RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026
1 – 4 September 2026
The Coast-R Network is organising a double session on 3 September at this year’s RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, sponsored by the Coastal & Marine Research Group, the Climate Change Research Group and the Participatory Geographies Research Group.
The sessions feature presentations from ReCCS and Coast-R Small Grants projects, plus panel discussion, Q&A and interactive workshop activities.
The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference regularly attracts over 2,000 geographers from around the world. This year’s conference is on the theme of “Geographies of inequalities: toward just places” and will take place in London at the Society and Imperial College London, and online.
Information about our session is given below. Follow the link to the RGS website to find out more about the conference and register your place:
Coast-R Network double session, 3 September 2026:
Co-creating Coastal Resilience: Participation, collaboration, and cross-sector working for just coastal futures
Session 1: 14:25 – 16:05 | Session 2: 16:35 – 18:15
Sponsored by: Climate Change Research Group; Participatory Geographies Research Group; Coastal and Marine Research Group
Session abstract
Coastal risk is not simply the outcome of sea-level rise, erosion, flooding or pollution. It is also produced through the politics of governance – who defines risk, whose knowledge counts, who is allowed in the room, and how responsibility is allocated, shared or quietly offloaded across sectors and scales. As coastal hazards increasingly intersect with housing shortages, ageing infrastructure, habitat loss, public health crises and fragile local economies, collaborative working has become a central expectation within shoreline management and flood risk governance (Sayers et al., 2022; Lane et al., 2011). Yet in practice, participation and partnership is often expensive, slow, fragile and messy – shaped, and sometimes derailed, by uneven capacity, institutional inertia, funding constraints and histories of mistrust (Blunkell, 2017).
This pair of linked sessions brings together researchers, partners and community collaborators involved in the Resilient Coastal Communities and Seas (ReCCS) programme, a £15m UKRI–Defra programme involving 100+ co-leads and charged with doing something ambitious: generating knowledge, action and resilience for UK coastal communities and seas in just 5 years. At the programme’s midpoint, these sessions offer space not for polished narratives, but for honest, critical and constructive reflections on what it really means to attempt participatory coastal research at scale and across sectors with diverging priorities, constraints and cultures.
Session 1 timetable: 14:25 – 16:05, 3 September 2026
| Time | Duration | Submission | Speakers / Affiliation |
| 14:25 – 14:35 | 10 mins | COCOR Project: co-building coastal resilience through research and community engagement | Melanie Biausque, Kirstin Lemon & Kieran Parker (Geological Survey of Northern Ireland / BGS) |
| 14:35 – 14:45 | 10 mins | Building Coastal Community Resilience in the East of England: Reflecting on an Asset-Based Approach | Scott Leatham, Irene Lorenzoni, Johanna Forster (UEA) & Thea Behrman (Estuary Festival) |
| 14:45 – 14:55 | 10 mins | Archive to Action: Connecting Coastal Community Insights to Policy | Claire Harris (Museum of London Archaeology) |
| 14:55 – 15:05 | 10 mins | Relational Resilience: Impact and Learning in Transdisciplinary Settings | Dragana Vidovic (Essex), Elaine Czech (Kent), Scott Leatham (UEA), Gina Yannitell Reinhardt (Essex) |
| 15:05 – 15:15 | 10 mins | Planning for Uncertainty: Building Adaptive Coastal Planning Capacity in England and Northern Ireland | Malachy Buck (London South Bank) & Linda McElduff (Ulster) |
| 15:15 – 15:25 | 10 mins | Q&A | |
| 15:25 – 15:50 | 25 mins | Activity: Co-constructed Community Dialogue — ethnographic vignettes and empathy mapping on Shared User Pathways in Wales | Matthew Howell & Tom Avery (Swansea) |
| 15:50 – 16:05 | 15 mins | Changeover & Overflow time |
Session 2 timetable: 16:35 – 18:15, 3 September 2026
| Time | Duration | Submission | Speakers / Affiliation |
| 16:35 – 16:40 | 5 mins | Lightning Paper: SEAS — Co-producing Early Insights on Brown Shrimp Decline in Morecambe Bay | Jajati Mandal, Lucy Loud, Mariana Lima et al. (Salford / NWIFCA / CEFAS / MGET) |
