In the Hot Seat with Dr. Alan Kennedy-Asser

Dr Alan Kennedy-Asser

From Climate Models to Extreme Heat Poetry: Dr. Alan Kennedy-Asser in Interview

Shade the UK work with influential figures in the field of climate sciences so that we can benefit from their knowledge and provide them with a platform to raise awareness of environmental issues related to climate.

Our most recent collaboration has been with Dr. Alan Kennedy-Asser from the University of Bristol, a climate scientist researching summer extreme heat in the UK through a multi-methods approach. We sat down with Alan to discuss his rich career in the world of climate, the most impactful projects he has worked on, and the overall impact of his work on adaptation. Read on to find out more.

Hello Dr. Kennedy-Asser, so glad you could join! Let’s dive right in.

I see much of your research has focused on UK extreme heat and its impacts on different subpopulations across the country, work that strongly resonates with us at Shade the UK. Would you be able to provide a short summary of your journey into this field? 

When I first thought about going to university, I knew my brain was quite mathematical. During my A-levels, I was studying maths and the physical sciences, geography included, and I always knew I would continue down that road academically speaking. At first I thought this would lead me down the engineering route, but I recognised quickly that it didn’t grab me in the way that it should, so I opted to pursue geography for undergraduate.

This was at the University of Bristol, which has been the centre of much of my educational and research background. I had always had a general fascination with climate change and the environment but, in studying geography, which is such a broad field of research, I started to realise just how relevant to today much of it really is. Combining this interest with a strong maths background, I started to lean more towards the physical side of geography, involving climate modelling and some detailed data analysis.

The enjoyment I got from my undergraduate led me to pursue a PhD, also at Bristol. My PhD thesis was looking into the past climate over Antarctica, about 30 million years ago, trying to determine why the ice sheet first formed there. In terms of the scale of this research, I always described it as very ‘blue sky’ and abstract. Whilst I loved the research I did, I always had it in the back of my head that I wanted to look into something with greater relevance for those around me. More relevant to today.

As luck would have it, the first job offer I got out of my PhD was to look at UK extremes!

I see that you have worked on a number of climate modelling projects, including your work on the OpenCLIM project, which uses modelling to support UK assessment of climate risks and adaptation. Could you dive deeper into this work and explain its potential impact in building resilience to extreme heat?

First, I really appreciate you sending through these questions ahead of the interview - as a researcher, I often get bogged down in the details, but this interview gave me an opportunity to take a step back and really analyse the big picture stuff.

I see this part of my career as the ‘UK heat period’, which lasted about 4 years and I would say OpenCLIM was the bulk of that work, as that was my ‘day job’. Alongside OpenCLIM, I ran some embedded research with other institutions and organisations, including Climate Northern Ireland, which I am sure we will discuss later. However, a lot of the projects that I was working on fed into the same idea; the work I was doing with OpenCLIM was all about the impacts of extreme heat in the UK, which seemed to be a theme across my different areas of research.

I describe the OpenCLIM project as a ‘model of models’, where we would analyse a group of different sectors and try to model what the impacts of climate change would be on those sectors. Some people were working on flooding, others on agriculture and crop yields, yet others were looking at the impacts of heat on peoples’ health - there was a real mix! Each of these had its own model, which were all linked up to give this integrated, more holistic view of climate change impacts on the UK in general, both now and in the future.

I led the development of heat models, which were fairly straightforward and we could deliver them quickly. This gave us the opportunity to focus on engaging with various stakeholder groups, a major focus of OpenCLIM, giving me time to work with groups such as Climate Northern Ireland and Public Health Wales, as well as many others.

And what would you say was your key learning through running this kind of research? I.e. throughout the ‘UK heat period’ of your career.

The main learning I took away from this was in the granularity of climate data. Of course, taking a step back and analysing the situation more broadly at a national scale, as we did with OpenCLIM, gives us that overarching picture of what is going on, but the nature of what we were researching meant it was difficult to understand climate adaptation and impacts in detail with this view alone.

More so, I believe that the richer way to explore the problem combines modelling work like this with more of a bottom-up approach. For instance, over the course of my career, one of my key focus areas has been on climate adaptation and specific measures for this. However, a key factor in the success of climate adaptation is in to what extent it is tailored; essentially, every region is going to need its own approach to tackling climate-related issues. So, while there is a lot of value in the top-down approach, it only gives a fraction of the complete picture.

It’s all about having an understanding of more individual experiences, whether at the level of the community or the person.

This was actually a factor that helped shape my mind on the kind of climate adaption I believe needs to be undertaken. I recently completed one piece of research, for which I now have a paper in review, that looked to bridge this gap by taking the modelling work I completed with OpenCLIM and complementing it with this stakeholder engagement work that I did with Climate Northern Ireland. One of the key arguments I make in that paper, which is a case study of rural Northern Ireland, is that it is very hard to do this on a large scale - to properly connect the bottom-up and the top-down, we need to incorporate a lot of local or indigenous knowledge.

The main challenge I see here is simply in the length of time needed to really get to know local communities and their specific climate needs. Of course, you could issue something like a survey, which would go a long way in terms of reach, but again we sacrifice that granularity.

Would you be able to tell me more about this work you conducted in Northern Ireland?

