With extreme weather events expected to become more frequent in the future, are there any lessons we can learn from the past? Environmental historians have been looking at droughts, floods and hurricanes - and, considering the impact they had on communities and how they responded. Des Fitzgerald asks Georgina Endfield and Jean Stubbs how both local and international stories of extreme weather can encourage public awareness and engagement with preparing for the realities of climate change.

Georgina Endfield is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Liverpool. Her AHRC-funded research project, ‘Spaces of Experience and Horizons of Expectation: Extreme weather in the UK, past, present and future’ explores how people have been affected by extreme weather through time. You can read a blog post about the project here: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/history/blog/2018/extreme-weather-stories And you can also access a database about extreme weather, which spans 500 years of weather events and history and is based on Professor Endfield’s research, here: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/extreme-weather/search/

Professor Jean Stubbs (School of Advanced Studies) is co-director of the Commodities of Empire Project. In 2019, she co-produced the AHRC-funded documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes with Michael Chanan and Jonathan Curry-Machado. You can watch the film here: https://www.livingbetweenhurricanes.org

Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.

You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.

The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.

Producer: Marcus Smith