| 16:40 – 16:50 | 10 mins | Listening to North Sea Multi-Species Communities in Transition | Rebecca Macklin & Andrew Whitehouse (Aberdeen) |
| 16:50 – 17:00 | 10 mins | Coastal Legacy Landfills: perceptions, management, engagement and risks | Rhys Jones (Queen Mary University of London) |
| 17:00 – 17:10 | 10 mins | Engaging with coastal communities and waste legacies: Reflections from an interdisciplinary research team | James Robinson (QMUL), Rhys Kelly (Bradford) et al. (RACC) |
| 17:10 – 17:20 | 10 mins | Shifting Shorelines: A Serious Game to Capture Qualitative and Lived Experiences for Inclusive Coastal Resilience Planning | Steven Forrest (University of Hull) |
| 17:20 – 17:30 | 10 mins | Learning from Past Marine Energy Transitions: Insights for Just Coastal Futures | Amy McCarron, Tavis Potts, Daria Shapovalova (Aberdeen) & Scott McGrane (Strathclyde) |
| 17:30 – 17:40 | 10 mins | Q&A | |
| 17:40 – 18:00 | 20 mins | Panel discussion (single discussion covering all panel submissions) | Karen Alexander (Heriot-Watt, TRANSECTS); Gina Reinhardt (Essex, ARISE); Kate Spencer (Queen Mary University of London, RACC); Briony McDonagh (University of Hull, Risky Cities) |
| 18:00 – 18:15 | 15 mins | Changeover & Overflow time |
Abstracts
Session 1
COCOR Project: co-building coastal resilience through research and community engagement
Melanie Biausque, Kirstin Lemon & Kieran Parker (Geological Survey of Northern Ireland) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
Tyrella Beach (County Down), Northern Ireland, is a 2 km-long sandy, dissipative beach backed by 25 ha of mature sand dunes supporting a diverse ecosystem. The site forms part of the Tyrella and Minerstown Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI); recent assessments by DAERA have identified ‘unfavourable’ dune conditions. Restoration measures, including scrub removal, dune grass planting and protective fencing, have been implemented, yet geomorphological monitoring and evaluation of their effectiveness remain limited. Given the role of sand dunes as natural coastal defences, improved understanding of coastal processes and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) is essential in the context of increasing coastal risk.
The CO-creating COastal Resilience (COCOR) project addresses this gap by integrating coastal research, citizen science, and education. Planned monitoring at Tyrella includes monthly RTK-DGPS surveys to record cross-shore profiles, dune toe and vegetation-line positions, complemented by drone-based photogrammetry and analysis of existing LiDAR and hydrodynamic datasets. Citizen science is central to the project, with shoreline monitoring delivered through CoastSnap, enabling beach users to collect standardised photographs from fixed locations to quantify shoreline position and morphological change. Additional volunteer-led measurements will use low-cost methods, including rulers and existing fencing poles, to record sediment elevation and changes between fixed markers and the vegetation line. Together, these datasets will support assessment of dune restoration measures and improve understanding of vegetation–erosion interactions. Educational outreach with local schools and communities will promote awareness of coastal processes, dune conservation, and responsible beach use. By combining high-resolution monitoring with participatory approaches, the project delivers a transferable, low-cost framework for dune monitoring and long-term coastal resilience.
Building Coastal Community Resilience in the East of England: Reflecting on an Asset-Based Approach
Scott Leatham, Irene Lorenzoni, Johanna Forster (University of East Anglia) & Thea Behrman (Estuary Festival) | Project: ARISE
This paper reflects on an asset-based approach with a multi-methods and multi-site research design to engage local communities and build coastal resilience in the East of England. There has been a paucity of case-based studies highlighting local, community-based understandings of coastal resilience (Rollason, 2025). Further, framings of coastal resilience have often focused on vulnerability, risk exposure, and gaps in capacity to cope with climate, environmental, and ecological change, or socioeconomic decline (Gero et al., 2024). Addressing these concerns, the community engagement workstream within the ARISE Project set out to understand, map, and contribute to identifying practical strengths, resources, capacities, knowledges, and opportunities for their mobilisation.
