7 minute read
Empowering communities to face climate change
Born in South Africa under the apartheid regime, Professor Bruce Glavovic from the School of People, Environment and Planning has focused his career on environmental justice, sustainability and human rights, and on peaceful, constructive ways of solving problems. ‘I have worked with communities all my life; I learn from them and provide support where I can,’ he says. ‘An important question is, how do we make public choices in ways that are enabling and empowering?’
For most of his career, Professor Glavovic has focused on coastal management, leading the team that produced South Africa’s postapartheid coastal management policy, which was described as a world first. He has also worked in natural hazards planning and in adapting to climate change, both of which are interwoven with other crises, including biodiversity loss, inequity and injustice, and efforts to ensure that public decision-making is inclusive and enabling. ‘Recently, my underlying critical scholarship has centred on what drives people into positions of vulnerability and marginalisation, and what can be done through empowering processes in a world of climate change and risk,’ he says.
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Currently, he is finishing a significant piece of work for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) focused on community-based coastal hazard risk reduction. ‘Essentially, it is a workbook for communities around the world to use to make enduring decisions about how to deal with this risk.’
Professor Glavovic also works with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body whose main brief is to prepare reports assessing the science related to climate change. ‘Our recent Working Group II report has strong statements about enabling governance, the importance of overcoming inequity and injustice, human rights, the voice of indigenous people, and non-human species,’ he says. The report concludes that decisions made in the coming 10 years will determine mediumto long-term climate change risk, and hence the imperative for urgent local/global action.
Professor Glavovic is concerned that the pace of climate change action is too slow. He has recently published a paper, ‘The Tragedy of Climate Change Science’, which draws a sobering conclusion. ‘If we continue on the present path, we condemn the world to a dangerous climate future,’ he says. ‘Temperatures will reach well above pre-industrial levels, there will be species loss, and we will experience dramatic increases in intense and more frequent extreme events. Do we have another six to seven years to prepare another IPCC assessment report while governments make incremental moves that see global warming levels continuously rise? If we are going to take the IPCC evidence seriously, we need to decide: do we do science as usual, or do we need to do something more radical?’
Given the urgency and criticality of climate change, Professor Glavovic argues the time has come for scientists to agree to pause climate change research as a means to first expose, then renegotiate, the broken science–society contract. ‘We’re suggesting a moratorium on the science that merely documents the decline of human wellbeing and planetary health. That science is not contributing to solutions. We need to continue working with our local communities whilst at the same time mobilising global action in this closing window of opportunity to avert dangerous climate change.’
This research is crucial for local communities. ‘I’m involved in case studies within Manawatū–Whanganui and Taranaki working with mana whenua and communities that are exposed and vulnerable,’ says Professor Glavovic. ‘It’s around how to empower people. Unless you address the drivers and root causes of climate vulnerability — for example, if you don’t understand the colonial context in relation to Māori and its ongoing effect on relationships with local government — it makes it very difficult to address the realities tangata whenua face. Science can provide technical risk-analysis tools that give detailed, quantifiable information about what the problem is and how to deal with it, but it doesn’t address the structural drivers. My critical action-oriented research helps to reveal those problems and find ways to try to overcome them.’
As part of this endeavour, Professor Glavovic is working with a group of trustees who are mana whenua to a piece of land on the Waitara River in New Plymouth. The land is facing flood risk, coastal erosion and intensified storms. ‘People are having to move out, and they have urupā and rare important taonga that are at risk, as well as people’s wellbeing and livelihoods. They have developed a partnership with local government and there is real commitment to supporting them. We are working together to develop an adaptation plan.’ In a similar way, he is working with a community at Tangimoana, where there is a grave flood risk. ‘Manawatū District Council is committed to doing something about it, and we’re going to help shape the plan. Rangitāne and other iwi and hapū have an important voice there. It’s exciting and humbling work because it can make a difference.’
Sdg 13 Climate Action
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
PROFESSOR BRUCE GLAVOVIC School of People, Environment and Planning
do we do science as usual, or do we need to do something more radical?
