Author: alan.kennedy

Keep on walking

Posted on by alan.kennedy

The Belfast Heat Walking Tour was one of the most enjoyable activities during the Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave project, generating very useful information for our research into communication methods, as well as being engaging and interesting for attendees.Victoria Ramsey at the Met Office, who I co-led the walk discussed its benefits in her research published in Climate Services:

“Participants found this form of communication helpful for putting the information into context and improving their understanding of heat risk within the city. They found the workshop helpful in understanding how to use the data products in decision making.”

Leading an urban heat walk in Bristol, February 2024

Given the success of the first tour, I have run it again multiple times and developed other similar tours across Northern Ireland and the UK. Here’s a summary of the all the other tours that have come about since.

  • Firstly, I have led more Belfast heat tours with a general public audience as part of the Northern Ireland Science Festival in 2023 and 2024. I have also led the tour for masters and undergraduate students at Queen’s University Belfast. Although the tours follow the same rough route, there have been some minor tweaks along the way and the different audiences and questions every time are a great way to keep the tour interesting and fresh. For example, often now I will discuss some other impacts of climate change in the city, not just heat, particularly where the tour crosses the Lagan and it is possible to see the new Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme.
  • It turns out heat walking tours are not new, and in 2023 I went on a heat walk of London with Julie Futcher and Chris Newman, both who had run tours before (in Julie’s case for many years all around the world). Inspired by this, I went on to lead a similar urban heat-themed walking tour in Bristol for my research group at the University of Bristol. I will be running this session again as a side event after the next UK National Climate Impacts meeting, which is to be held in the city in September 2025.
  • Beyond heat, for the Northern Ireland Science Festival in 2024 and 2025 I have also co-led a tour about climate change and how we can adapt to it at the National Trust’s Mount Stewart site in Northern Ireland. This talk touches on all sorts of important changes that rural Northern Ireland faces, from sea level rise to unpredictability of rainfall. Having initially started working with the National Trust during Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave, since 2023 I have been leading in a side project to understand Mount Stewart’s unique microclimate and how the site can be adapted to deal with climate change. More on that in a post very soon…
  • Finally, I ran climate walks for families at the Stendhal music festival, near Limavady in Northern Ireland, in 2024. This tour highlighted climate change in broad terms, how it might affect Northern Ireland (particularly rural areas) and some of the things we can do reduce its impacts. We also measured the microclimates around the festival site and I even brought my mandolin and sang an old folk song about Northern Ireland’s changing environment centuries ago.

These tours have continued to receive good feedback as an engaging way to communicate environmental research. For example, from the 2025 Northern Ireland Science Festival tour of Mount Stewart we had all 5 star reviews and some lovely comments:

“Loved it!”

“Excellent workshop, so fascinating”

“I thought the combination of Andy and Alan’s knowledge really brought the talk to life”

“Very interesting”

“The hosts were very informative, available and friendly”

I genuinely believe this is one of the best communication methods I have ever used. Telling a story through place, allowing people to see it with their own eyes and not through a screen, and being active and encouraging walking (an excellent solution to the climate crisis) makes this a win-win-win in my opinion. I have intentions to develop further tours in the near future.

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A final note: following the original Belfast walking tour, we ran a workshop with our city stakeholders during which we mapped out the decision making processes around heat-health and building management in the city. In my first post about this back in 2022, I included a picture of the ‘visual notes’ that I illustrated for building management, however at that stage I had not completed the heat-health visual notes. Better late than never, I have made heat-health notes – take a look and let me know what you think!

Visual notes showing the decision making processes and data requirements to improve health resilience to heatwaves in Belfast

 

Publication out now

Posted on by alan.kennedy
Harvest of barley in Co. Down

I am pleased to announce that much of the research from this project and the OpenCLIM project for Northern Ireland has now been published in the journal of Climate Risk Management. The peer review process can take some time, so I apologise for the delay!

The paper specifically brings together data that is both quantitative (i.e. numbers) and qualitative (i.e. stories) from climate impact models and local people in Northern Ireland who I had the fortune to meet and interview during the Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave project. It highlights that using both of these types of data together paints a more nuanced and holistic picture of how climate change is impacting and will continue to impact Northern Ireland – more so than would be possible using either of these data types in isolation.

Here are two examples that are discussed in greater depth in the paper.

Northern Ireland isn’t that hot compared to the rest of the UK. In fact, if you use a climate impact model to calculate the risk of heat stress on workers, then it suggests there will be no serious risk, even in a world that is 4 °C warmer than pre-industrial times. However, when I spoke to care providers in Castlederg, they said that already there are many days per summer when working conditions can be uncomfortably hot for staff. Therefore, the local knowledge highlights that this is a risk. The modelling data highlights that this risk will be a bigger problem in the future, even if the models fail to represent the micro-scale conditions inside an individual care home.

Projected changes in perennial rye grass yield across Northern Ireland at different levels of global warming. Taken from the paper (Figure 3).

