Adaptation: Supply transformative tools to support decision-making and change
Led by Connon Andrews (NIWA)
Research goals
- We will use Serious Games to discover people’s behaviours and preferences for sea-level rise adaptation. We will use the Serious Game data to build a behavioural model that shows how people would behave over time in a changing climate in response to a range of policies and resource constraints.
- Designing policies to tackle real-world socio-economic challenges over many decades is difficult, due to a limited opportunity to experiment and test options. We will develop a virtual policy environment to “see the future”, allowing people to understand and evaluate the implications of different policy settings.
- We will identify appropriate methods for managed realignment, including how to manage coastal restoration and associated land-use planning matters, how to reconstruct coastal wetlands, and when to maintain or ramp-up provision of ecosystem services.
- We will bring together all the developed tools to develop pathway case study demonstrations for decision-makers.
Future Coasts multi-hazards game
The development of a serious game/adaptation simulation using a coastal lowland scenario under the effects of climate change is focussed on adaptation and aims to deliver transformative tools to support decision-making and change. We will use the tool developed to discover people’s behaviours and preferences for sea-level rise adaptation and the data it generates to build a behavioural model that shows how people would behave over time in a changing climate in response to a range of policies and resource constraints.
Both an online and physical version of a multi-player and -hazard serious game are being developed to:
- collect player behaviours to support the construction of a series of behavioural models
- support climate change adaptation education and conversations with public and stakeholders:
- to create engaging and memorable tools for community engagement
- to deliver players at the conclusion of the game to further information, tools and resources developed in the Future Coasts Aotearoa programme and elsewhere as they consider their own adaptation options.
The development of the physical version game prototype is well underway. A working protype is currently being tested by the research team and should be ready for wider testing by mid-April. Once testing is complete the construction of the on-line game will begin.