In each of four coastal locations in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent, we hosted a series of initial engagement events; a main event comprising a “world café” facilitation (Brown & Isaacs, 2005; Löhr et al., 2020); and pre-/post-interviews with Q Methodology as an elicitation technique to generate comparative data. Throughout, a team of artists worked across the events to help inform research, policy, and public understanding, creating final artworks for each location that honour the engagement of participants and provide a legacy for the ideas that have been generated. In this paper, we reflect on the process of building community trust and engagement; the focus on non-extractive data practices; and on bridging the theory-practice gap by focusing on tangible, community-led initiatives resulting from the events. We draw lessons on the use of innovative engagement strategies in co-producing relational capacities for greater coastal resilience.
Archive to Action: Connecting Coastal Community Insights to Policy
Claire Harris (Museum of London Archaeology) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
Coastal risk governance is increasingly framed through participation and partnership, with decision-making positioned as a shared responsibility between authorities, stakeholders, and communities. Yet in practice, questions remain about whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and how community insights are translated into policy.
The paper offers a critical reflection on the structural conditions that continue to constrain the inclusion of community knowledge within coastal governance, and considers how community archives can contribute to challenging enduring power imbalances and addressing persistent representational gaps. The paper examines these issues through Archive to Action, a project evaluating the Coasts in Mind (CiM) Community Archive and its potential to connect community knowledge with coastal governance.
The CiM archive is a co-created, GIS-based digital platform hosting photographs, oral histories, and other place-based materials that document over a century of coastal change. Developed with end-users, it enables communities to share lived experience and local knowledge. By providing policymakers with accessible, usable evidence the platform seeks to bridge gaps between locally held knowledge and formal coastal planning evidence.
Working with policymakers in the Swale Estuary and the CiM national Steering Group, Archive to Action examines how community knowledge is accessed, interpreted, and incorporated into decision-making. Drawing on hackathons and in-depth interviews, the paper traces the pathway from archive to policy. It concludes by reflecting on the challenges of embedding community knowledge within governance, highlighting both the potential and the limits of participatory infrastructures like the CiM archive.
Relational Resilience: Impact and Learning in Transdisciplinary Settings
Dragana Vidovic (University of Essex), Elaine Czech (University of Kent), Scott Leatham (University of East Anglia), Gina Yannitell Reinhardt (University of Essex) | Project: ARISE
In transdisciplinary settings, tracking changes in outcomes is only one part of understanding a community’s capacity to adapt, transform and collaborate over time.
This paper reflects on developing a transdisciplinary protocol that learns from and mobilises diverse knowledges in developing coastal community resilience as part of the ARISE Initiative, funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (ES/Y008901/1). ARISE brings together researchers, community members, and local organisations to identify locally significant issues along the Norfolk–Kent coastline, map existing and needed resources, and test policies and decision-making processes to strengthen community resilience.
Evaluating success draws on multiple forms of evidence, including community experiences, systematic data, creative expressions and institutional dynamics. Methods include community observations, interviews, questionnaires, creative outputs, policy network and community mapping, and ripple-effect mapping to capture both intended and unintended outcomes. Artwork and other creative tools support synthesis, reflection, and communication of local knowledge, while surveys measure shifts in trust, confidence, participation, and connection to natural and built environments at regional and local areas. Monitoring and stewardship activities support early identification of environmental concerns and document institutional responses to community- and citizen science-generated information. Additional indicators include participant attendance and experience, evolving community networks, and the adoption of project tools and methods by local authorities and groups.
This mixed-method approach allows ARISE to assess impact and learning as interconnected processes within complex social–ecological systems. By integrating qualitative, quantitative, and creative forms of evidence, the project captures how communities develop resilience over time.
