Shifting Shores: Managing Challenge and Change on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK

Abstract

In this paper, we look at how landscape and climate change are simultaneously apprehended through institutional strategies and then negotiated through local knowledge and social relations on the ground. We argue that by examining landscapes that are practised, embodied and lived, it is possible to gain an understanding of people's actions, beliefs and values in relation to climate and climate change. This attention to cultural landscapes also enables us to ask how a variety of publics make sense of climate change, and how they are invited to do so by organisations that take responsibility for the management and preservation of landscape, such as the National Trust, Europe's biggest conservation organisation. This paper considers how the Trust makes sense of climate change via the document Shifting Shores and how its strategies are operationalised on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK.

Key Words:

• landscape
• climate change
• conservation
• cultural geography
• National Trust

Notes

1. The National Trust is a charity, founded in 1895, which is completely independent of government. It is funded via membership fees, donations and legacies, and revenue raised from commercial operations. Its 2011 Annual Report notes that it has 3.8 million members, 61,500 volunteers, 17.7 million visitors to its pay-for-entry properties. Its website (www.nationaltrust.org.uk) reports 50 million visitors to open air properties in 2008.

2. As Rummukainen points out, “GCMs [General Circulation Models] can effectively address large-scale climate features such as the general circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean, and sub-continental patterns of, for example, temperature and precipitation” but there is a problem with achieving regional predictions, for “the formal resolution (grid scale) is at best around 100–200 km. Their real resolution is more like 6–8 grid distances, i.e., of the order of 1000 km. This falls short of many key regional and local climate aspects, e.g. intensive precipitation” (Rummukainen, 2009, p. 82).

3. The South West, for example, includes all of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire along with parts of Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

4. We have used pseudonyms to maintain the anonymity of our respondents.