Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Climate Risk Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/crm

Narratives of change and the co-development of climate services

T
for action
Werner Krauß
artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 7, D-28359 Bremen, Germany

A R T IC LE I N F O ABS TRA CT

Keywords: After the Paris Agreement, the transition towards a carbon free society necessitates new forms of
Environmental humanities collaboration between climate science and society. In my article, I argue that the increasing
Anthropology participation of disciplines from the humanities represent a cultural turn in climate risk gov-
Narrative theory ernance. At the example of my anthropological case study at the Northern German coastline, I
Climate service
show that the co-development of place-based climate services for action means a challenge to the
Collaboration
science-based definition of climate change and the resulting problem-solving strategies. Climate
change materializes in form of extreme weather events, changes in the seasons and sea level rise.
Local narratives represent these changes, expand the problem definition of climate change and
express the multiple entanglements of weather, climate and society. Past flood disasters and
interactions with the sea are presented in different configurations of time and space that put
emerging forms of climate services into context. Narratives of change serve as a localization
device and as starting point for the co-development of climate services for action. Collaborations
between science and humanities on the one hand, and between researchers and local actors on
the other are an open-ended process. In form of a field report, I identify diverse narratives of
change and first steps towards the co-development of new forms of climate services. At the ex-
ample of a scenario workshop, I describe local visions of climate risk governance, with climate
researchers as facilitators and moderators of public forums motivated for action. This essay
provides an anthropological insight into this process and details the procedures of emerging
collaborations, making use of field notes, anthropological self-reflection and narrative theory.

1. Introduction

As an anthropologist interested in climate change, I am used to working in an interdisciplinary field that is dominated by natural
sciences. Climate change is predominantly defined as a physical phenomenon and made public as a scientific fact, which has turned
out to be an important argument in the political debate. But after the Paris Agreement, with its ambitious goals, a challenge has been
to shift the focus from detection of climate change to place-based climate action. Climate change materializes differently in every
region, and climate services at the interface of science and society have to adapt accordingly. There is more at stake than finding
technological solutions; the challenge is to co-develop local climate action and to make solutions feasible, sustainable and demo-
cratically legitimate. The primary task is no longer to educate and to inform people, but to listen to their narratives of a changing
climate as a starting point for collaborative climate action.
This article is based on my experiences of the complexity and challenges of putting this agenda into practice, at the example of my
anthropological fieldwork at the German North Sea coast, in the Jade Bay (Jadebusen) region. My research is part of an

E-mail address: wkrauss@uni-bremen.de.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2020.100217
Received 28 July 2019; Received in revised form 23 December 2019; Accepted 17 February 2020
Available online 26 February 2020
2212-0963/ © 2020 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

interdisciplinary European Union project titled “Co-development of place-based climate services for action” (CoCliServ)1. In the
course of this article, I want to provide a detailed insight into this process of co-development, which includes collaboration among
different disciplines in the project as well as collaboration with local actors. Climate change matters differently in each place, and
each place is different from all other places. In our CoCliServ project, we use local “narratives of change” as a localization device. In
the proposal, we wrote that narratives “give meaning to facts and scientific calculations” and “turn matters of fact into matters of
concern”.2 But what does this actually mean in practice? In this article, I will give a detailed account of how we found a common
definition of “narratives” in the project with the help of butterflies; how I hunted for narratives in my case study at the German North
Sea coast, and how I tried together with colleagues from climate science to initiate a collaborative exploration of what it takes to start
action on climate change. In climate risk management, the focus is on technological solutions, and methodological doubts or self-
reflective considerations easily are overplayed with routine, common sense and technological expertise. But co-development is a
dialogic process that challenges these routines, the identity and the role of science as assumed leader of the political process, as it is
demanded for example by the FridaysforFuture movement.
In this anthropological intervention, I argue instead that climate risk management increasingly has to embrace its role as mod-
erator and facilitator of a public forum or arena, where local actors decide in a democratic way about climate activities. In order to
assume this role actively, interdisciplinary climate researchers have to learn telling their own narratives of change, too. They have to
situate themselves carefully in the respective settings to get access to the specific configurations of space and time that make up the
local.

1.1. Proceeding

This article mimics an anthropological field report and is divided into five parts; the time span covers the first and a half year of
my experiences as an anthropologist in an interdisciplinary project.
The first part deals with methodological and terminological issues. How do anthropologists work, what have butterflies to do with
narratives, and how do narrative theory and climate services relate? The focus is on the process, of the coming-into-being of a project.
In the second part, I present some accounts of my stationary fieldwork in the Jade Bay area at the German North Sea coast,
between November 2017 and August 2018. My first encounter with local actors in the Jade Bay area confronted me with my own
expectations and ended in a “culture shock”; there is a prize to pay for accessing the local, and I had to learn listening closely to local
narratives of change. As an example of a shared narrative, I present an account of a celebration in memory of the “Weihnachtsflut”
(Christmas flood) of 1717, where I learned about putting apocalyptic warnings of rising sea level into a historical perspective. This
event is followed by the discussion of a landmark – the tidal gate of the coastal village of Dangast – as a chronotope; the concept of
chronotope goes back to the narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and is “a particular configuration of time and space that
generates stories through which a society can examine itself” (Pratt, 2017: 170).
In the fourth part, I provide an account of a scenario-workshop that I co-organized with the “North German coastal and climate
office”3, where different actors met in order to learn about regional projections about climate change, to present their own activities
and to test collaboration. In all of these stories, there is always an element of self-identification in the presence of the other (Kramer,
1992); an anthropological insight which might be true for all of those involved in this project, as members, associates or potential
contributors. As a conclusion, I argue for a cultural turn in climate risk management.

