MANAGING THE INCONCEIVABLE: PARTICIPATORY ASSESSMENTS OF IMPACTS AND RESPONSES TO EXTREME CLIMATE CHANGE

A comprehensive understanding of the implications of extreme climate change requires an in-depth exploration of the perceptions and reactions of the affected stakeholder groups and the lay public. The project on “Atlantic sea level rise: Adaptation to imaginable worst-case climate change” (Atlantis) has studied one such case, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a subsequent 5-6 meter sea-level rise. Possible methods are presented for assessing the societal consequences of impacts and adaptation options in selected European regions by involving representatives of pertinent stakeholders. Results of a comprehensive review of participatory integrated assessment methods with a view to their applicability in climate impact studies are summarized including Simulation-Gaming techniques, the Policy Exercise method, and the Focus Group technique. Succinct presentations of these three methods are provided together with short summaries of relevant earlier applications to gain insights into the possible design options. Building on these insights, four basic versions of design procedures suitable for use in the Atlantis project are presented. They draw on design elements of several methods and combine them to fit the characteristics and fulfill the needs of addressing the problem of extreme sea-level rise. The selected participatory techniques and the procedure designs might well be useful in other studies assessing climate change impacts and exploring adaptation options.sea level rise, West Antarctic ice sheet, climate change

FECES STANDARD MONEY: BEYOND TRANSACTIONS

Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering (Convergence of Science and Arts)Feces Standard Money (fSM), is a complementary currency that is different from other currencies in a number of ways. It is the first currency to adopt feces as its standard. In a world where objects and people are thought of as "goods and services," reality is compressed into conceptions of "use value" or "utility???. However, in the fSM system, feces and food waste that have traditionally and culturally been classified as ???human waste??? are used to produce biogas, creating value. Feces then becomes a representation of a new conception of value - one based on abundance instead of scarcity. This study aims to explore how the use of fSM can facilitate a redefinition of sustainable wealth. It begins by exploring neoclassical and modern theories of money and their relationship to the current state of money. It argues that economics??? failure to adequately account for the role of money as a basis of social relations contributes to the current unsustainable economic system. Building on the background and philosophical underpinnings of fSM, it postulates that money based on a feces standard might be a possible solution to developing a monetary system that can serve as the basis of social relations and facilitation of exchange as a means of instigating social change in attitudes towards global challenges like inequality and climate change. Social network analysis is used to investigate the social footprint of fSM in a game simulation of the fSM system. It is found that the mechanisms of fSM has the potential to imbue the network with tight knit connections -knots- that can contribute to a more inclusive monetary system.clos

Effective education and communication strategies to promote environmental engagement : The role of social-psychological mechanisms

Communicators of climate change seek ways to better educate and motivate individuals to personally commit to sustainable, energy-saving activities. However, critical psychological and social barriers to conservation make this task challenging. Behavioral scientists are well aware of the difficulties that individuals and groups have in responding effectively to information surrounding climate change, and have used these insights to develop a number of techniques to aid in persuading people of the importance of the climate change issue, and motivating adaptive behavioral responses. This report consolidates research findings from behavioral economics, decision science, and social psychology to explore key insights and evidence around effective climate change education strategies and interventions aimed at enhancing conservation behaviors. We explore key findings from the behavioral and decision sciences, including analyses of cognitive bias, choice architecture, social influences, values, and communication strategies. In addition, we discuss a set of international, academic-private partnerships that used interventions suggested by behavioral science and psychological theory to dramatic effects. These in-depth case studies demonstrate how practitioners and researchers have put research insights and principles into practice. We conclude by addressing implications for policymakers

Nuclear versus Coal plus CCS: A Comparison of Two Competitive Base-load Climate Control Options

In this paper we analyze the relative importance and mutual behavior of two competing base-load electricity generation options that each are capable of contributing significantly to the abatement of global CO2 emissions: nuclear energy and coal-based power production complemented with CO2 capture and storage (CCS). We also investigate how, in scenarios from an integrated assessment model that simulates the economics of a climate-constrained world, the prospects for nuclear energy would change if exogenous limitations on the spread of nuclear technology were relaxed. Using the climate change economics model WITCH we find that until 2050 the resulting growth rates of nuclear electricity generation capacity become comparable to historical rates observed during the 1980s. Given that nuclear energy continues to face serious challenges and contention, we inspect how extensive the improvements of coal-based power equipped with CCS technology would need to be if our model is to significantly scale down the construction of new nuclear power plants.Economic Competition, Electricity Sector, Nuclear Power, Coal Power, CCS, Renewables, Climate Policy

