Exploring the Lived Experiences of Coastal Communities’ Climate Change Adaptation for Sustainable Development
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Abstract
Environmental change has become a defining challenge for sustainable development, profoundly reshaping human–nature relationships across coastal regions. Within this context, understanding how individuals experience and interpret these changes has become central to sustainability studies, yet current research remains dominated by economic and ecological assessments. What remains insufficiently understood is how coastal communities make sense of climate change as a lived experience that affects identity, belonging, and meaning. In response to this gap, this study clearly aims to examine how coastal communities interpret and internalize climate change as part of their daily lived reality. To achieve this objective, the study employs an interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA), using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants whose livelihoods depend on the sea. The data were analyzed through hermeneutic interpretation, allowing a systematic segmentation of experiential meanings into core analytical themes. The analysis revealed five interrelated themes—identity, resilience, emotional struggle, cultural continuity, and redefined sustainability—illustrating that adaptation is both a social and existential process. These findings highlight that adaptation extends beyond technical or ecological responses and instead represents a deeply embedded meaning-making process shaped by emotional, cultural, and relational dimensions. Overall, this study strengthens multidisciplinary comprehension by presenting its objectives, methods, and findings in an explicitly structured manner. It demonstrates that sustainability is not merely a policy framework but a lived moral relationship shaped by empathy, interdependence, and emotional endurance. The study contributes a phenomenological lens that encourages future research to integrate lived experience into the development of empathetic, culturally grounded sustainability strategies..
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