Social Science Space

Niall McLoughlin is a PhD candidate in psychology and arts scholar at the University of Bath, as well as an associate with Climate Outreach. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, McLoughlin discusses the psychological catastrophe that accompanied the natural disaster of the 2015 Cumbrian floods and what that might teach us for addressing climate change.

Mitigation enables people and communities to prevent disasters or at least reduce their impacts on the loss of life and property. And while mitigation is often presented as a mission for engineering, there is a wide scope for social and behavioral preparation explains veteran public policy researcher in a new paper on mitigating flooding catastrophes.