Stakeholder engagement strategies to build resilience to compound hazards: Engaging community-based organizations in research

Climate extremes can generate impacts in one sector that cascade or amplify the impacts in others. Developing strategies that build resilience to these compound hazards requires collaboration among diverse stakeholders to understand hazard dynamics and the synergies and tradeoffs in adaptation activities. In many regions, community-based organizations (CBOs) lead in local climate adaptation, and their engagement in research can help inform research agendas and capacity-strengthening activities that support locally led adaptation. In this paper, we describe a co-produced, collaborative research project that convened CBOs working in climate adaptation, public health, and energy resilience in Puerto Rico. The goals were to identify knowledge gaps and opportunities for immediate action. Based on interviews, a participatory workshop, and a survey, we report on the CBO activities, their networks and their views on the relationships between climate, public health, and energy. We also describe their perspectives on priorities to address compound hazards. Drawing on these results, we discuss five strategies that can help research projects collaborate, co-produce, and engage with CBOs. They include understanding the network to inform engagement, paying attention to differential impacts and justice, employing flexible planning to accommodate multiple goals and perspectives, focusing on information sharing to advance collaboration, exploring narratives of change to understand adaptation and maladaptation, and confronting the question of “what next.” This study informs how research can more effectively engage CBOs in climate adaptation studies, which, in turn, can contribute to building plans and systems that are better equipped to build resilience to compound extreme events.