Reflection: Climate change adaptation and flood resilience in Ayrshire
On 20 March, community councils, members of the Ayrshire Climate Hub, artists and cultural organisations gathered at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) Ayr to explore the role of creative collaboration in building flood resilience across Ayrshire.
Creative climate action in Ayrshire
Culture for Climate Scotland collaborates with regional partners to deliver place-based local assemblies. The aim of the assemblies is to explore how climate and culture can collaborate to facilitate creative climate action. In partnership with UWS, we have organised two local assemblies in Ayrshire, the first one taking place in November 2023. At the first local assembly, understanding climate change adaptation and building community resilience to flooding emerged as a key priority.
What happened on the day?
To start the 2026 assembly, we invited local experts to share their experience and knowledge of climate impacts, climate change adaptation and community resilience.
- Lorna Jarvie, Sustainable Development Policy Officer at South Ayrshire Council, gave a grounding, and introduced local climate risks and responses. She highlighted examples of adaptation that are rooted in community, including a project that saw leftover Christmas trees be used to support sand dunes through ‘dune thatching’.
- Siobhan McDonald, Partnership Officer at Ayrshire Climate Hub, introduced everyone to the climate hub and their seed funding programme.
- Mat Page, Head of Programming and Producing at The Gaiety Theatre, described the impacts of extreme weather events on their public programme – specifically the cancelling of shows due to leakages in their B-listed building – and how the theatre is supporting sustainable behaviour. For their 2025 pantomime, The Gaiety partnered with Stagecoach to offer theatregoers discounted bus tickets, and created a dedicated panto travel webpage with route and ticket information.
Sensing the river and emotional mapping workshop
We then moved on to a deep listening workshop led by Graham Jefferey, Professor in Arts and Media Practice at UWS. Participants were invited to draw the soundscape around them: bird song, the river Ayr, traffic, people’s footsteps. The sensory activity grounded people in the environment and was a practical example of how creative practices can be used to sense environmental change.
After mapping our immediate surroundings, we returned indoors for regional mapping led by Rhiannon Hawkins, PhD Researcher at University of Glasgow. Rhiannon described her workshop and wider research:
‘My workshop session centred on creating community hazard maps, inviting participants to draw, write and plot where they had experienced climate impacts, stretching from flooding and biodiversity change to new renewable energy developments, while also capturing how these places, developments and events made them feel.
These maps complement existing SEPA resources to highlight the value of lived, local knowledge in climate change research and widen the focus beyond flooding alone. This work feeds into my PhD entitled, “Rain, Rain, Go Away… Come Back Another Day”: Understanding Scotland’s Relationship between Climate Change and Mental Health, which explores how climate hazards, wider climate change and adaptation measures shape community mental health across South East Ayrshire, Dumfries, Dumfries & Galloway and the NE Sutherland–Caithness coastline, selected through four months of quantitative analysis.
Funded by the ESRC and supported by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, the workshop activity and wider project has been inspired by and draws on the concept of Resourcefulness (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013), which emphasises the need for community‑led adaptation and the importance of local political and socio‑cultural knowledge in challenging power dynamics and shaping fair, grounded climate adaptation for all.’
Photography by: Becky Duncan
Connecting threads
After a shared lunch, we led an afternoon of building networks and connections around adaptation and resilience. We got lucky with the weather and managed to spend the whole afternoon outside in the sunshine, with birdsong in the background.
The Culture for Climate Scotland culture/SHIFT team developed a scenario workshop for Scotland’s Flood Resilience conference in January 2026, which we adapted for this local assembly:
‘Problem holders’ are given a scenario, where a community, school or local housing association is facing problems with flooding and needs help. The ‘problem holders’ ask their group for help: what skills, resources, knowledge, contacts or funding might they have – in their own work life – to offer in this scenario? When someone offers help, they are passed a spool of thread, forming a web of connections and illustrating the abundance of local social infrastructure.
Photography by: Becky Duncan
After this, we worked in small groups to think through ideas and next steps. We thought through potential opportunities such as working more collaboratively, sharing best practice and staying connected through a shared email thread. We thought through what organisations could offer in the next month, and in the next year.
Key outcomes included: sharing contact information, expanding and diversifying the network of creative climate action, meeting as an assembly annually and involving more voices in regional adaptation planning.
There were varied offers to the network. For example, the Scottish Maritime Museum offered to share their knowledge around developing Community Heritage and Climate Action Plans (CHCAPs), as part of their ongoing collaboration with ‘Our Heritage, Our Future’ at Keep Scotland Beautiful.
Resources
- For further information you can read the SPRINGBOARD local assembly: Ayrshire slides on Dropbox.
- If you’re interested in joining the Ayrshire Climate Hub network you can email [email protected].
- Read our Guide to adapting to climate change.
- Explore the Community Climate Adaptation Roadmap from Verture and Creativity Collaboration, Resilience: How Art Is Shaping Community preparedness to explore the arts tool from National Centre for Resilience.
About Springboard
SPRINGBOARD brings together artists, cultural and sustainability organisations, climate workers, activists, local businesses, third-sector organisations and anyone interested in collaborating to form powerful local networks for creative climate action. Local assemblies are an opportunity to connect with other practitioners in your region to address climate change collectively. The events are for anyone working or volunteering in the climate or environmental sector, the arts, screen, creative industries, museums, heritage and libraries.
Photography by Becky Duncan