2. Anthropology, narrative theory and methods

Anthropology does not necessarily produce results or data which stand on their own or speak for themselves. Instead, anthro-
pologists try to carefully situate themselves in the field, knowing that they only can access partial truths. Based on long-lasting
fieldwork and participant observation, I practiced “deep hanging out” at the German North Sea coast. Geertz (1998) coined this term
in order to challenge the epistemic illusion of an objective documentation of culture and to highlight instead the contingency and
subjectivity of the anthropological method and the role of serendipity for the research process. In search of place-based narratives of
change, I followed the recommendations of my interlocutors. I interviewed mayors, administrators, regional climate managers,
farmers, associates of the dike and sluice organizations, activists of NGOs, politicians, scientists, the director and members of the
National Park and UNESCO world heritage site Wadden Sea, and many more. I attended public events about wind energy and
meetings of citizen activists, and I participated twice in the ritual of dike inspection. Once I even watched a whole cycle of tides,
sitting outside of the alte Kurhaus in the coastal village of Dangast, watching how the tidal gates opened and the sea ran dry und
turned the bay into an enormous mudflat, only to be filled hours later by the irresistible force of the incoming tide. Geology tells
stories, too. According to Latour (2017), geo- or Earth stories are both semiotic and material and combine history and geology; this is
how I found narratives of change as much in geological processes as in the interviews.
From an anthropological perspective, narratives are more than a simple addition to the production of knowledge about climate

1
The interdisciplinary project “Co-development of place-based climate services for action” (CoCliServ, 2017–2020) is executed in five different
coastal regions in Europe (Dordrecht, Netherlands; Golfe du Morbihan and Brest, France; Bergen, Norway, and the Wadden Sea / Jade Bay area in
Germany).
2
http://cocliserv.cearc.fr/project
3
The North German coastal and climate office is a partner in the CoCliServ project and is situated at the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht.

2
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

change or a tool to improve climate communication. The focus on narratives shifts the attention from the impact of climate on society
to the myriad of entanglements between human and non-human actors in a changing climate. While science-based climate discourse
tries to reduce complexity and defines climate in physical terms, the narrative approach opens up the debate and invites as many
actors as possible. The tension between these approaches is a permanent challenge in the CoCliServ project. In any case, the focus is
on collaboration as defined by the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015: 27): “Collaboration means working across difference, which
leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.” Contamination means violating boundaries between disciplines and
between science and society, and it is easily considered as a threat to disciplinary identity and the respective authority associated
with it. I observed in many interdisciplinary projects the instinctive reaction of disciplinary purification in the threatening presence of
the other, but according to Anna Tsing, collaboration means having to accept and to live with contamination.
Thus, the focus on narratives and the inclusion of humanities into climate research is an intellectual challenge for all parties
included. Interdisciplinarity means defining the field, situating oneself as a researcher in this field, and being ready to follow the
actors, their stories, their concerns. The challenge is to navigate the relations between the disciplines and between science and
society; the role of the researchers is to become knowledgeable interlocutors and moderators of the co-development they initiate.
Science no longer takes the authoritarian attitude of educating the people, but the democratic notion of working together with local
actors about a matter that is a concern for all of us.
In the beginning of the CoCli Serv project, we had to figure out what narratives and climate services actually mean for us, across
the disciplines. For a moment, we opened up the black box of what normally is taken for granted: we discussed terminology in order
to structure our practice; we tried to break out of the scientific routine of applying concepts.

