scale in these quotidian sources. The presence of vouchers in parish collections has long been acknowledged, but their utility for historical research has been wholly disregarded owing to the significant technical challenges of using them. Where they survive vouchers can be tightly or chaotically folded, diverse in format, and of variable legibility, offering uncertain returns for the lone investigator. As a pilot study in Staffordshire has demonstrated, however, volunteer researchers working alongside academics have the scope to unpack vouchers both physically and intellectually. Collaboration with volunteers offers historians of the Old Poor Law a new opportunity to integrate the content of vouchers into histories of the poor and to evidence more fully the lives of ordinary people beyond poverty. This work will generate partial biographies of tradespeople, administrators, paupers, and workers who are not represented elsewhere in the historical record in consistent ways. The biographies will be written by volunteers and project staff. These outputs will not always mimic the complete record required for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since the nature of the sources will not permit cradle-to-grave certainty about people's life courses. What they will do is draw on vouchers and available genealogical material for the same locations to outline those parts of lives that are reliably visible from these recalcitrant parish sources. The value of partial biographies has been demonstrated by the limited number available via the ESRC-funded London Lives website. This work will expand the geographical remit of the model, develop the methodology by placing vouchers at the heart of the exercise, and incorporate the editorial choices and writing of volunteer researchers. At completion of the funded project the collected dictionaries will contain a minimum of 1000 lives from across the counties of Cumbria, Staffordshire and East Sussex; and the project dataset will include at least 50,000 lines of data, reflecting a similar number of vouchers.

One of the most critical issues to current debates on tackling climate change is the way that our energy needs can be met in the future. Renewable and clean energy technologies are part of the answer, along with wider strategies regarding improved energy utilisation and conservation and improved energy efficiency. However, due to the rapidly advancing science of renewable and clean (sustainable) energy technology the wider public remains uncertain, sceptical and ill-informed of the real application and potential of these technologies to their everyday lives and communities, and the essential role of improved energy utilisation and conservation and improved energy efficiency. This is particularly true for groups from traditionally harder to reach socially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds who face the greatest barriers to engagement with these issues. Using a strong partnership approach, this project will enable active researchers in the field of clean technology to stimulate the public's interest in sustainable energy approaches and help the wider public realise the huge importance and relevance of this area of science to their own communities.The project will adopt three complimentary communication strands: (1) 'green' roadshow events for the wider public; (2) workshops for local community groups; (3) workshops with schools (both primary and secondary) and education groups and school-based public events. These activities will focus particularly on harder to reach socially and educationally disadvantaged communities within the North Staffordshire and surrounding area. This project is supported by strong project partnerships including partners with expertise in working with socially and educationally-disadvantaged communities particularly in the regeneration of sustainable communities; partners with facilities and expertise in information, design and implementation of renewable technologies within socially and educationally-disadvantaged communities and partners with considerable expertise in working with the wider public (including schools) in the communication of climate change and sustainable solutions. In addition, the project team has extensive experience of working with primary and secondary schoolchildren and schoolteachers and educational groups in the provision of workshops on sustainable energy approaches and climate change.Genuine and effective dialogue between the project team, project partners and participant representatives will be achieved through discussion groups set up between the project team, project partners and participant representatives, in addition to the workshops run as part of the project. This will ensure effective dialogue on the aspects of sustainable energy approaches of greatest importance to the wider public while helping to generate real attitudinal and behavioural change towards establishing more sustainable communities in the socially and educationally deprived areas with which the project works.