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DAVID TAPPIN, DR NATALIA D’SOUZA AND DR ZOE PORT
Healthy Work Group
Healthy work is rewarding, meaningful, interesting, ethical, of value and sustainable. Associate Professor David Tappin, Dr Natalia
D’Souza and Dr Zoe Port from the School of Management are part of the Healthy Work Group, which was formed around the concept of better understanding the conditions that contribute to poor workplace health and wellbeing, from which the design and undertaking of work can be improved. The group includes academic staff and postgraduate students from Management and Psychology. ‘We look at interventions for the avoidance of harm and the improvement of work, to create decent productive work, conducted with equity and dignity,’ says Associate Professor Tappin.
Although workplace wellbeing has become more prevalent in recent years, Dr Port points out that the more popular interventions do not usually go far enough. ‘We’re mindful that while the workplace wellness movement is important, we want to create a healthier system and not focus just on the individual. Let’s change the work in the first place so that we’re not all expected to be super resilient.’ Associate Professor Tappin agrees. ‘Initiatives that focus on what an individual can do are helpful, but they aren’t getting to the root of the problem and mostly provide symptomatic relief from stressors, whereas looking at the work system — things like recruitment, job design and management competencies — is likely to be more helpful.’
The team is carrying out a project, funded by the Health Research Council and WorkSafe
New Zealand, to reduce psychosocial risk and thereby improve conditions for health and wellbeing in small and medium businesses in New Zealand. Twenty-four organisations were recruited across three sectors, and half of these participatively developed an action plan aimed at improving health and wellbeing in their organisations, with the others receiving no intervention to enable comparison.
‘We’re a bit over halfway through the intervention period,’ says Associate Professor Tappin. ‘There have been a few delays with lockdowns and the impact of the pandemic. But there are lots of interesting insights that are becoming apparent. It’s highlighting the complexity of dealing with psychosocial factors in a work context, because every situation is slightly different and it’s heavily nuanced by the style of management. But some of the factors that we see as important are around the level of control people have in their work, as well as workloads.’
One organisation, for example, is working on improving its processes for recruitment and induction of new staff, which will have an impact on how quickly, and with the least stress, people are able to undertake their work when newly employed. ‘It’s an example of a primarylevel intervention that is aiming to make work more enjoyable and fulfilling,’ says Associate Professor Tappin. ‘There are other benefits at an organisational level in having a process that’s streamlined, but from a new employee’s perspective they are going into that work knowing what they are required to do, so they don’t get stressed about being in a situation they’re unfamiliar with. It will enable them to also have some sense of where they might want to go and creates a scaffolded learning process. It’s a way of making improvements organisationally as well as for individuals undertaking that work, both currently and in the future.’
‘Another area for improvement that we are seeing is in access to information,’ says Dr Port. ‘We’ve often come into an organisation and employees will say that they don’t know something or wish management would communicate with them, and management will say that the information is there, or they didn’t think employees would be interested. So access to information and open lines of communication are key because not having these will make your job harder and more stressful.’
Associate Professor Tappin agrees. ‘Worker voice and social dialogue are also important components of work that are sometimes missing. In principle, being able to have your say should be available to all, but this may not always be the case, dependent on the nature of the organisation and the awareness of people that these things exist.’
Dr D’Souza points out that those in control have a significant role to play. ‘If they’re really committed to making that change then that’s going to happen fairly quickly. It hinges on the attitudes and behaviours of people in positions of power. They have to really want to make work decent, and it has to be a conscious effort.’
To complement their research, the team has co-designed a third-year Decent Work course, which is an exploration of the principles, practices and issues surrounding decent work in contemporary work organisations. ‘It’s been a really nice link to some of the research that the Healthy Work Group does,’ says Dr D’Souza, ‘and it’s also great from a teaching perspective being able to share some of those insights as well.’
SDG 8 DECENT WORK & ECONOMIC GROWTH
Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.