2.1. Narratives & butterflies

There is not one definition of what the term narrative means and how it is used. I remember well one of our first project meetings
in Brussels, when we still were in the stage of writing the proposal. Being responsible for the “narratives of change” work package4, I
had prepared a statement which I was eager to communicate to my new colleagues. I was concerned about the role of narratives in an
interdisciplinary research team with an object of study, climate, that is primarily defined by natural sciences. Were narratives just
another source of information or data? Would they be used in an instrumental way in order to translate scientific knowledge to the
public? I argued emotionally that narratives are instead a new way to define climate problems and, consequently, to open up the
window for new solutions.
In our meeting, I used a metaphor to express the nature of my concern: You cannot pin narratives like butterflies on a needle in
order to dissect, analyse and categorise them. Instead, I argued, narratives are interactive, they are situational and told by someone to
someone in specific moments, as part of a conversation. You have to follow a narrative like a butterfly on its journey, flying from here
to there, connecting, pollinating, being curious and interactive. My colleagues listened surprised to my poetic narrative, in the early
morning in Brussels. I was not sure if I had expressed my concern properly, but the butterfly stayed with us and gained a life of its
own.
Some weeks later, our project leader, Jean Paul Vanderlinden, attended a ERA4CS5 meeting in Brussels, where the new projects
about climate services were officially launched. He wrote us an Email that everything went fine, and he added a link to a weblog from
a colleague who had also attended this meeting. In his blog entry “Climate stories and a butterfly net”, Paul Stoll (2017) wrote a nice
report about the meeting. He started by quoting another colleague who delivered a perfect analogy to many scientists’ demand that
climate services should provide robust facts and nothing else:
“’Financial decision makers don’t want stories. They want data to go into their financial risk models.’ So said a speaker at a
meeting I attended in Brussels yesterday to launch a set of projects to provide climate services for Europe. I’m sure she is right.”
This was exactly what I had argued against in our project meeting. But Paul Stoll goes on and reports about our approach in
CoCliServ, as presented by Jean-Paul Vanderlinden:
“But then, (….), another project coordinator showed us why stories matter to the rest of us. (…). A French social scientist called
Jean-Paul described his project by walking around the room with an imaginary butterfly net catching stories from the air. For the first
time that afternoon everybody seemed to be paying full attention. (…) Jean-Paul had designed a project, he told us, whose ‘pro-
cedural benefits’ would outweigh any other benefits. For his project, it was capturing the process of bringing personal stories and
scientific information together that mattered most, rather than the results of that process themselves.” (Paul Stoll, 2017).
Finally, the butterfly metaphor landed on our website; it is the first thing the visitor gets to read about our project: “Imagine
scientists, with her and his, butterfly net. Yet these are not butterflies she and her are after. They are (gracefully) hunting down
climate-centered narratives – as elusive and beautiful as the rarest of butterflies.”
Narratives are definitively not pinned down like a butterfly, and our project turned even more experimental and artistic6. Nar-
ratives instead are considered now as an entry point into people’s experience of weather-worlds, as the local materialization of
climate change. From here, we intended to start the process of co-developing climate services. But what exactly are climate services,
and where and how do narratives and climate services intersect? Another black box to be opened before we started, and we were not

4
EU projects are organized along different work packages.
5
ER4CS means “European Research Area for Climate Services” and is an initiative of the Joint Programming Initiative “Connecting climate
Knowledge for Europe”.
6
The project has a strong art and science component, employing artists in several case studies.

3
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

afraid to do so.

2.2. Climate services and narrative theory

There was another project meeting before we actually started our explorations. Again, I had prepared a short presentation about
the role of narratives and how to bring together scientific information and personal stories. William Cronon (1992) once discussed
two different interpretations of the dust bowl in environmental history; one explained the catastrophe in social, the other in eco-
logical terms. The differing versions – both based on the same data – confirmed the thesis that narratives frame an event that shapes
its interpretation. But while Cronon still believes in objectivity despite the diverging interpretations, the writer Amitav Ghosh (2016)
changes the foundation of analysis in his book “The great derangement”. He criticizes modern literature for insisting on the se-
paration of nature and culture, with the bourgeois drama still staged in front of the assumed stable panorama of the Holocene. Ghosh
argues for the inclusion of nature as an actor in the human drama; for him, nature comes as a shock; a shock like he experienced when
being once hit by a freak cyclone in New Dehli, while crossing a street. Catastrophe, he argues, is the link between climate and human
beings and ends all distanced objectivation. Greta Thunberg’s battle cry “we need to panic” is an echo of this assertion.
Like Cronon with the accounts of the dust bowl, Ghosh compares two different representations of climate change, the text of the
Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) and the encyclical “Laudato Si” of Pope (2015). He writes that the diction of the Agreement is
borrowed directly from the free-trade agreements of the neo-liberal era, with its references to “accelerating, encouraging and en-
abling innovation” (UNFCCC in Ghosh, 2016: 155), and the terms on which it relies, such as “stakeholder, good practices, insurance
solutions and private participation, technology development, decision-making and so on” (UNFCCC in Ghosh, 2016: 155). In contrast
to the opaque, juridical and technical jargon of the Agreement, the encyclical explicitly links climate change with environmental
justice, social inequality and human rights. Pope Francis acknowledges the influence of the saint who is his “guide and inspiration:
Francis (of Assisi, the author) helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of
mathematics and biology and take us to the heart of what it is to be human” (Pope Francis in Ghosh, 2016: 154).
Ghosh’s interpretation of the texts is consistently relational; he reads them not analytically, but in an interpretative way. In
discussions in the CoCliServ project, we extended this approach and critically discussed the role of climate services in society, in
terms of their language and the metaphors they used. We easily agreed that we also had to consider the “senses of place” (Feld &
Basso, 1983) of our case studies, without denying their dynamics and cultural evolution over time nor the unequal relationships
between the observer and the observed. Climate services are part of governance strategies and thus not neutral institutions. And they
have a history, too.
Climate services are designed as an outreach of climate science, as public or private institutions and are explicitly addressed in the
IPCC chapter “Foundations for Decision Making” (Jones et al., 2014: 198), where they are defined as follows:
“Climate services aim to make knowledge about climate accessible to a wide range of decision makers. In doing so they have to
consider information supply, competing sources of knowledge, and user demand. Knowledge transfer is a negotiated process that
takes a variety of cultural values, orientations, and alternative forms of knowledge into account (medium evidence, high agree-
ment).”
In the case of the North German coastal and climate service, its founder, a climate scientist, once explained to me that he sees his
climate service as a kind of “farm shop”, where farmers market their products directly on their farm. Like in the Paris Agreement, he
uses an economic metaphor when he speaks of knowledge markets, where science competes with other forms of knowledge – which
have to be respected, he added, even though they are mostly scientifically invalid. Science is not perfect, either: he easily admits that
the scientific knowledge basis is uncertain, but he leaves no doubt that only science is capable of speaking with authority about
climate change.
But there are cracks in this uniform top-down story of climate services. As a contributing author to the chapter about
“Foundations of Decision Making” in the IPCC (Jones et al., 2014), I had to deal with a lot of literature to be included from
anthropology, sociology or geography. Other forms of knowledge and narratives about climate and its changes come into play. Voices
from the social sciences criticize the climate reductionism of the hegemonic climate discourse and its power effects in the global
South. Climate services meet a postcolonial situation, and local narratives play an increasing role in climate research. This, again, is
where our CoCliServ project comes in: what role do local narratives actually play? Are they just a tool to better transport the message
from science to public; do they just help science calibrate their knowledge by adding information gained through observation and
practice? Tsing (2015: 37) argues, that narratives actually are a method:
“To listen to and tell a rush of STORIES is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to
knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter. To learn anything, we
must revitalize the arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history.”
In her definition of narratives as a method, Tsing adds the human scale to the technological expertise of climate services.

