'Don’t lose heart in dark times, we can’t keep going in the same direction forever': Culture and a Compound of Covid and Climate as Catalysts for Change in Responding to Extreme Weather in Scotland

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of culture in influencing local responses to a new type of crisis during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in rural Scotland, and explores how culture, together with the lessons learnt from experiencing Covid in a context characterised by increasing intensity of climate-induced extreme weather, subsequently helped shape new and more effective collective responses to compounded storm-related emergencies. By examining the findings from online ethnographic interviews focusing on experiences of extreme weather undertaken during the first Covid wave, and a combination of online and face-to-face interviews that took place in the aftermath of a second wave, I explore the importance of the role of memory, history and sense of place for making sense of and responding to the new Covid crisis, and how these same aspects of culture were drawn upon to generate new forms of self-organisation and collective action for responding to extreme weather during the second Covid wave. In particular, I highlight how long-standing, culturally-specific ideas underpinning conceptualisations of a ‘local identity’ that were also perceived to have previously been ‘hijacked’ and appropriated by policy-makers to promote official de-centralised responses to extreme weather emergencies were reconsidered in the aftermath of the first Covid wave to promote greater social interconnectedness which, in-turn, helped overcome long-standing storm-response difficulties as well as new challenges facing community members during subsequent storms. I argue that this not only reveals the importance of culture for devising new ways of responding to risk within contexts of uncertainty and compounded crises but presents important insights for improving risk communication and helps further illuminate problems associated with the hegemonic uses of the concepts of resilience and vulnerability which continues to dominate official UK policy concerning climate-change and civil emergencies, as well as much of the wider risk and disaster research.