MACC Hub Webinar Series #2: Improving the way we engage with vulnerability as a pathway to transformational adaptation

Date and Time

Date: Monday, 7th July, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM GMT+1
Location: Online

Aim

The Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC) Hub invites you to a critical and timely webinar exploring the concept of vulnerability in climate adaptation. In climate discourse, “vulnerability” is a widely used term—appearing in research, policy, and institutional strategies. But what does it truly mean to be labelled vulnerable, and who has the authority to define it?

This session will interrogate how vulnerability is framed, the implications of these framings, and how we might move toward more inclusive, participatory, and justice-oriented approaches. If transformational adaptation is about challenging the systems and structures that produce climate risk and injustice, then we must also challenge how vulnerability is understood and operationalized.

Agenda

The webinar will explore:

• Who is considered vulnerable—and who defines this?
• The consequences of being labelled as such
• How current research, policy, and funding frameworks reinforce or challenge existing hierarchies
• Why rethinking the language and politics of vulnerability is essential for climate justice

Too often, framing people as vulnerable risks reinforcing stigma, erasing agency, and casting communities as passive recipients of aid rather than as active agents of change. This session aims to create space for reflection and dialogue on how to engage with vulnerability in more transformative ways.

Each speaker will offer a 12-minute responding to the guiding questions, followed by an open Q&A and collective discussion. This is not a lecture, but a space for shared inquiry and critical engagement.

Speakers

We are pleased to welcome three speakers working across academia, advocacy, and policy:

• Professor Kate Brown (University of York), an expert in social policy and criminal justice, whose work explores how vulnerability is governed and experienced in welfare and exploitation contexts.
• Satwat Rehman (Just Transition Commission, Scotland), CEO of One Parent Families Scotland and Co-Chair of the Just Transition Commission, who brings decades of experience in equalities and inclusive policy-making.
• Poppy Ellis Logan (King’s College London), a PhD researcher focused on disability-inclusive disaster planning and the social dimensions of emergency response.
• Jacqueline O’Hagan, Healthy City Co-ordinator at the Belfast Healthy Cities

Registration details

This is an online event, free for all