Bringing Climate Change Science to the Landscape Level: Canadian Experience in Using Landscape Visualisation Within Participatory Processes for Community Planning

This chapter addresses the role of visualisation tools within participatory processes in bringing climate change science to the local level, in order to increase people’s awareness of climate change and contribute to decision-making and policy change. The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is becoming more widely understood in scientific and some policy circles, but public awareness and policy change are lagging well behind. Emerging visualisation theory suggests that landscape visualisations showing local landscapes in fairly realistic perspective views may offer special advantages in bringing the projected consequences of climate change home to people in a compelling manner. This chapter draws on and summarizes a unique body of research in Canada, applying and evaluating a local climate change visioning approach in five diverse case study communities across the country. This new participatory process was developed to localize, spatialize, and visualize climate change implications, using landscape visualisation in combination with geospatial and other types of information. The visioning process was successful in raising community awareness, increasing people’s sense of urgency, and articulating for the first time holistic community options in mitigating and adapting to climate change at the local level. In some cases the process led to new local policy outcomes and actions. Such methods, if widely implemented in enhanced planning processes, could facilitate uptake of climate change science and potentially accelerate policy change and action on climate change. However, moving from more traditional types of science information and planning to an approach which can engage emotions with visual imagery, will require guidelines and training to address ethical and professional dilemmas in community engagement and planning at the landscape level.