About Drought Showcase Review (Post-Event)

Interactive Sessions
Communities
SPEAKERS
Session Leader: Professor Lindsey McEwen, Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience, UWE Bristol
Professor Mike Wilson, School of Arts, English and Drama, Loughborough University
Dr Liz Roberts, Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience, UWE Bristol
Dr Ragab Ragab, CEH, Wallingford
WHAT WAS THIS SESSION ABOUT?
Storying drought with communities: who are the
harbingers of drought and the watershed thinkers?
This session explored how stories and storytelling
can come into the same space as specialist science in
drought risk decision-making (past, present and future)
at a catchment scale.
During the session, delegates:
• thought about catchments as units in place-based,
water thinking in a drought risk context
• explored what stories bring to the table in terms of
perceptions and behaviours
• shared stories that have emerged from catchments in
the DRY project, identifying key groups who are already
sensitised to prolonged dry periods. These included
allotment holders and gardeners – already exercising
water thinking scaling up from the hyperlocal
• shared some of DRY’s video reflections on the
storying process as prompts for group discussion
• shared ‘hands on’ experience of our processes of
crowd tagging of stories and active listening, and
• showcased some of the ways to integrate stories and
science through story mapping, bite-sized science and
catchment-based drought impact indices.
‘Visioning water adaptations’ - one participant’s storyboard
from a community storytelling workshop in the Bevills Leam
catchment in the Fens.
WHAT HAPPENED
Delegates left with:
• a better understanding of how storytelling can contribute to evidence bases for local water management and
drought risk decision-making
• new insights into the issues and opportunities in bringing storytelling and science together in drought risk
decision-making
• experience of being hands-on in the DRY process of making stories searchable and the value of active listening
in those processes
• new insights into the strategies experimented on in DRY to bring stories and science together as an evidence
base for decision-making
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