Planning for Uncertainty: Building Adaptive Coastal Planning Capacity in England and Northern Ireland
Malachy Buck (London South Bank University) & Linda McElduff (Ulster University) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
The risks of coastal erosion and flooding are increasing in the UK. Yet, coastal management approaches are fragmented and differentiated across the UK, with complexity of varying legislation, institutional responsibilities and resource limitations creating challenges for planning within coastal authorities. In Northern Ireland the absence of a formalised framework for coastal management leaves councils without a clear policy basis for proactive coastal management and creates uncertainty within planning processes. In England, SMPs offer a framework for adaptation, but their integration within spatial planning is varied. The funding for managing coastal risk is uncertain in both nations. This uncertainty in responsibility, funding and policy makes it difficult for planners to balance development pressures and socio-economic objectives, with longer-term resilience against coastal change and flooding.
This paper provides the preliminary findings of a Coast-R funded comparative project examining how planners interpret and manage these uncertainties, drawing specifically on insights emerging from a series of participatory workshops with local authority planners, policymakers and coastal practitioners. The workshops provided space to articulate the types of uncertainty they encounter, the institutional and policy conditions that shape their work, and the challenges of balancing long-term adaptation with immediate development pressures. The workshops surface a series of important questions for the long-term management of coastal areas at risk: how planners understand their role within coastal management; how coastal management frameworks (or their absence) influence confidence and decision making in planning; and where participants see opportunities for more adaptive responses to coastal risk.
Activity: Co-constructed Community Dialogue — ethnographic vignettes and empathy mapping on Shared User Pathways (SUPs) in Wales
Matthew Howell & Tom Avery (Swansea University) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
The following session will demonstrate how Empathy Maps can be used as a tool to discuss a broad range of controversial topics. The session draws upon ethnographic vignettes, to encourage participants to consider the diverse needs of other community members. As a visualisation tool, the empathy map encourages us to walk in the shoes of others and consider a wide range of emotions. The ethnographic dimension provides meaningful insights through co-construction vignettes. This method encourages rational dialogue that is based on careful consideration and reflection of other people. It allows the participants to carefully disconnect themselves from emotively driven discussion and unpack rhetorical assumptions. Additionally, the method ensures that the quieter voices in the debate are heard, therefore widening the themes of discourse allowing healthy debates to develop. If community dialogues are not established with care, they risk producing new community tensions or deepening existing ones. As researchers, we have a responsibility to consider any action that might undermine community cohesion rather than build it. The following session provides a demonstration of how we can minimise these risks.
Session 2
Lightning: SEAS — Co-producing Early Insights on Brown Shrimp Decline in Morecambe Bay
Jajati Mandal, Lucy Loud, Mariana Lima, Annabel Plumeridge, Piyali Chowdhury, Andrea Drewitt, Andrew Wolfenden, Naiara Guimaraes Sales & Chiara Benvenuto (University of Salford; North Western Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority; CEFAS; Mersey Gateway Environmental Trust) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
Coastal small-scale fisheries are increasingly exposed to interacting pressures arising from climate variability, environmental change, and pollution. In Morecambe Bay (UK), fishers have reported a sustained decline in brown shrimp (Crangon crangon), yet systematic scientific assessments have been limited for more than two decades. The SEAS (Shrimp-Environment Assessment Study in Morecambe Bay) project is being developed as a collaborative response, integrating participatory research, ecological monitoring, and contaminant analysis to generate an evidence-based framework relevant to both ecosystem health and fishery resilience.
The project combines stakeholder workshops, field sampling, and laboratory analyses. Fishers’ experiential and historical knowledge have informed research priorities, sampling design, and interpretation of change. Ecological monitoring will focus on shrimp population metrics, including size structure, density, and maturity. Environmental assessments will target sediment and water quality, with analyses of trace metals and selected organic contaminants. Climate and habitat datasets will be integrated in the analyses to explore potential links between environmental stressors and shrimp population dynamics.
Given the early stage, the initial results foreground process-oriented insights rather than outcomes. Particular attention is given to how co-production shapes research framing, how local knowledge and scientific methods are negotiated, and how collaboration influences trust, expectations, and adaptive study design. Anticipated challenges include aligning sampling with tidal cycles and fishing schedules, managing the uncertainty inherent in baseline-building studies, and translating complex analytical concepts across sectors. By examining these dimensions, SEAS aims to contribute to broader discussions on inclusive, community-engaged approaches to coastal resilience, knowledge exchange, environmental monitoring, and fisheries management.