3. Anthropology

In global climate discourse, climate is an abstract concept that is defined by climate science, based on detection and attribution.
But when I conducted anthropological field work in the Jade Bay region at the German North Sea coast, climate change was ev-
erywhere. The winter of 2017/2018 was unusually dark and wet. The sky hardly cleared up, it was too warm for this time of the year,
and the rain never seemed to stop falling. The pastures and fields were drowned in water, and the farmers complained that they could
not spread manure anymore. Everyone I spoke to agreed that the extreme weather and the mild winter were signs of climate change.

4
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

This disastrous winter was followed by an endless summer, which lasted from March to October and brought hardly any rain.
Pastures turned brown, there were crop failures, farmers ran out of hay and had to sell cattle to the slaughterhouse. The drought
extended all over Germany. Farmers demanded compensation, but the government was reluctant; is climate change a national
emergency or an occupational hazard? Climate change was everywhere, in media, politics, science and in everyday conversations. On
the surface, local actors share a global discourse about climate change. We are used to thinking in chronological time, from past to
future, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. But in narratives, time and space have their own configurations when we only listen
closely enough and when we are ready to challenge our own assumptions. Or are forced to do so, as I had to experience in the first
phase of my field work.

3.1. Culture shock

My first serious encounter with local actors left me momentarily in a state of culture shock; my interlocutors seemed to reject my
request for collaboration, and I felt in turn estranged from my own project. In other words: I was looking for local partners for co-
development, and I returned confused and bewildered. What had happened?
I was driving with my car through the marshes along the dike at the German North Sea Coast, when I discovered a sign on the side
of the road which pointed to an old farm house. It said: Umweltstation (environmental station). This sounded interesting. I knocked at
the door, and a man in his sixties or so, with long grey hair, rubber boots and a workingman’s outfit, opened the door. He welcomed
me and gave me a tour through the Umweltstation, which turned out to be a shared home for a community of people, existing already
for 40 years or so. The station offers various workshops, preparing adolescents for future work practice, and it is an environmental
center. I was delighted. Here I had everything I needed: a local group of engaged people and citizen scientists. I immediately imagined
it as the safe haven for my project, a perfect starting point for the co-development of a place-based climate services for action.
I carefully explained the project, which my host was curious to hear about. It did not work that well. Have you ever tried to
explain to a citizen what “co-development of climate services for action” means? Just try. It is not easy. Anyway, he was friendly, and
he showed me around in the house. The recent winter storm had torn a hole in the roof, and water dropped into a bucket. My host
turned out to be a graduated chemist with an extraordinary knowledge about the geo- and climate history of the Jade Bay, and he and
his fellows organized workshops about regional issues as a form of community building. Excited, I asked for another meeting,
thinking to conduct an interview.
Next time, we met in the kitchen, which apparently also served as a living room. There were two other members of the com-
munity, a man and a woman, both in their sixties, and two young people, interns, who lived there for a year. Again, I presented our
project and asked what they thought about climate change, eager to make them my partners in the project. To my surprise, none of
them actually considered this a good idea. They did not really buy into my version of climate change. I could hardly believe it. I tried
to sell my project and asked: are you not afraid of climate change? Here, so close to the dike, living beneath a rising sea level? I tried
hard, but they did not buy into my narrative of climate change. They said, climate change means nothing and everything. It is a
concept which reminds them of scientists who previously wanted to talk them into nuclear energy, they said. Scientists who acted as
agents of growth and neoliberalism – a remark that immediately reminded me of the critique provided by Amitav Ghosh, which I now
seemed willingly to betray.
They explained to me that of course they realize that the climate is changing. But climate change as a political strategy remains for
them an abstract concept; they are concerned in a direct way about their environment, the marshes and the dikes, the animals and the
seasons, the geo-history and the well-being of the people who live in a region far away from the cities.
They proudly told me about their apple project, which they had been running for many years. They are interested in preserving
regional apples, heritage apples, and they invite people to bring their own apples for making juice from them. It has become a yearly
ritual, and people come from all over the place. They collectively press the apple juice and bottle it; they spend the days together with
the neighbourhood, there is apple cake, apple poems and apple parties. School classes drop by, and they campaign at regional events
for apples. “This, Werner, is something we can actually do together with other people”, my host said. “But what should we do in your
climate service? How to make a community out of it?” And he added that climate change is something for science and administration.
It is about bureaucracy, about governance. Apples are the taste of belonging, about taking care of the world we inhabit, I noted,
impressed. Heritage apple trees had survived EU standardization, they are not prophylactically sprayed with pesticides, and but-
terflies like them – in a region, where industrialized agriculture prevails and actively contributes to the extinction of insects.
This was my first real field encounter with local actors, and I experienced it as a culture shock. Mostly, I was shocked about
myself. In retrospect, it felt as if I had been ready to sell my soul for the sake of finding a partner for the project. Being critical of a
positivist reading of the concept of climate services myself, at the first opportunity I found myself ready to convince people of
something I actually did not believe in yet. What exactly did I have to offer? I felt the pressure of a three-year project, the peer
pressure and the pressure to present results. In ethno-psychoanalysis, Erdheim and Nadig (1992) once called this kind of culture
shock a “social death”, and they marked it as a necessary transitional state in anthropological fieldwork. I learned that access to the
reality of the coastal landscape is not for free. There is a shared reality of common concerns, and there is a world that has to be
unravelled to become accessible. I needed to calm down. I had to learn to listen in order to find a more convincing narrative of
change.

