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Climate change may be undermining the stock of seasonal representations that society draws on to understand and live according to the weather. The CALENDARS project studies how modern society represents seasons, and how these representations shape institutions and help people live with seasonal change. The project opens an important emerging field in climate adaptation research by examining the representations of ‘normal’ seasons underlying key institutions, assesses their quality for successful adaptation to rapid climate change, and analyses facilitators and barriers to adopting representations more flexibly to new climates. It contributes a novel perspective on how to transform our institutions – from schools to farmer cooperatives – from the foundational culture and representations up, to better fit the changing seasonal cycles we are experiencing. CALENDARS empirically explores the relationship between different institutions’ ideas of seasons and their successful adaptation through an in-depth comparative study of a set of institutions in two local communities, in Norway and New Zealand. It is steered by an overall objective to: ‘Advance knowledge and understanding of how seasonal representations shape and are shaped by institutions, and critically appraise the quality of these representations for contributing to successful adaptation to seasonal change’. Conceptually, CALENDARS looks at representations as continuously ‘co-produced’ at the boundary of nature and society, and society and institutions. It tests a novel reconceptualisation of co-production as a prism; with each of the project’s three phases looking at the complex processes by which representations emerge through different ‘lenses’ of co-production. Methodologically, the project tests the feasibility of a novel basket of bespoke methods spanning narrative interviews, calendar boundary objects and collaborative sustainability science.

New Zealand

Until 20 years ago it was widely believed that asthma was an allergic/atopic disease involving atopic inflammation of the airways. Work that I and others have done has now shown that non-atopic asthma is much more important than was previously recognised. This has been confirmed by my ERC-funded AsthmaPhenotypes study, in both high-income countries (HICs) and low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). This is important both in terms of the prevention of non-atopic asthma, and also in terms of its treatment. I therefore propose to study the Causes and MEchanisms foR non-atopic Asthma in children (CAMERA) in four different settings where I have shown that NAA is common: New Zealand (HIC, high prevalence), Brazil (LMIC, high prevalence), Ecuador (LMIC, medium prevalence), and Uganda (LMIC, low prevalence). Work-package 1 (WP1): involves a case-control study of risk factors for atopic and non-atopic asthma in these four settings, as well as similar analyses in other available and comparable data sets. Together, these studies have comparable data on asthma, atopy, and a large number of asthma risk factors, on a total of 48,000 participants. I will conduct innovative analyses exploring the different causal pathways in these different settings. Work package II: in each centre, we will then select 160 participants (40 atopic asthmatics, 40 non-atopic asthmatics, 40 atopic non-asthmatic, 40 non-atopic non-asthmatics) for further clinical investigation with regards to three mechanisms that may be particularly relevant to non-atopic asthma: capsaicin challenge, cold-air challenge, and response to interferon-gamma. The unique features of this study include: (i) the inclusion of both high and low prevalence centres from HICs and LMICs; (ii) new analyses of risk factors for NAA, contrasting the findings in various pathways; and (iii) the investigation of three mechanisms which may be involved in non-atopic pathways.