This 5-month project will establish a West Midlands Local Policy Innovation Partnership (WM LPIP). This will involve connecting local policy and research partners across the region to deliver a programme of activity that supports inclusive and sustainable local growth. We will achieve this through the provision of research, evidence, data and expertise to take advantage of opportunities and to find place-based solutions to challenges that matter to local people and communities. Our emphasis in the Phase 1 period which is the subject of this application is on building, strengthening and diversifying partnerships between research organisations and local stakeholders in the West Midlands to identify local priorities and formulate a plan for addressing them in the coming years in the WM LPIP Phase 2 programme. Insights and solutions will be developed within and across policy domains relating to economy (inclusive and sustainable local economic performance, innovation, skills), community (communities in their places, felt experiences and pride in place, cultural recovery) and environment (living and working sustainably in a greener economy) themes. Our ambition is to make inroads towards tackling 'wicked problems' across geographical scales (hyper-local, local, regional, national) that are challenging to address because of their complex and interconnected nature, as well as more straightforward challenges where the prospects for people and places can be improved more quickly. To achieve this, we will map relevant local and national administrative data to outline data sources that are available for analysis and insights into thematic priorities. We will also undertake a rapid evidence review of the academic and grey literature on the challenges relating to achieving inclusive and sustainable economic growth, with a particular emphasis on place. We will also draw on academic and policy literature and strategies relating to circumstances and activities in the different sub-regions in the West Midlands. Alongside this we will design and deliver a series of place-based stakeholder and community workshops across the West Midlands. Each stakeholder workshop will bring together local stakeholders from across the public, private and third sectors to discuss key challenges and priorities for the local area and the region, with local universities drawing on their networks to enable this. A public engagement event will follow to help us to further understand the needs of local communities and to receive feedback on the priorities identified in the place-based workshops. In this way priority areas of focus will be established in consultation with local stakeholders and communities and we will develop a platform for sustained engagement with them. Together the place-based and policy prioritisation workshops will inform the design of our model and work programme for Phase 2 of the WM LPIP.

Rufopoly is a participatory learning board game enabling players to undertake a journey through a fictitious rural urban fringe called RUFshire, answering questions and making decisions on development challenges and place-making; those answers then inform each player's vision for RUFshire. The encountered questions are determined by the roll of a die and based on primary data collected for a Relu project (2010-2012) about Managing Environmental Change at the Rural Urban Fringe. Rufopoly has been used extensively in early stages of projects and plans such as the pioneering Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership spatial plan and has been used by government, EU project groups, local authorities, business, community groups, universities and schools. It has exposed audiences to issues associated with the delivery and trade-offs associated with planning and environmental issues at the fringe but crucially without the use of complex jargon. We believe that the full potential and impact of Rufopoly has yet to be fully realised. There are several reasons for this: 1. Rufopoly was developed towards the end of our Relu project as an unplanned output for a conference run by Relu in 2011 on 'Who Should run the Countryside?'. Its success prompted its inclusion as an output. 2. There were insufficient funds for it to be successfully tested and integrated with policy and practice communities to maximise its utility as a learning tool as this was never the original intention of the project. 3. It is currently presented as a one size fits all board game of a hypothetical place. More time is needed to explore the potential of Rufopoly to become a generic platform for stakeholders wishing to develop their own versions of the tool to meet their own needs and to fill a widely recognised gap in the effectiveness of participatory tools for improved decsion making. This knowledge exchange project addresses these deficiencies by drawing together the shared knowledge and previous experiences of designers and users of Rufopoly. This informs a series of interactive workshops in Wales, England and Scotland to identify how this kind of game-format can be enhanced into a more effective and multifunctional tool. This will help extend and embed the impact for a range of policy and practice partners in the form of a Rufopoly Resource Kit. By working collaboratively with end users we can identify how Rufopoly can be reconfigured across different user groups and organisations in tune with their agendas and needs. There are four stages to this project: WP1: Review and learn lessons from previous Rufopoly experiences. This involves (1) an assessment of the actual results and findings from past games that were written up and the results analysed. (2) critical assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of Rufopoly from facilitators and core participants. We will draw priamirly from our UK experiences but are also able to secure insights from the international adaptations of Rufopoly from Nebraska (November 2013) and Sweden (2014). WP2: Conduct a series of interactive workshops with different policy and practice audiences. These workshops will be held in England, Scotland and Wales using members of the research team and other participants. The purpose of these workshops is to (1) share results of WP1; (2) assess how the tool could be reconfigured to address the principla needs and challenges facing participants; and (3) prioritise feasible options for a Rufopoly Resource Kit. WP3: Using WP1 and WP2 outcomes, we will design and trial (across our team) the Rufopoly 'Mk2' resource kit and associated materials/guidance. WP4: Launch the Rufopoly Resource Kit and guidance in a live streamed global workshop event. This would; reveal the basic resource kit as co-designed by the team and enable testers of the resource kit to share their experiences maximising knowledge exchange and its range of potential applications.