Extreme weather, complex spaces and diverse rural places: An intra-community scale analysis of responses to storm events in rural Scotland, UK

Abstract

The impacts that increasing rural demographic and socio-cultural diversity has had upon the responses of rural community members to weather-related hazard events has remained relatively understudied within the Disaster Risk Reduction scholarship. Drawing upon interview evidence obtained from a study of three rural communities in Scotland, UK, the article explores how variation in length of residence amongst community members affects abilities to cope during periods of extreme weather, with long-term residence being associated with more positive outcomes than more recent in-migration. The article suggests that differences in responses between long-term residents and more recent in-migrants results from a complex array of differences in exposure to previous storm events, differences in occupational backgrounds that result in differences in ways of relating to the land, and differences in social relationship preferences and expectations. The article makes the claim that policies and practices of Disaster Risk Reduction, including the Scottish Community Resilience initiatives, need to focus more on the intra-community scale in rural settings in order to better protect residents from the risks that extreme weather poses to human well-being. In their present form, Scottish Community Resilience initiatives are likely to be limited in their ability to improve the storm-coping abilities of residents because their implementation at the whole-community scale reflects outdated assumptions about the character of rural communities and ignores the impacts of several decades of demographic change. The findings also raise questions about how the knowledge that enables successful adaptation to environmental hazard events can be effectively mobilised within increasingly complex and diverse societies.