EPSRC IMPACT Exhibition

This exhibition was conceived by Dunne (PI) and comprised 16 mixed-media speculative design research projects. It marked the culmination of an EPSRC-funded initiative also partly supported by NESTA. Dunne supervised and then curated the projects by staff, graduates and students of the RCA Design Interactions programme. Each was conducted in collaboration with an external research partner organisation already supported by the EPSRC. The topics covered ranged from renewable energy devices and security technologies to the emerging fields of synthetic biology and quantum computing. Dunne and an advisory panel from EPSRC and NESTA selected themes on the basis of diversity of topic, design opportunities, intellectual and creative challenges, and public relevance. Dunne invited the designers to take a radical, interrogative approach, exploring the social, ethical and political implications of the research. Each designer visited the relevant science lab, consulted with the scientists throughout the project, and participated in a one-day workshop hosted by NESTA between scientists and designers on such forms of collaboration. Designers carried out literature, journal, and project surveys before developing their projects through iterative prototypes. The exhibition, held at the RCA in 2010, was considered by EPSRC to offer a powerful insight into how today’s research might transform our experience of the world. It was reviewed in the Guardian (2010), Wired (2010) and Design Week (2010). Dunne presented ‘IMPACT!’ in conferences including the IDA Congress, ‘Design at the Edges’, Taipei (2011) and at the Wellcome Trust, London (2011). He gave a related lecture to researchers at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing (2011). Individual exhibits from the project featured in exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art (2011), National Museum of China (2011); Z33 (2010–11); Wellcome Trust (2010–11); Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial (2010); Ars Electronica (2010); The Times Cheltenham Science Festival (2010); and V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media (2010)

Abstracts of Invited and Selected Papers and Organized Symposia, WAEA Annual Meetings, San Francisco, California, July 6-8, 2005

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Games for a new climate: experiencing the complexity of future risks

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This report is a product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Games for a New Climate, which met at Pardee House at Boston University in March 2012. The 12-member Task Force was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre to “explore the potential of participatory, game-based processes for accelerating learning, fostering dialogue, and promoting action through real-world decisions affecting the longer-range future, with an emphasis on humanitarian and development work, particularly involving climate risk management.” Compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, the report includes contributions from all of the Task Force members and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors – to both understand and experience the difficulty and risks involved related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future. The dozen Task Force experts who contributed to the report represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design.Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centr

Visual Climate Change Communication: From Iconography To Locally Framed 3D Visualization

Climate change is an urgent problem with implications registered not only globally, but also on national and local scales. It is a particularly challenging case of environmental communication because its main cause, greenhouse gas emissions, is invisible. The predominant approach of making climate change visible is the use of iconic, often affective, imagery. Literature on the iconography of climate change shows that global iconic motifs, such as polar bears, have contributed to a public perception of the problem as spatially and temporally remote. This paper proposes an alternative approach to global climate change icons by focusing on recognizable representations of local impacts within an interactive game environment. This approach was implemented and tested in a research project based on the municipality of Delta, British Columbia. A major outcome of the research is Future Delta, an interactive educational game featuring 3D visualizations and simulation tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation future scenarios. The empirical evaluation is based on quantitative pre/post-game play questionnaires with 18 students and 10 qualitative expert interviews. The findings support the assumption that interactive 3D imagery is effective in communicating climate change. The quantitative post-questionnaires particularly highlight a shift in support of more local responsibility

Estimating the Future Input of Fossil Fuel CO2 into the Atmosphere by Simulation Gaming

Previous estimates of input of fossil fuel CO2 into the atmosphere are reviewed, including those of NAS, IIASA, IEA, and Marchetti. Methods employed largely disregard that if CO2-induced changes are indeed harmful then there may be efforts to prevent emissions. There is a need to include explicitly societal response to increasing CO2 emissions in estimating future input as well as the strategic interaction among national energy policies. Economic theory of the general equilibrium type, game theory, and computer simulation (without humans) have disadvantages in this regard. Gaming, involving humans playing the roles of various nations, may be an illuminating approach to the problem. A simple game, focusing on coal, trade, and many nations is proposed as an initial effort