3.2. Post-apocalyptic narratives

On Christmas night in 1717, a horrendous flood devasted huge parts of the coast and caused about 9000 deaths. Three hundred

5
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

years later, on Christmas eve of 2017, a local cultural organisation, the academy of Dangast, opened an exhibition about this so-called
Christmas flood.7 The exhibition placed this horrendous event in the context of the geological and social history of this area, which is
characterized by storm floods and land reclamation.
I attended the opening ceremony, which was led by representatives of the academy, of the church, of the municipality, of cultural
organisations, of the dike association and other honourable persons. At the beginning, various voices read from the chronicles of the
flood, which a parish priest had documented. On the night when Christ was born, parents lost their children in the ice-cold water. One
story that I cannot forget was about a father who tried to save his baby which had fallen from the dying mother’s arm into the rising
flood. Before he jumped into the icy water, he tied the hair of his wife to a limb of a tree so that survivors could find and bury her.
“Those were poor souls”; the priest had dryly commented in his chronicles.
This moving spectacle was followed by a sermon of the current parish priest, in which he discussed the role of God: people now
and then had asked themselves, why had God sent a flood like this, on Christmas eve? In 1717, the flood was widely understood as a
punishment of an angry God. Today, the priest reassured, we see God differently, he is on our side with a helping and consoling hand.
But most of all, now we have dikes that protect us, and even in 1717, local engineers blamed the fragility of the dikes and their
neglect as the cause for the catastrophe, and they started designing more effective ones. Theological, moral and engineering dis-
courses are not mutually exclusive, neither in the past nor in the present, I noted. At the end of his sermon, the priest reminded the
audience that climate change is another sign that we have to change our way of life; when we order our Christmas gifts online at
Amazon, he said, we contribute to climate change through the emissions caused by delivery.
In the next speech, the head of the dike association shared his childhood memory of the flood of 1954, which also happened on
Christmas Day. His Christmas gift was a radio, and this radio helped to inform the family about the rising flood behind the dike, close
to their home. His father rode by bike to see the dike master, and he came back with good news. In this secular narrative, rudimentary
technology already plays a role and starts to change the feeling and attitude towards the threat of storm floods; today, so the narrator
said, people feel safe and have to be reminded constantly of the importance of coastal protection, which he sees as one of the virtues
of this exhibition.
At the end of the ceremony, the flood bell, erected as a permanent piece of art outside the exhibition building, was rung and
blessed. The original church bell is buried under the seabed of the Jade Bay. We turned to the dark sea beneath the stars: where now is
water, once was land. “Senses of place”, the title of Feld’s and Basso’s (1983) book, came to my mind.
Current discussions about climate change, the rise of sea-level and possible disastrous effects, build upon a century-long discourse
about coastal protection, and they still balance technical, theological and moral questions. As a listener during the emotional
ceremony, I had a vision of the Jade Bay area as a post-apocalyptic society, where the catastrophe had already happened, more than
once. There is a lively storm-flood-memory culture along the coast, with diverse historical monuments, displaying the height of past
storm floods, reminders of pioneers of dike construction, and sculptures with religious context along the dike, resulting from an art
project. It is a history that is well documented in scholarly literature, both as a body of memory and as a constant warning, such as in
Kempe’s “’Mind the next flood!’ Memories of natural disasters in Northern Germany from the sixteenth century to the present”
(Kempe, 2006). A closer look at the political ecology of this coastal landscape reveals micro-histories, in which different levels of time
are seamlessly interweaving geological, historic and present events.8

