Santa Cruz Climate Action Stories ESRI screenshot.
Images improve cultural understandings of complex, nuanced information. There has been a trend toward using stock images in journalism. These images feed into a larger system of media representations that shape the cultural understandings of health issues and both behavioral and policy responses. Our team is experimenting with improving the systemization through which we create public health messages across media platforms by using online maps (Geographic Information Systems (GIS)) to group stories about community responses to environmental health solutions. We expect that including geospatial information and sector-related tags to sort images and stories by sector will improve message specificity and provide reference material for more highly produced media content. Microtargeting images and messages to specific audiences can allow for message tailoring to specific geographic regions, sectors, and intersections of both. GIS examples can then be used as reference material to feed into other media types such as journalism or narrative media content. We are expanding on these methods using a geospatial-based tool to improve the visualization of regional climate regional solutions.
During Phase One, our team accomplished three primary goals that will help our team expand upon previous work. First, we built a new copy of the geospatial interface that we had previously explored with two pilot examples so that it would be available for a larger, more robust scale of climate action examples. Second, we assessed the landscape for partnerships to help us to help us appropriately scale and collect climate action stories. Third, we developed two exploratory partnerships, one with the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) and one with the Entertainment Partnerships team of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Association of Science and Technology Center team, working under the Seeding Action initiative, proposes to collect and develop the interface in conjunction with their network of science center partners. As of February 2023, 51 science centers and museums have joined Seeding Action. The Entertainment Partnerships team of the Natural Resources Defense Council interfaces with commercial production teams such as their 2024 Sundance Film Festival program The Last Laugh: Comedy in the Age of Climate Change. The participation of this media training program serves to help us collect the GIS climate action examples with media production teams who need examples of regionally specific climate action examples to incorporate in scripted media.
The two pilot efforts—one by a California Central Coast team and another by a group in Oxfordshire, UK—have provided a proof of concept by using GIS to invite community members to share positive climate-based actions, which are then showcased on an interactive map. These projects provide users with a link to a form for them to submit images and descriptions of their actions, as well as their locations. For example, users have uploaded images of a community garden, use of public transportation, and zero-waste repair shops and markets. Their entries are added to an interactive map which others can use to explore the types of actions taking place, with tools to toggle between categories such as building electrification/efficiency and transportation. In this way, community members can learn more about the people taking local actions, and where actions are taking place.
The existing prototype is a highly adaptable platform. For example, the portal to share actions can be included as a link or QR code on websites or social media posts, shared during in-person or virtual events, added to fliers and distributed throughout a community, or loaded on tablets that are available to visitors. The current link is hosted here. Our outputs from Phase One are the new GIS database tool and the two working partnerships.
To get to this stage in the project, the biggest change that we’ve had to make is the flexibility that we need to have to work with our nascent partnering organizations. The speed which the project moves at is dependent on the trust and interest in not just the leading organizations, ASTC and NRDC, but also their component science museums and media producers. I expect the next stage of the project to be equally delicate in how we cultivate those relationships. Our hope is that once this becomes a working system of community partners that the mechanical story collection and sharing becomes less dependent on individual participants and a more robust iterative feedback system.
Santa Cruz Regional Climate and Health Equity Partnerships will be an advisory committee for the Climate Action Plan for the City of Santa Cruz. Our goal is to develop a framework for regionalizing climate action. The CHEP framework includes a geospatial mapping tool and synchronized messaging system to improve coordination among climate, health, and equity efforts. Through a network of communities sharing the CHEP framework, we hope to improve both regional coordination and visualization of climate, health, and equity issues. We plan to synchronize efforts so that we can more rapidly move climate, health and equity projects into service. Importantly, the CHEP framework can be customized for any region and at any scale.
The Community would like to improve visualizations of existing climate actions and engage the wider Santa Cruz population so that they can actively participate which will result in higher levels of engagement leading to positive climate actions.
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Our original timelines were intentionally loose to accommodate the flexibility needs of our volunteer team and the required partnership development and relationship building with leader organizations.
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Phase Two: Next steps
Emily Coren, Stanford Psychiatry and Psychology, Science Communication
Krista Myers, MS, Louisiana State University, Earth Science
Nathan Uchtmann, Physician
Nightingale Uchtmann, Nurse
Jennie Dusheck, MA, Author, Freelance Science Writer & Editor
Nancy Glock-Grueneich, Participant in the Santa Cruz Climate Action task force
Aviva Wolf-Jacobs, PhD student, Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California
Jason Maitland
