Fishing communities in Europe are facing significant challenges due to policy measures aimed at reducing fishing effort in order to cope with the “crisis” in key stocks. While it is imperative to ensure sustainability of the resource, such policies may overlook the contribution of fisheries to the social and cultural well-being of coastal communities. This article explores the contribution that sense of place can make to understanding the relationship between fishing and cultural ecosystem services, drawing on case studies from Cornwall, southwest England. Through semistructured interviews with fishing community stakeholders we outline how fishing contributes to sense of place in terms of individual and community identities, as well as a particular place character associated with the physical presence of fishing. We suggest that a co-constructionist account of the relationship between sea and land can provide a starting point for understanding the cultural landscape that emerges as a result of fishing.

Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid-19 crisis. This paper assesses (i) how different farming systems were exposed to the crisis, (ii) which resilience capacities were revealed and (iii) how resilience was enabled or constrained by the farming systems' social and institutional environment. The 11 farming systems included have been analysed since 2017. This allows a comparison of pre-Covid-19 findings and the Covid-19 crisis. Pre-Covid findings are from the SURE-Farm systematic sustainability and resilience assessment. For Covid-19 a special data collection was carried out during the early stage of lockdowns. Our case studies found limited impact of Covid-19 on the production and delivery of food and other agricultural products. This was due to either little exposure or the agile activation of robustness capacities of the farming systems in combination with an enabling institutional environment. Revealed capacities were mainly based on already existing connectedness among farmers and more broadly in value chains. Across cases, the experience of the crisis triggered reflexivity about the operation of the farming systems. Recurring topics were the need for shorter chains, more fairness towards farmers, and less dependence on migrant workers. However, actors in the farming systems and the enabling environment generally focused on the immediate issues and gave little real consideration to long-term implications and challenges. Hence, adaptive or transformative capacities were much less on display than coping capacities. The comparison with pre-Covid findings mostly showed similarities. If challenges, such as shortage of labour, already loomed before, they persisted during the crisis. Furthermore, the eminent role of resilience attributes was confirmed. In cases with high connectedness and diversity we found that these system characteristics contributed significantly to dealing with the crisis. Also the focus on coping capacities was already visible before the crisis. We are not sure yet whether the focus on short-term robustness just reflects the higher visibility and urgency of shocks compared to slow processes that undermine or threaten important system functions, or whether they betray an imbalance in resilience capacities at the expense of adaptability and transformability. Our analysis indicates that if transformations are required, e.g. to respond to concerns about transnational value chains and future pandemics from zoonosis, the transformative capacity of many farming systems needs to be actively enhanced through an enabling environment.

It has long been recognised that the traditional media play a key role in representing risk and are a significant source of information which can shape how people perceive and respond to hazard events. Early work utilising the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) sought to understand the discrepancy between expert and lay perceptions of risk and patterns of risk intensification and attenuation with reference to the media. However, the advent of Web 2.0 challenges traditional models of communication. To date there has been limited consideration of social media within the SARF and its role in mediating processes of risk perception and communication. Against this backdrop, we focus on the social media platform Twitter to consider the social amplification of risk in relation to ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus); a tree health issue that attracted intense media attention when it was first identified in the UK in 2012. We present an empirical analysis of 25,600 tweets in order to explore what people were saying about ash dieback on Twitter, who was talking about it and how they talked about it. Our discussion outlines the themes around which talk about ash dieback was orientated, the significance of users’ environmental ‘affiliations’ and the role of including links (URLs) to traditional media coverage. We utilise the notion of ‘piggybacking’ to demonstrate how information is customised in line with group/individual identities and interests and introduce the concept of the ‘frame fragment’ to illustrate how information is selected and moved around Twitter emphasising certain features of the messages. The paper affords a detailed consideration of the way in which people and organisations simultaneously appropriate, construct and pass on risk-relevant information. A conclusion is that social media has the potential to transform the media landscape within which the SARF was originally conceived, presenting renewed challenges for risk communication.