3.3. The Dangast tidal gate: A regional chronotope

The coastal landscape is a constructed landscape. It is the result of land reclamation, the century-long interaction between the
land and the sea. In his book “The conquest of nature”, the historian Blackbourn (2006) writes about the Jade Bay area as one of his
prime examples for the role of engineering, draining and building dams in the “making of Germany”. The history of Germany is one of
dispersed territories and full of micro-histories, which in turn formed senses of place and regional identities. It is against this
background of political ecology that global climate change reaches the coastline of the Jade Bay. It is a partially-improper shortcut to
state that the dikes are built to protect the land from the sea. They were built for many reasons, as I will demonstrate in the following
example of the micro-history of the Dangast tidal gate.
The Dangast tidal gate was finished in the end of the 1950s. A colourful mosaic on the back of the building puts its construction
into a historical context; it displays the line of the ‘Ellenser dam’, a dam built in the early 17th century. Until then, the ‘Schwarze
Brack’9, the black water had separated this part of the Jade Bay from Jever, the capital of Friesland, as a result of previous storm
floods. To reach Jever, people had to travel around the flooded area through the territory of Eastern Friesland, where they each time
had to pay taxes for passing through. To keep a long story short: in order to facilitate the journey and to avoid taxes, a dam was built
through this former extension of the Jade Bay, the Schwarze Brack. As a consequence, East Friesian towns like Neustadt-Gödens lost
their access to the sea and are inland today; as another consequence, subsequent dikes were built on both sides and the sea was turned
into land. Today, the Ellenser Dam which is mapped on the mosaic, is a road, and the dikes have moved line after line closer to the
sea. Only in the second half of the 19th century, land reclamation came to a halt when Emperor Wilhelm II decided to build
Germany’s first and only deep-sea port in Wilhelmshaven, where the Jade Bay provides a deep-water trench.
It takes some time to learn this complicated mix of engineering, coastal protection, sea dynamics and political and economic

7
The exhibition was curated by Klaas Heinrich Peters and Michael Remmer.
8
About different conceptions of time and the concept of chronotopes, see Krauß et al., 2019.
9
A Brack is a cratering left from a storm flood.

6
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

Fig. 1. Flood stones in Dangast with flotsam from the All Saints flood of 2006 (photo by Gerd Bartels). copyright Gerd Bartels.

interests. Dikes are chronotopes, configurations of time and space, bearing many different stories, with climate change as the newest
one.
On the green dike beneath the mighty tidal gates of Dangast, there are six memorial stones, each one of them reminding people of
a major historic storm flood (see Fig. 1). The stones mark the peak levels of the years 1717, 1825, 1855, 1906, 1962 and of 2006. This
historic landmark, which first consisted of four stones, is not at the place where it was once erected, close to the Dangast mill; in 1924,
a new sea dike was built and the landmark suddenly stood in the hinterland, far from the sea. Thus, the stones had lost their
immediate relation to the actual peak levels. After an interim station between 1935 and 1971 at another dike, the dike association
moved the stones to their current place. The stones still show the peak level, but in a different place, on a different dike. They are no
longer exact representations of a flood level in a specific place; they are a landmark in a prominent place both in terms of technical
construction – the tidal gate – and of tourism, and they provide a sense of awe and respect.
The most recent stone is a reminder of the All Saints flood of 2006 which had reached a peak of 5,31 m, higher than the flood of
1962, which is the obligatory reference point along this coast.
When I interviewed the managing director of the dike association, I noticed a photograph of the flood stones on the wall of his
office. He told me that he had taken the photo the day after the All Saints flood of 2006, because he was shocked when he saw the
flotsam above the landmarks. The flood went almost unnoticed by the media, but for him, the photo documents his personal en-
counter with the reality of climate change, in the same sense as the cyclone hitting Amitav Ghosh in New Dehli. Nature is no longer
only a background or stage for the human drama, and at the coast, it maybe has never been.
The current dikes are, once again, under construction; they are being adapted to the projected rise of sea level. They should be
safe now, they say, for the next hundred years, or fifty years, who knows. There is a level of uncertainty, and there are limits in dike
building; the ground cannot carry higher loads. At a public discussion in Wilhelmshaven about the future of the coast, a coastal
engineer provided a vision about opening some polders, building houses on mounds like in earlier times, and introducing aqua-
tourism, where people travel by boat instead of cars. It is time to think about the future, he said, but local people never will accept
and co-operate. There are not only dikes between water and land, but also between administrations and politics, between politicians
and citizens, between science and society. The climate problem is a democracy problem, I scribbled into my notebook, this is my
starting point for co-developing a place-based climate service.

4. Co-development: Bringing science into democracy

How to initiate co-development? Together with the “North German coastal and climate office”, which is a partner in the joint
CoCliServ10 project, I organised a workshop with stakeholders, decision-makers and concerned citizens. In the coastal village of

10
In the project, the “North German coastal and climate office” is responsible for a work package designed for local climate assessment and
evaluation of local climate information.

