Paper Short Abstract:

Expert understandings of climate change adaptation tend to ignore informal everyday responses to its local impacts. This presentation examines DIY strategies used by Czech city dwellers to adapt to heatwaves, drought and energy crisis, and attempts to challenge formal discourses.

Paper Abstract:

In expert discourses, adaptation to climate change is often understood as top-down decision-making and/or searching for expert solutions. In addition, household adaptation to climate change commonly means conscious adopting of technological solutions distributed through the market (Ferenčuhová 2022). To the contrary, everyday and DIY practices that help people in different contexts to adjust to the local expressions of climate change and to associated challenges (such as heatwaves, drought, but also energy crisis) are undermined in expert discourses as irrelevant temporary „coping responses“ (Porter et al., 2014). Examples include practices of collecting and reusing water in the households without adopting expert technologies, energy and cost-efficient strategies to keep one’s home cool on a hot day (e.g., through sophisticated ventilating), or DIY retrofits in one’s home to save energy. In this presentation, I will focus on various everyday and DIY strategies people in Czech cities adopt in their homes in response to climate change (however, without necessarily identifying changing climate as the issue at stake). I ask if and how they oppose expert and top-down approaches and I observe conflicts as well as synergies between “formal” and “informal” solutions. Finally, I argue that expert discourses on climate change adaptations need some rewriting to stop ignoring everyday and DIY practices and their transformative potential.

The presentation departs from my previous article „Inconspicuous adaptations to climate change in everyday life“ (Ferenčuhová 2022, Journal of Consumer Culture) and is based in my ongoing research covering DIY reconstructions of prefabricated wooden houses in the Czech Republic.