Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: Urban climate adaptation coordinator

When a Dhaka drainage engineer told me our community flood-risk report looked "too informal to use," I understood the real problem: residents in flood-prone wards held detailed local knowledge, but adaptation planning rarely reached them. As urban climate adaptation coordinator, I decided to close that gap rather than wait for institutional direction. I recruited and trained 12 youth volunteers, who interviewed 94 households across three wards using a structured observation sheet I drafted. Trust was the harder task. Residents were cautious about outsiders, and volunteers doubted their work would matter. I ran separate orientations, joined the first field days, and revised the form after volunteers said two questions confused older residents. After the engineer's objection, I rebuilt the evidence pack: geo-tagged photographs, a ward-by-ward summary, and a site-by-site walkthrough. I requested a second meeting and presented each hotspot in turn. The drainage team agreed to fold our findings into their prioritization map. Within two months, the ward office cleared blocked drains at two hotspots before the next monsoon spell, reducing standing water on two lanes that had flooded repeatedly the previous year. Three volunteers later attended municipal feedback sessions on their own, and the senior engineer asked me to share the observation sheet with a neighbouring ward coordinator. I learned that influence here depends on making evidence legible to people with different standards of proof. I want to study climate change and development in the UK, focusing on participatory risk assessment and policy uptake, and ask Chevening alumni working in South Asian urban resilience to critique my indicator set. On return, I will bring a short field guide to the ward coordinators' monthly meeting and ask my supervisor to pilot it in two additional wards, tracking drains cleared before monsoon as the test.