Listening to North Sea Multi-Species Communities in Transition
Rebecca Macklin & Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
This paper provides reflections on an ongoing, community-based project in Yell and Torry, that explores the lived, affective, and sensory experiences of energy transition and infrastructural development in two North Sea communities, as well as the linkages between them. Along with economic gains, the development of overlapping energy industries in Scotland has brought significant changes to local ecosystems and coastal lifeways, and communities are frequently marginalised in decision-making processes. The original fishing village of Torry, Aberdeen, has been reshaped for the oil industry through the construction of two harbours and related infrastructure. Yell in Shetland has benefitted from the adjacent Sullom Voe oil terminal but the decline of oil and arrival of large-scale windfarms raises questions over decision-making processes and the socio-environmental impacts of energy transition. Yet, collective ownership models can offer routes to self-determination for communities.
Placing particular focus on sound, this project asks how an emphasis on situated and embodied experiences can provide a fuller understanding of the historic and future impacts of energy and infrastructural development, as well as support the preservation and recovery of environmental knowledges and at-risk ecocultural heritage. The research adopts a multispecies approach, placing human experiences in relation to those of birds and other wildlife equally impacted by infrastructure projects. Sharing sonic archives of place, co-produced through community workshops in Yell and Torry, this paper will offer reflections on how researchers can support community-led initiatives to build the affective and social infrastructures necessary for a just transition.
Coastal Legacy Landfills: perceptions, management, engagement and risks behind the UK’s silent climate timebomb. An overview of a PhD project.
Rhys Jones (Queen Mary University of London) | Project: RACC
There are over 1200 legacy landfill sites in coastal and low-lying estuarine areas of England. Due to climate change induced sea level rise and changing storm patterns, these areas are facing an increasing level of risk from flooding and erosion. There is a lack of knowledge regarding the content of these sites, and their governance requires uniquely local, but nationally equitable, approaches.
This includes understanding what creates strong working relationships between research, policymakers, publics and different levels of government. Assessing these relationships is complex and, in regard to legacy landfills, has not received the level of focus that they deserve. However, to address these “silent ticking time bombs”, this must change and the role of local authorities as planners, regulators and managers must be explored.
This research begins with local authorities and builds outwards to investigate three relationship streams, their dynamics, tensions and practices of collaboration in responding to the risks of coastal legacy landfills. These relationships refer to how local authorities engage their communities; how local authorities share learnings; and the practices of collaboration between local and national governments.
My presentation will overview the mixed methods approach utilised in this research, introduce its initial findings and describe its relationship to the Resilience of Anthropocene Coasts and Communities project. This research aims to improve understandings behind how to manage coastal legacy landfills in a fairer, more inclusive and safer way. It will contribute to debates regarding community engagement in decision making and improve understandings of dynamics and collaboration across governments.
Engaging with coastal communities and waste legacies: Reflections from an interdisciplinary research team
James Robinson (QMUL), Rhys Kelly (Bradford), Ute Kelly (Bradford), Megan Clinch (QMUL), Isabel Cotton (QMUL), Minty Donald (Glasgow), Rhys Jones (QMUL), Suzy O’Hara (Sunderland),
James Porter (King’s College London), Andrew Russell (QMUL) | Project: RACC
The term ‘community engagement’ is widespread throughout research, policy and practice at the coast. It is often ‘framed’ positively, related to human residents, and invokes commitments about how research should be done. These factors can, unhelpfully, mask complexity and challenges related to community engagement in theory and practice. ‘Engagement’ can take many forms and ‘communities’ can be defined in many, not always human, ways. Designing and conducting ethical and effective engagement requires skill and different forms of knowledge. Engagement is unpredictable and often requires adaptation as understandings or situations develop, and may not be necessary or appropriate.
