Climate and Community: Building back better. How within a community organisation setting people are coming together to tackle the climate emergency, alongside responding to the social crises generated by austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic

Tackling the climate emergency is the biggest challenge of our time. Radical changes are needed across society, yet it is not clear how communities can play their part. Whilst there is a pressing and urgent need for climate action, communities are also grappling with intersecting crises from austerity and COVID-19. Rather than viewing these as separate issues, I explore how people are coming together to tackle climate change, alongside the social crises generated by austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic. To gain insight into how these issues interlink, I use ethnographic and action research methodologies through a case study of a community organisation in Leeds. I apply a community resilience framework to analyse their strategies, tactics, and programmes of work. The key strands of community resilience that I employ are community resilience as adaptation, coping, and transformation. Community resilience as adaptation focuses on how the organisation adjusted to the neoliberal political and economic environment to enable them to build a stronger community institution. One of the aims of adaptation was to help the community to cope, which was based on supporting people to manage and minimise adverse impacts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Community resilience as transformation was about trying to bring about more radical change as a response to crises. There are two contributions that this research makes to fill gaps in the current literature. Firstly, I show how different strands of community resilience can co-exist, interact, support, and inhibit one another. Secondly, I demonstrate how community resilience as transformation can be built using symbiotic and interstitial strategies, which again can interact within single projects. Applying these ideas to climate action, I argue that effective action in a community setting must be collaborative, take account of the community context, and it does not necessarily start from a position of tackling the climate emergency. To be effective, fair, and to improve life for people, climate action cannot ignore the realities of how community led approaches operate and it must seek to make our communities better places to live.