Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves. These events, along with limited historical precedent, are creating significant uncertainties for local communities as well as private and public agencies across the world.

Under such conditions, standard approaches may not be sufficient because the prediction of such events and their cascading impacts is not always possible. Instead, approaches that work with uncertainty and build reliability i.e., safe and stable delivery of services to minimise impact amidst conditions of high variability, are required.

Responding to this challenge, RELIABLE – a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project – aims to explore and test strategies for climate preparedness that are attuned to uncertainties.

RELIABLE focuses on mid-level policy actors who craft and shape responses to climate-induced hazards by ‘governing on the go’, leveraging their social, affective (emotional) and tacit skills. Unlike elite policymakers, they are embedded within systems for a longer period and leverage accumulated learning and relational skills to adapt their decisions by quickly judging the social, political and environmental feasibility of actions on the ground. These are vital for building preparedness and resilience but have largely remained underexplored in standard approaches.

Focusing on hydrological extremes (floods and droughts) in South Asia and the UK, we will observe and work with these mid-level actors (such as emergency/disaster managers; water infrastructure operators/engineers; control room operators; regulators) to explore their strategies of uncertainty management that aid in building reliability.

The project draws on a cross-disciplinary research design and innovative methodology combining social sciences with arts and design and storyline approaches. The FLF will conceptualise uncertainty management and explore strategies to inform climate preparedness. In doing so, it will generate new knowledge on embracing uncertainty within policy processes and contribute to the emerging research frontier of governance under climate extremes.

The core objectives are:

1. Explore and analyse the agency, decision-making, relational and affective practices of mid-level actors to conceptualise uncertainty management and generate strategies for preparedness.
2. Provide context-specific and comparative insights on uncertainty management and deliver co-produced strategies for building reliability.
3. Establish and lead a community of practice for cross-learning on uncertainty management and exploring opportunities for scaling up and out.