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Moderator: Michael Stanyer

Engagement and Games: Serious Gaming for Climate Adaptation

Presenters: Heather Murdock and Dr. Evalyna Bogdan

Flood adaptation is a significant challenge in Canada and around the world. Local communities aiming to build greater resilience to flooding often grapple with balancing competing interests and deciding which trade-offs are tolerable. It has been shown that “serious games” can be an effective tool to facilitate learning and collective decision-making. These tools involve gamification methods applied to serious topics. A growing body of research shows that the gamification of complex socio-environmental problems can create safe spaces for stakeholders to explore diverse views and interests in a low-pressure environment.

This presentation will showcase how a flood adaptation practitioner and a researcher teamed up to develop a serious game for flood governance in Canada – the Flood Resilience Challenge. An evaluation of the pilot test and the implication of these findings will be presented for the application of the Flood Resilience Challenge in communities across Canada.

Enhancing Public Awareness through the Arts in Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Adaptation

Presenter: Sylvia Borda

In considering the conditions required for a resilient and sustainable future we need to repurpose, reinvent, remake and rethink how our human-impacted planet can better work with the environment and function synergistically with it.
 
In this talk on what's next in civic and rural development, artist Sylvia Grace Borda illustrates how the arts sector can help align us more closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While Canada was one of 193 nations that pledged to adopt the SDGs in 2015, it has been slow in developing a strategy for implementing the goals nationally. This interactive presentation highlights how we can champion SDG targets by demonstrating ways in which the arts can support tackling climate change.   In particular the talk provides actionable insights of how our civic spaces can become examples of climate adaptive and eco-cultural spaces for public awareness and custodianship.

Sylvia's presentation is relevant to those whose daily work impacts Nature, including architects, engineers, landscape architects, planners and policy makers, by demonstrating how the arts can help us build and achieve a more sustainable world.

Communicating about Climate Change in the Canadian Provincial North: Insights into Promoting Community Engagement

Presenter: Maya Gislason

Communities in the Canadian Provincial North (CPN) are particularly vulnerable to climate change. However, limited research addresses the unique challenges, impacts and possibilities around effectively communicating climate change in these regions. Further, climate change communication research focuses primarily on urban realities, and when applied to the CPN, these best practices may alienate, isolate or even polarize local climate change research and community engagement efforts led by local champions. In this presentation, we share findings from in-depth interviews with local changemakers across Northern British Columbia and Ontario, and a survey of two urban communities in the CPN. With a focus on place, local vulnerabilities and the role of industry as a major economic driver, this presentation considers the nature of rural and remote communities, and how living at the epicenter of struggles between environmental and economic sustainability contours the challenges of communicating about climate change in these regions.