Models also suggest a wide range of potential changes in crop yields, due to a few different uncertainties, for example how crops will respond to increased CO2 in future. On average, all models suggest that yields of crops such as perennial rye grass will increase, but it is uncertain by quite how much by. However, farmers across Northern Ireland reported at workshops that variable weather conditions were already impacting their practices. In some cases, grass yields were adversely affected due to dry weather for example. In other cases, although there were good yields of grass, waterlogging of soils meant that cattle could not graze the fields. These insights from farmers highlights the need to to look beyond the headline figures and average climatological conditions and instead focus on local spatial and temporal scales where impacts will be felt.

This is just scratching the surface, however. There are still many more results that could be and I hope will be explored in future research.

Spurred on by the publication of this work, I plan to publish a few more stories and insights I gained during this project, which will also have the added benefit of hindsight and further learning and research I have done in the past 2 and a half years since the project officially finished. I hope that someone might find these insights useful, and hope to be able to keep telling new, interesting and inspiring stories about Northern Ireland’s changing climate in the years to come.

Belfast Heat Walking Tour

Posted on by alan.kennedy

Taking the idea of telling a story through place one step further, the next storytelling method Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave took the form of a walking tour through Belfast.

Walking the streets of Belfast

Recent research independently at the University of Bristol and the UK Met Office both created new mapping results of heat risk and vulnerability in Belfast. The walking tour took to the streets with a group of stakeholders from the Public Health Agency, Housing Executive, Belfast Healthy Cities and Department of Health to see how these mapping products compare with reality in Belfast.

Heat risk maps of Northern Irleand and Belfast from the University of Bristol (left) and UK Met Office (right)

Stops on the tour told the story of heat vulnerability: what builds resilience or what enhances risks, walking a transect of low to high risk. At each stop, some specific details and data about the current electoral ward area, the temperature amplification effect of the urban heat island and different potential heat adaptation measures were discussed.

A stop on the walking tour discussing urban heat island

In between stops, there was plenty of opportunities to question and discuss ideas further, and get feedback on the research work from the stakeholders. The tour ended at the recently opened 2 Royal Avenue building, where a workshop was held with the same group of stakeholders, plus a few extras, to map out how and where climate data such as the heat risk maps can be used to feed into decision making. This was done on two themes: health & communities and the built environment & infrastructure. After the workshop, visual notes were drawn up showing with weather symbols where climate data can be used.

Group work at the climate decision making workshop

Visual notes mapping how climate data feeds into decision making on the built environment

Feedback on this activity was positive and there are plans to run the event again in the future. Interested in learning more? Leave a comment and let’s talk.

Summer Heat and Agriculture NI

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Given my quantitative background in physical geography, I do like a good graph, map or figure. I was therefore interested to explore visual storytelling through a collection of graphs, and particularly whether interactive graphs could make the story more engaging than a conventional scientific report or presentation.

Introducing the Summer Heat and Agriculture NI app, launched in the summer of 2022, highlighting some of the impacts of summer heat extremes on the agricultural sector in Northern Ireland. The app is built in Shiny, a package for the statistical software R, and allows differing levels of interaction with each graph. There are several tabs to the app, taking the user through past heatwaves and their impacts to the potential magnitude of future events.

Before I go any further, why not have an explore yourself:

The aim of this app is to be of use to agricultural policy makers, i.e. those who are setting strategies or feeding into larger scale climate, environmental or agricultural reports focussing on the whole of Northern Ireland. While a local postcode checker is included in the app to show potential future temperature extremes at a local level, the underlying climate data is not detailed enough to provide specific advice for individual farms. However, it is hoped that the app would be of interest to anyone who works in agriculture and feedback on it is very welcome.

What would make it more useful to you? Leave a comment and let’s have a conversation!

Time Travelling in the Northern Irish Countryside

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The second story I’d like to share is much more conventionally a ‘story’. It is an imaginative story about our changing world.

Participatory arts-based research was carried out through a pair of storytelling workshops led by local storyteller, Liz Weir. These workshops brought together young people aged 17-26 from rural Northern Ireland to explore how the Northern Irish countryside has changed and will continue to change in the future.

The outcome? Each young person got to write and tell their own short story about the future of the countryside, set in 2050. Liz Weir wove together one narrative bringing together elements of each of the individual stories. This story, plus memories shared of the past countryside, were turned into a beautiful map and story by designer Ellie Shipman.

The final narrative is a complex mixture of positive and negative, which I think is a truer reflection of reality than some conventional narratives on the future and environmental change.

Map of the North Coast and rural Northern Ireland, showing early memories of first connections in life with the countryside. The final story, written by Liz Weir using words from the young people's stories.

This work was kindly supported by additional participatory research funding from Research England.

Castlederg: Care in weather extremes

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The first storytelling of Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave is a case study telling the story of a place.

The town of Castlederg in Co. Derry/Londonderry currently holds the record for being both the hottest and coldest place in Northern Ireland. While many UK studies of heat extremes focus on urban areas, this report looks at the impacts of these heat extremes on a rural community, as well as highlighting steps that have been taken in Castlederg to improve resilience to such extremes. It is hoped these steps can be adopted elsewhere in Northern Ireland to adapt to rising global temperatures.

The research involved semi-structured interviews with local care providers and those in care, bringing together their stories and experiences of past major heatwaves.

Download the full report here: Castlederg: Care in weather extremes.

First page of the Castlederg case study report

Read the report? Let’s chat – I’d love to hear your feedback. Please leave a comment with any thoughts or questions and I’ll get back to you.