Article by Aiyana Moya via UC Santa Cruz Newscenter

What can an individual person do to adapt and recover from climate-related events?

This question can be daunting for the everyday person to answer. It turns out, it can even be challenging for climate experts to weigh in on.

“When I asked this question to local experts, most had a difficult time answering,” says Linda Hirsch, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz who is supported by the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.

Hirsch is one of the authors of a new study on how technology can help people be more prepared for climate-related hazards—a measurement coined “climate resilience.” Hirsch also led a team of UC Santa Cruz undergraduates in building a new exhibit at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center that seeks to equip community members with techniques for preparing for climate change events through an actionable, engaging game for visitors.

As our lives are increasingly subject to natural hazards, building ways to be resilient in the face of climate-induced events is increasingly important. This is true on the individual and community level. Hirsch’s recent study examines how technology can support and empower people to be climate resilient, while the game she built gives people tangible ways to implement climate resilient practices into everyday life.

At its core, Hirsch seeks to identify ways that people and communities can prevent, manage, and recover from climate-related disruptions and impacts.

How can technology support climate resilience?

Hirsch’s study, which is slated to be published in the coming months, includes interviews of 16 experts working in climate resilience, particularly those in partnership with local communities. These interviews help inform what elements contribute to climate resilience, Hirsch says. The study then builds upon these foundational elements by examining how technology might fill identified gaps and needs, or facilitate preparedness to create climate resilient people and neighborhoods.

So far, the study asserts, climate resilience research has taken a top-down approach, working from a policy perspective and using scientific applications to understand the overarching frameworks that can make a city more resilient in the face of natural hazards. But Hirsch’s study is grounded at the individual and community level, seeking to identify everyday actions that build preparedness for natural hazards. It also considers not only how technology can be used to support these actions, but narrows the ambiguity around technology’s role in supporting this process.

Technology plays a deeply integrated role in the many processes that contribute to climate resilience — from communication and collaboration to reflection, learning and support. One of the most important things technology can do, the study found, is expand access to information, which emerged as a key theme in building resilience from the expert interviews. This was one of the takeaways for Hirsch as well.

“One of those crucial parts [about building climate resilience] is about information. How you access information, how you distribute information, how you understand it and also how you apply it,” Hirsch says.

Accessible information is closely linked to strong community connections, the study finds. To bridge knowledge gaps, communities need robust networks, both within and beyond their immediate neighborhoods, connecting with other communities, institutions, and businesses. Technology plays a key role in this effort, offering multiple ways to share information, from social media to messaging platforms. These tools are essential building blocks of community resilience. When people are connected, the availability of resources and the impact of one person’s actions are more visible.

“If you have a neighborhood community that’s more connected internally, that will make it more resilient,” Hirsch says.

People also take cues from each other, one expert interview said. If your neighbor rides a bike to work, perhaps you might consider an alternative, sustainable mode of transportation.

When using technology to facilitate these spaces, climate experts called for digital tools that not only support learning and connection, but are also enjoyable to use. They highlighted the potential of playful approaches, like games, to encourage community-wide participation, including among groups that are often overlooked, such as older adults, low-income residents, and non-native speakers.

For Hirsch, the study also illuminated the necessity for interdisciplinary collaboration. She’s looking forward to presenting her findings at an upcoming conference dedicated to exploring how design can support a more sustainable world, and she hopes this will be an opportunity to bridge research sectors.

As for what’s next, Hirsch hopes to dive into the perspectives of how individuals can build climate resilience from the source — communities and people. She’s already begun some of this work, through a series of workshops she conducted earlier this year that asked community members how they prepare for flood risks, to develop preparation methods and considered what would help community members be more engaged in taking steps towards climate resilience.

One piece of feedback she heard?

“People wanted learning to be [climate resilient] a fun experience,” Hirsch says.

Making climate resilience fun at the Seymour Center

Inside the Seymour Marine Discovery Center in Santa Cruz, children and parents walk around various exhibits, pointing at starfish suctioned to glass tanks and stopping to read plaques. One family picks up the cards of Linda Hirsch’s interactive flood resilience game.

Liane Bauer (l), Fisheries Collaborative Program, learning to play the interactive game with Linda Hirsch (r).

On each card is an activity that the player can do long before, just before, during and after a flood. Projected in the middle of the game is a map of the neighborhoods flanking the San Lorenzo River. A smiling otter waves at the player in the corner of the projection and yellow stars track the player’s progression in the game.

The object of the game is for players to increase their community’s flood resilience by working together and thinking ahead.

“The games are part of my larger research fellowship to explore technological interventions to increase local communities’ climate resilience from the bottom up,” Hirsch says. “There’s a need for fun and engaging interventions as well as the need for locals to get more connected with their local surroundings and neighborhoods. The game does that through connections to local resources and actions.”

Would clearing your gutters of leaves be something you should do long before a flood, just before, during or after, one card prompts. A QR code below the activity invites the player to learn more about this activity. If the action you choose makes the most sense given the prompt, you earn points.

These details are intuitive and help lighten the serious topic of flood events. They aren’t accidental— each element was designed with the user in mind, as well as the player’s ages, and is a conclusion of the collaboration between Hirsch’s team and the Seymour Center.

“We had several development cycles engaging our contact from the Seymour Center and the local communities in Santa Cruz,” Hirsch says. “The game comprises multiple components of which each needed to be carefully designed, tested and developed before connecting it with the other game components. Even the wooden player stations, those are one of the simpler components, and yet still needed several iterations for designing them, cutting them the right way, so that everything fits and is understandable.”

But it’s these thoughtful details that Hirsch hopes will make the game accessible for all ages and have a lasting impact on players.

“Games are not the answer for everything, but it allows for more positive emotions and experiences with a serious topic,” Hirsch says. “They also facilitate intergenerational play, where players can discuss and decide together, benefitting from the knowledge that each of the players has to contribute.”

Hirsch and her team plan to track how many players from which stations play a game, how many games are completed and how long it takes players to complete a game. They will also conduct surveys to see if players followed up on the card’s prompted action.

So far, Hirsch says, people liked the game, especially how it emphasizes local contacts and information sources. Already, one person who completed the follow-up survey mentioned that they had packed an emergency kit for themselves and their dog after playing the game, according to Hirsch.

“Games are very important. Not everywhere for everyone. But if we think long-term and think about the empowerment of non-experts and their different educational backgrounds, games can be a very good way to keep the threshold low to engage with the topic,” Hirsch says. “If people have fun doing it and even doing it together with others they like, they are more likely to play and engage with the topic again. And those meaningful experiences trigger more reflection, too, than just reading a passive text about it.”

Looking ahead

Hirsch’s study helps illuminate the ways that technology is embedded in the process of creating a climate resilient community. It also identified the specific ways we can use technology to build resilient communities, from using it to disseminate information, to creating engaging ways for the community to examine their own relationship preparedness for climate hazards.

It can also do something else and perhaps more surprising—it can help us connect with our own humanness, through collaboration and social interactions within our communities.