7
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

Dangast, about 40 people from different segments of the coastal society accepted our invitation. There were administrators and
mayors, a pastor and farmers, activists from nature conservation and citizen initiatives, the national director and, to my delight,
members of the Umweltstation. We split the workshop in two parts: first the climate office presented regional climate information
followed by a discussion, and in the second part, we asked people to share their climate concerns.
The workshop setting was spectacular, the room had panorama windows with a view on the Jade Bay, which was fully flooded
when the workshop started, and empty when it ended. My colleagues from the North German coastal and climate office had arrived
four hours early. They came with two cars, full of gear for their presentation. They plastered the room with propaganda material of
their home institution, the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht. On the wall facing the audience, they erected a huge poster with a harbour
scene, titled with the Helmholtz coastal research logo and stating in black letters: “understanding. knowing. acting”. Dispersed in the
room, there were several other posters with climate information, on two tables there were computers to explore the tools they had
developed. Even though it was a jointly organised event, the presence of Helmholtz was visually overwhelming. It was a powerful
performative representation of the authority of climate science. In my opening address to the audience, I mumbled something about
big science and the invisibility of the humanities; I had not even thought of bringing propaganda material.
In her presentation, the head of the “North German Coastal and Climate Office”, a climate scientist, explained the difference
between climate and weather and the role of human greenhouse gas emissions. The data for Northern Germany are shocking: the
region warms up faster than the average of the rest of the world, vegetation periods are extended, all seasons have become warmer.
There are more hot days and in winter, there is more rain. Due to sea level rise, storm flood risk is elevated. From here, the speaker
switched to global climate politics. The business-as-usual scenario, she said, will rise average temperature to 5.5 degrees, and the
window to reduce emissions is closing fast. Future floods may be elevated 1.5 m compared to the iconic flood of 1962.
Even after being 20 years active in climate research, I was shocked, and so was the audience. At the same time, my professional
self followed closely the argumentation and tried to understand the graphs on each of the slides, all of them going upwards in the end.
But what exactly did they show? The slides passed too fast to decipher the details. Graphs turned into symbols, into illustrations of
general emergency, with no chance of critical assessment of the sources.
In the discussion, a member of the audience felt reminded of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. He asked the speaker: How does
it feel for you, to be the messenger of such bad news? The speaker hesitated for a moment, she admitted being affected, but then she
gained posture and said that she as a scientist only presents the facts, and that it is up to politics to act.
In the discussion, a farmer told that in the past summer, when the drought lasted from March to October, each time after he fed
the animals, he calculated how much hay was left. Industrial livestock farming, someone else bitterly added, does not have this
problem because of commercial fodder. An activist against the A20, an Autobahn project crossing the coastal region, mentioned that
in Germany, even in industry, corporations started to act on climate change, except in the mobility sector. A mayor shared his
amazement about a bee initiative in his municipality, which turns out to be enormously successful; he suggested that swarm in-
telligence might lead to a solution to the climate problem. A city planner explained that since 1995, 9.5 square kilometres of public
land in his municipality was zoned for urban development, though only 750 inhabitants had arrived in the past 25 years in the
municipality. He says he never found scientific research of this climate relevant problem, and he invited our students to conduct
research in his municipality. The contributions in the discussion addressed different issues, paired with a common sense of despair.
How come that so many things went wrong while the scientific facts urged the need to act? There was consternation and be-
wilderment. I felt as clueless and helpless as the rest of the audience. If there is so much evidence, why is there no change, no political
action?
In the second part, we organized group discussions. We suggested a future scenario as the topic for discussion: In 2030, the coastal
region of the Jade Bay has actually fulfilled the emission reduction goals and is labelled as a climate friendly region. How did the
region achieve this award, what exactly will have contributed to this change?
We split the audience into five groups, which finally presented their ideas to the plenary. The atmosphere of depression and
impotence gave way to a wave of activism and spontaneity. The suggested interventions covered the areas of agriculture and land use,
biodiversity, energy, mobility, habitation, tourism, digitalisation and industry.
There was a consensus that the response to the challenge of global climate change has to be regional. The view back from the
future stimulated interpreting the region in new ways. From the long list, some of the suggestions included: changing agriculture
imperatives from quantity to quality; making climate a relevant factor in urban planning; digitalisation and optimisation of energy
use in households and industry; making the region energy independent with renewable energies; new forms of mobility and stopping
the construction of the new highway (Autobahn); turning off the coal plants in Wilhelmshaven; extending the biosphere reservation
form the UNESCO world heritage site to the land; implementing climate managers and energy concepts in each municipality, and
many more. One of the contributors suggested that the plethora of suggestions resembles a mosaic from which each individual part
might provide the starting point for a solution to the climate problem. In any case, the contributions did not reduce climate change to
the reduction of greenhouse gases only. Instead, the climate problem was defined as a result of an ineffective, energy wasting and
stressful way of life. Climate was not only a technological problem which can be left to the experts.
When the team of the “Northern German coastal and climate office” wrapped up their posters and computers, their speaker
seemed to be slightly disappointed. Her interest in narratives is to gain information about local climate knowledge or to learn about
knowledge deficits; on this basis, she can improve her data source and turn it into user friendly information. I was both confused and
delighted. The presentation of quantitative climate data had caused depression and anger. The local narratives had provided hope
and activism. It was a perfect match, I thought. But as a project, we did not yet manage to close the gap between quantitative data and
qualitative responses, between scientific experts and activist experts, and also between anthropology and climate science. We had not
yet made it across disciplinary differences, there is still too much fear of contamination. But it was a good start and strengthened the

8
W. Krauß Climate Risk Management 28 (2020) 100217

idea of climate services as a public forum for climate action.

