Anycare: A Serious Game to Evaluate the Potential of Impact-Based and Crowdsourced Information on Crisis Decision-Making

Extreme weather and climate events challenge weather forecasting and emergency response operations and are often related to high social, environmental and economic impacts worldwide. Effective disaster risk management relies not only on the accuracy and precision of official hazard predictions and related warnings issued by forecasters but also on how those are communicated to and interpreted by end-users to support informed decision-making on allocating human and material resources before and during the crisis. Recent decision-support tools promote the elaboration of multi-hazard ‘impact-based’ or ‘risk-based’ forecasts that translate meteorological and hydrological hazards and related cascading effects into sector- and location- specific impact estimations as the core to improve responder’s and public’s understanding and coping capacity to those risks. To take a first step towards exploring this hypothesis, we propose a new role-playing experiment that engages participants in the decision-making process at different levels of the weather-related emergency system. ANYCaRE serious game experiment explores the value of modern impact-based weather forecasts on the decision-making process to (i) issue warnings and manage the official emergency response under uncertainty and (ii) communicate and trigger protective actions at different levels of the warning system. Flood/flash flood or strong wind game simulations seek to reproduce realistic uncertainties and dilemmas embedded in the real-time forecasting-warning processes. A tabletop version of the game was first tested in scientific workshops in Finland, France and Spain where European researchers, developers, forecasters and civil protection representatives helped refine the concept. An improved version was then implemented with undergraduate University students in France and with stakeholders involved in the management of hazardous weather emergencies in Finland. First results indicate that (i) multi-model developments and crowdsourcing tools increase the level of confidence in the decision-making under time pressure, and (ii) facilitates interdisciplinary cooperation and argumentation on emergency response in a fun and interactive manner. ANYCaRE tabletop version appears as a valuable learning tool to enhance participants’ understanding of the complexities and challenges met by various actors in weather-related emergency management.