On the topic of adaptation and, more specifically, resilience, one part of this work jumps to mind. This was when I was working on Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave, where I developed a heat walking tour of Belfast. The idea here was to incorporate the work I had done across the UK, looking into heat vulnerability and risk, and mapping this to different regions of the UK. We set out to identify the areas across the city that were more or less susceptible to extremes of heat and define the elements that contribute to this risk.

When I say I identified the at-risk neighbourhoods, I need to be clear in how that does not mean we represented it as some streets were shielded and others were doomed. This was one of the messages we really had to drive home to audiences, that these are still generalisations - after the neighbourhood level, we have the street level, then the individual occupant level.

At each of these levels, the factors that contribute to either risk or resilience can change, with certain factors possibly making individual residences in safer neighbourhoods at very high risk, and vice versa.

On the back of that, what are these factors that influence resilience? What is being done across Belfast specifically?

As with most cities across the world, there is so much more that could be done in Belfast. That said, the tour that I ran didn’t necessarily focus on climate adaptation, it more focused on pre-existing factors that could make areas more or less resilient.

What is good in some parts of Belfast is its green space. At the start of the walking tour, we begin in Ormeau Park, the biggest green space in the city centre, which gives us a chance to talk about how the presence of shading from trees and evaporative cooling lead to much lower temperatures in the vicinity.

From then, the walk transects across one side of the park to an area of housing that appears to cut across three different ward areas in Belfast, each seemingly reflecting low-, median-, and high-risk environments. For example, the first area consists of more detached and semi-detached houses, many with gardens surrounding them, both of which are indicative of more heat-resilient features. But, as the walk progresses, houses become more tightly spaced, gardens turn to yards, and all housing is terraced. Green space disappears entirely, which strongly correlates with a higher urban heat island (UHI) effect.

It is these pre-existing features that we point out throughout the tour, not necessarily what more is being done.

Did the scope of Once Upon Time in a Heatwave extend beyond the walking tour? What other projects, focusing on individual stories, were part of this?

The overall project itself is loosely defined as using stories to reveal lived experiences of heatwaves. There was a lot to it, including semi-structured interviews, creative writing, storytelling workshops, and poetry workshops. Much of this was with young people, trying to reflect how rural Northern Ireland is changing intergenerationally.

One interesting case study came from some work I did in the small town of Castlederg, the town in Northern Ireland which has recorded both the country’s hottest and coldest temperatures - within a 12-year period, the town managed to record a low of -18.7ºC and a high of 31.3ºC. I went there to speak to the local community. Trying to be as broad as possible, I sat down with those in various different sectors, including in childcare, elderly care, and schooling and education, to ask how they have managed to cope with recent extremes of weather.

One objective was to try and step away from trying to measure the impact of heatwaves in terms of lives lost - when did that become the metric for measuring health? Looking more into ideas of residential discomfort or labour productivity, I wanted to paint a far more detailed picture.

In Castlederg specifically, I heard a number of stories from care workers that, even in 25ºC of heat, working in a home and wearing PPE made for a very stuffy environment. Not to mention the physical side of the job, in having to help residents around or help them get dressed. It was a challenging environment for so many workers.

What came out to me from all of this research was that we should develop a broad set of case studies that go beyond numbers and draw out individual experiences and events. Crucially, these impacts can also extend beyond human health and how the heat makes us feel or other unexpected impacts. There was one interesting case I heard about following the 2022 heatwaves, with the police service in London. During that heatwave, when the temperature record was broken, a refrigeration unit broke down and forensic evidence was lost. Whilst not common, it serves as a single important data point around the risks of overheating, which would be lost in a larger model.

With enough of these stories, I would hope to form a sort of cultural reference point for our experiences of heatwaves in this country. It’s only an idea right now, but who knows where it could go.

For my final question, I want to ask something more broad. As we can see, in the absence of a radical shift in carbon emissions, a climate-adaptive approach is growingly recognised as a key solution to global heating. However, progress towards this has not been fast. What would you say are the key changes we need to see and what impediments lie in front of them?

This was the question I had to mull over the most. It might seem like a bit of an aside, but I’ve been doing some work with the National Trust recently.

There are a number of people working in different climate sectors - not just heatwaves, but areas like flooding too - who are acutely aware of the issues of climate change and know that they should do something about adaptation, but struggle to. It is often not the most pressing priority in the short term. However, the reason I enjoy working with the National Trust so much is that they are thinking about climate adaptation right now.

It has been fascinating to see the decision-making process take place in real time with the National Trust. Seeing the organisational structures that empower people to make a decision on how to adapt their work around climate, then just bite the bullet and do it, has been inspiring. For example, I recently interviewed a few people working down in Sheffield Park on how they are able to manage the garden space. Essentially, how do they manage an arboretum, full of historic trees, in a way that allows them to protect it? It is encouraging to see this, primarily because they are some of the few who not only recognise that it is necessary to act before disaster strikes, but they are actually doing it. With a bit more thinking like this, we could make greater strides towards adaptation in this country.

In conclusion, it just takes those organisations that have both the drive and the structure to get going now.

Alan, thank you for your time.

Listening to the expert opinions of academics such as Dr. Kennedy-Asser is crucial to our work here at Shade the UK. Not only does it give us the opportunity to grow our own knowledge-base on the latest climate research, but it allows us to amplify their voices to our own audiences. We hope to continue working with Dr. Kennedy-Asser in the future, as well as speak to other experts in the world of climate as this interview series evolves.

If you would like to hear more about our research or get involved, please contact us at info@shadetheuk.co.uk.