CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast

CSaP: The Science & Policy Podcast comes from the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge, and its host states the aim plainly: to bring evidence and expertise to public policymaking. Climate is the focus, treated less as a headline than as a set of stubborn practical problems. The show groups its material into themed mini-series, so one subject can run across several conversations. Josephine Anselin, a PhD student at Cambridge on a policy internship at the Centre, introduces the coastal resilience series. She links it to having lived in Jakarta, a city that has been called the world's fastest sinking, and talks to a different coastal research expert in each episode. Those conversations stay close to how things work. One guest explains that beaches sit high in summer and lower after winter's high-energy conditions, so a storm forecast that starts from the wrong beach profile can under-predict or over-predict the impact. Machine learning comes up as a newer tool, with a caveat: it copes poorly with conditions its training data never captured, so long historic records and continued monitoring stay essential. In 'Coastal Resilience: What is coastal resilience?', a guest describes building a GIS database of the UK coast and assessing it from environmental, social and physical perspectives. The nature-based solutions conversation turns to salt marsh that was reclaimed for farming behind sea walls standing for a century or more. Letting the tide back in is harder than it sounds. That land has had no fresh sediment for as long as the wall has stood, may have been compacted by farm machinery, and can sit much lower, on a surface less suited to vegetation returning. The guest compares it to trying to 'turn the wetland tap back on'. In 'Coastal Resilience: Policy transitions', a guest weighs local authority housing targets, which are often legally binding, against shoreline management plans that must be considered but do not bind planners. A second mini-series, Science, Policy and Climate Resilience, was led over four episodes by Emily So, Professor of Architectural Engineering at Cambridge, with host Rob Doubleday. It looked at living with climate impacts and at speeding up climate priorities after COP26 in Glasgow. Its built-environment episode has a memorable image. One speaker wants to point a phone at a building and see it glow red when it is overdesigned and green when it is in balance with the forces on it, and doubts much will change until cause and effect are that visible. That season was made in partnership with Expertise Under Pressure, a research project at Cambridge's Centre for the Humanities and Social Change. The show also steps outside its usual format with a live recording at the Cambridge Climate Change Festival, where the editor and eight chapter leads preview Cambridge Zero's report, A Blueprint for a Green Future. The coastal series is a good way in, because a new specialist in each episode comes at one theme from a different angle. A listener comes away knowing where climate adaptation gets stuck: data that runs short, land that will not simply return to what it was, and rules that pull in other directions.