The Future of Volunteering in Extreme Weather Events: Critical Reflections on Key Challenges and Opportunities for Climate Resilience

Abstract

Volunteers are playing a significant role in interacting with ongoing societal shocks and stresses, such as mobilizing resources and supporting responses to extreme weather events. Their actions contribute to the pursuit of local climate resilience by shaping the local level and influencing socio-ecological systems. Therefore, academics, communities, practitioners and policymakers responsible for understanding, encouraging, developing and sustaining volunteering activity can benefit from critical reflections on volunteering in extreme weather events in order to support ongoing research initiatives, future research and policy agendas, and the development of funding strategies and public programs for climate resilience. This Policy Forum paper critically reflects on the current status of volunteering for extreme weather events and local climate resilience, using experiences from flood risk management, to identify key challenges and opportunities for the future. It builds on the ESRC CASCADE-NET project in discussing both academic puzzles and practical challenges faced in volunteering for local climate resilience in an attempt to bridge gaps and foster further debates between theory and practice. These insights are drawn from a series of dialogic exchanges that reflect the authors’ diverse perspectives and lived experiences of volunteering that emerge in their research and practice in England, the Czech Republic, and The Netherlands. We identify and share ten urgent challenges, followed by discussion of four cross-cutting themes that exist: volunteers as a renewable energy source, stakeholder narratives of volunteering, learning from other contexts, and transformative resilience. In exploring the futures of volunteering, this Policy Forum challenges existing thought by proposing the need to move beyond traditional narratives of “the volunteer” and “volunteering” to a more inclusive and nuanced understanding. Through this, we believe that volunteering can play an essential role in pursuing a just transition, with volunteers being able to challenge the status quo to contribute to transformative climate resilience practice and policy.