The ANTICIPATE project examines how different actors forecast and prepare for co-located hazards under conditions of climatic uncertainty, and whether and how these practices can be integrated for building preparedness.

Changing rainfall patterns caused by climate change can increase the severity and frequency of both droughts and floods. This is a cause for concern when these historically new patterns occur in drought-prone areas. While local communities in arid rural areas may be used to adapting to the uncertainties around drought, the incidence of floods in drought-prone regions is stretching the planning and response capacities of both individuals and public agencies. Despite significant advances in seasonal forecasting of extreme events and efforts to improve preparedness, studies demonstrate that new patterns of extreme events, such as the co-occurrence of floods and droughts –which we conceptualise as ‘co-located hazards’- will require significant changes in institutional processes and mindsets

The project aimed to contribute to cultural understandings of forecasting by exploring the cultures and practices of the scientific community alongside more place-based traditions of forecasting. It seeks to encourage these diverse communities of practice (local people, meteorologists, policymakers and scientists) to re-imagine forecasting in the light of co-located hazards and explores whether and how uncertainty can be productively harnessed to yield the future as a potent source agency where preparedness can be co-produced with marginal communities.

Objectives:

• Examining different understandings of co-located hazards
• Exploring how different actors approach forecasting in the context of co-located hazards
• Understanding preparedness through anticipatory practices

We focused on the Indian state of Gujarat, where extreme variability (floods and droughts) has pushed pastoralists and dryland farmers to the limits of coping. Integrating ethnographic, participatory and creative approaches with atmospheric modelling, ANTICIPATE was an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration between academics, disaster specialists and local artists across the UK and India.

Radical Uncertainty short film | Radical Methodologies (brighton.ac.uk)

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