In this paper, members of Resilience of Anthropocene Coasts and Communities (RACC) reflect on our experiences designing and conducting community engagement whilst researching coastal legacy waste. Engagement on this topic provokes particular considerations distinguishing it from other coastal adaptation issues. Local authorities play a leading governance role but often lack capacity to act. Deciding if, when, how and who to engage in the context of project goals, constraints and its legacy require careful consideration. Decisions have been complicated by ambitions in our original proposal, plural understandings of community engagement within our interdisciplinary team and communication challenges with key stakeholders. In efforts to engage responsibly we aim to continuously reflect and adapt our research plans. There remains much to learn about what is appropriate and feasible. This session is an opportunity to share and reflect on our developing knowledge and understanding. We hope this will benefit others grappling with (community) engagement at the coast.
Shifting Shorelines: A Serious Game to Capture Qualitative and Lived Experiences for Inclusive Coastal Resilience Planning
Steven Forrest (University of Hull) | Project: Coast-R Small Grants Fund
UK coastal communities face accelerating erosion and flood risk alongside widening health and socio-economic inequalities. Existing practice and policy guidelines are often informed predominantly through quantitative metrics with limited attention and understanding in incorporating qualitative data and lived experiences from coastal communities as forms of useable evidence. This research investigated the potential of using serious gaming as a methodological approach to facilitate community dialogue on coastal resilience planning whilst also providing a structure that enables the systematic collection of data that benefits researchers, local authorities, and the communities themselves.
Findings are presented from a UK-wide scoping review of community evidence collection and use in coastal resilience policy, supported by semi-structured interviews with national and regional stakeholders. This review informed the development and testing of Shifting Shorelines, a serious game that focuses on facilitating discussions in coastal communities about current and future risks being faced. Shifting Shorelines has been deployed in Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby (UK). In these sessions, participants adopted stakeholder roles, negotiated trade-offs and articulated their values, needs and priorities. Gameplay outputs (audio, artefacts and decisions) were thematically analysed to produce usable qualitative evidence for policy and practice. This process and the outputs were sense-checked and co-developed with relevant stakeholders, including North Yorkshire Council and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service (project partners).
The serious game demonstrates a practical and scalable method for generating qualitative evidence to inform coastal policymaking and business cases. However, there are also practical and theoretical challenges, which will be discussed further in the presentation.
Learning from Past Marine Energy Transitions: Insights for Just Coastal Futures
Amy McCarron, Tavis Potts, Daria Shapovalova (University of Aberdeen) & Scott McGrane (University of Strathclyde) | Project: TRANSECTS
Coastal communities have long been central to the UK’s maritime and energy economy, having hosted successive waves of activity from traditional extractive industries to offshore oil and gas and now, to marine renewables. As the UK accelerates efforts to meet climate and net zero commitments, these regions are once again at the forefront of marine energy transitions (METs). Past transitions highlight important questions about justice, participation and governance that can inform how current and future change is shaped for coastal communities.
Through a Rapid Evidence Assessment of academic, policy, grey and archival literature, we examine how the concept of ‘just transition’ has been framed, experienced, and governed during past METs. We find that coastal communities face a distinctive set of challenges, including longstanding economic reliance on volatile and boom-bust industries, limited scope to shape decision making within centralised and fragmented governance systems, and the cumulative erosion of local traditions and identities as transitions unfold over time.
Based on these challenges, we identify several opportunities to ‘get it right’ for coastal communities in future METs. These include strengthening the relational support that makes participation meaningful, such as more formal roles for ‘bridging organisations’ and trusted intermediaries, to support dialogue across sectors and scales. We highlight the value of clearer, more consistent pathways for community benefit and local value retention, alongside developing place-based evidence to guide more anticipatory transition planning. Together, these opportunities offer practical ways to strengthen the fairness, inclusivity and long-term resilience of METs and enhance the legitimacy of coastal transition governance processes.
Panel discussion
Karen Alexander (Heriot-Watt University) — TRANSECTS; Gina Reinhardt (University of Essex) — ARISE; Kate Spencer (Queen Mary University of London) — RACC; Briony McDonagh (University of Hull) — Coast-R Network
A panel discussion drawing together the cross-cutting themes of both sessions and the panel submissions.
