About the Deep Listening Project
The Deep Listening Project seeks to co-design technologies that enable institutions and communities to collaborate towards effective and just climate adaptation.
The Deep Listening Project (TDLP) will create a sustainable communication infrastructure for collaborative adaptation. Together with communities and institutions, TDLP will co-design tools and procedures that emphasize the human and holistic environmental dimensions of adaptation while using AI and decision-support technologies to enable institutions to “deeply listen” to Indigenous and frontline communities.
Through case studies, it will engage in collaborative research, design, and practice to create artifacts that can shift the global adaptation paradigm.
Climate imaginaries
Indigenous Peoples’ and frontline communities’ visions of climate futures, shared through storytelling technologies and strategies.
Sensemaking
Sociotechnical mechanisms used to extract deep, meaningful insights that can be then utilized in climate adaptation processes.
What is the challenge?
The current process of climate adaptation is headed by intergovernmental organizations, international non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations. In the past decade, there has been an increasing acceptance by governmental organizations that issues around climate-induced migration are a global challenge, given that climate change is global. As a result, landmark agreements have been signed, with the commonality of involving a coordinated approach from all the stakeholders.
However, climate adaptation faces numerous obstacles. Inadequate support for in situ adaptation, fragmentation of policy regimes and responses, inadequate consultation with affected communities, and inequity in decision making and problems with cultural integration with receiving communities, among other social issues, often prevent successful adaptation processess.¹ Environmental interventions can also be maladaptive by increasing vulnerability or hazards for some groups.²
In light of these issues, scholars have called for approaches to climate adaptation that recognize historical structural inequality,³ as well as intersectional approaches that consider inequalities in indigenous contexts and their unique vulnerabilities to climate change and adaptation policies.⁴ They have also called for pluralistic approaches that do not assume homogeneity but that recognize the lived realities of multiple subjectivities,⁵ as well as those that consider the disruptions of the relation between space, place, and people.⁶ Procedural justice is necessary: not just providing consultations, but transforming institutional processes.⁷
Climate adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines adaptation as “The process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects.”
Research, design and practice
The project will be carried out with a case study methodology, where we will engage in collaborative research, design, and practice within eight discrete contexts. In years one and two, we will partner with Indigenous groups in the United States and frontline communities in Nepal. Additional case studies will be developed in Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, Brazil, Colombia or Argentina in years three and four. Within each case study, we will explore the five components of deep listening and develop and test technologies that can enhance communication and decision-making, leading to greater trust and sustainable planning.
The Deep Listening Project will provide a rigorous examination and evaluation of how institutions currently collaborate with frontline communities in developing adaptation plans and create new technologies and procedures that can be adopted and adapted in contexts around the world. Considerable effort will be spent on cultivating and socializing emerging communication practices within a range of organizational cultures to ensure broad uptake of new tools.