In the meantime, I have organized another workshop with different people, but in a similar setting and a similar design. There is
interest in getting regional climate information, but most of all, there is a strong incentive to act, to challenge the political routine and
to bring climate change into municipal politics, with climate researchers as moderators and facilitators. But to fulfil these roles, we
have to learn to tell our own narratives of change.

5. Conclusion

The intention of this anthropological intervention was to show that the increasing presence of the humanities in climate risk
management is more than filling a knowledge gap or a simple addition of local knowledge to the already existing body of scientific
knowledge. Instead, I argue that increasing presence of disciplines like anthropology incite a profound change in the design of climate
risk management. It is time for a cultural turn in the way how climate services are conceived.
Current science-based climate discourse tends to reduce climate change to its physical aspects and to suggest technological
solutions, obliterating the political nature of the problem. Climate science is easily seduced to act like colonialists, with expert
knowledge about climate as a magical wand that predicts the future and changes the present accordingly. In the light of current
populisms, there is also a tendency to make use of science to end all narratives, the endless chatter of people, through scientific facts.
But this does not work. In the interdisciplinary project CoCliServ, we are trying a different way of bringing together scientific
information with place-based narratives. In doing so, matters of fact are turned into meaningful matters of concern. The focus of our
project is, as outlined above, on the process, on the procedural benefits of collaboration. There is not a one-way solution for the co-
development of climate services for action. We have five different case studies in four countries, and each of them has a different story
to tell. It is a lesson to be learned from anthropology that knowledge is situated and that there are only partial truths. Each case study
has its own dynamics and produces its own stories. As scientists, we have to tell our own narratives of change, too, in order to situate
ourselves accordingly in the field.
During my fieldwork on the North Sea coast, I encountered a myriad of human and non-human entanglements; the interaction of
the people and the sea serves as a configuration of time and space which enables a seemingly endless flow of narratives. It is a
landscape which is good to think with, where geo-stories play a central role, and where global climate change meets local micro-
histories. The focus on narratives opens up Pandora‘s box and produces a rush of stories, actors, ideas and activities. The price for
accepting this mess and the will to collaborate is contamination, endangering the familiar boundaries between science and society,
between disciplines, between us and them. But the price for not collaborating is to die, says the anthropologist Anna Tsing. It is time
to act. Place-based climate services might serve as a public forum where collaboration can take a form and finds a structure, where
ideas find a place and an organization, and where they can be transformed into action.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This paper was funded through the EU ERA4CS / JPI project CoCliServ “Co-development of place-based climate services for
action”. I want to thank Scott Bremer for checking my English and the reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.

References

Bakhtin, M.M., 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Blackbourn, D., 2006. The Conquest of Nature. Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Cronon, W., 1992. A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. J. Am. History 78 (4), 1347–1376.
Erdheim, M., Nadig, M., 1992. Größenphantasien und der soziale Tod. Kursbuch 58, 115–126.
Feld, S., Basso, K. (Eds.), 1983. Senses of Place. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.
Geertz, C., 1998. Deep Hanging out. The New York Review of Books, Oct. 22 issue.
Ghosh, A., 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Jones, R.N., Patwardan, A., Cohen, S.J., Dessai, S., Lammel, A., Lempert, R.J., Mirza, M.M.Q., von Storch, H., Krauss, W., Wolf, J., Young, C., 2014. Foundations for Decision
Making. In: Field, C.B., Barros, V.R., Dokken, D.J., Mach, K.J., Mastrandrea, M.D., Bilir, T.E., Chatterjee, M., Ebi, K.L., Estrada, Y.O., Genova, R.C., Girma, B., Kissel, E.S.,
Levy, A.N., MacCracken, S., Mastrandrea, P.R., White, L.L. (Eds.), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects.
Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United
Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 195–228.
Kempe, M., 2006. ‘Mind the Next Flood!’ memories of natural disasters in northern germany from the sixteenth century to the present. Medieval History J. 10 (1–2), 327–354.
Kramer, F, 1992. The Red Fez. Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. Verso, London, New York.
Krauß, W., Bremer, S., Wardekker, A., Marschütz, B., Baztan, J., da Cunha, C., 2019. Chronology and in-depth analysis of place-based narratives of change (project report, 99p).
http://cocliserv.cearc.fr/sites/cocliserv.cearc.fr/files/resultats/CoCliServ_D1.2.pdf Latest accessed 28.7.2019.
Latour, B., 2017. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, Medford.
Pope Francis, 2015. Enyclical letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on care of our common home. https://laudatosi.com Latest accessed: 28.7.2019.
Pratt, M.L., 2017. Coda, Concept and Chronotope. In: Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E., Brubandt, E. (Eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters in the
Anthropocene. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 169–175.
Stoll, P., 2017. Climate Stories and a Butterfly Net. https://www.climatestories.org.uk/climate-stories-and-a-butterfly-net/ Latest accessed: 28.7.2019.
Tsing, A., 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.
UNFCCC, 2015. Framework convention on climate change. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/109.pdf Latest accessed: 28.7.2019.