Climate Action Mapping, Santa Cruz, California Phase 2
Santa Cruz, California, United States
Santa Cruz Climate Action Stories ESRI screenshot.
Community communication and media representations of local climate actions are mostly either absent or insufficient globally. When climate change is covered, representations focus on climate impacts providing incomplete information about how people can act to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Climate Health Equity Partnerships (CHEP) are using geospatial tools to improve the regionalization and visualization of existing climate actions. Using localized visualizations increases the agency of local communities to respond to the climate crisis and allows as many segments of the community as possible to access the information. Climate and health are sometimes perceived as separate topics with separate stakeholders and disconnected solutions. CHEP supports connecting climate and health together by creating an easy-to-use visual display of climate actions. CHEP will improve upon a prototyped interactive interface where the public can upload photos and short descriptions using an online GIS tool which will support diverse science centers and museums to work with members of their communities to document and visualize local planetary health action.
Two pilot efforts—one by the starting California Central Coast team and another repeated 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.
Description
CHEP will leverage the existing platform that allows users to upload photos and descriptions of a wide range of climate actions and uses a geospatial-based tool to highlight where each action took place. By providing tailored guidance and the necessary infrastructure, the project partners will enable science centers and museums to incorporate this tool in a range of programs, in turn facilitating conversations about solutions that build a sense of active hope and invite and inspire community-level action.
CHEP will support science centers or museums to embed the platform in existing programming (e.g., field trip programs, summer camps) or communications (e.g., social media) to invite their community members to share instances of local action. They will create a beta “how-to” guide with directions for collecting the examples and using them as a springboard for group conversations. The team will be available to problem-solve with science center staff as needed.
CHEP will collect feedback and outcomes from participating science centers through interviews, focus groups, and/or surveys. For example, they will seek to better understand the contexts in which the platform was used, what worked well, and what challenges they encountered. These insights will inform subsequent iterations of the project and will be shared alongside the platform and how-to guide at conferences such as the ASTC annual conference and AGU Annual Meeting. This project can be implemented at different scales, each with corresponding resource requirements and outcomes.
Mission: To (1) raise awareness of, advocate for, and collaboratively adopt equitable policies and practices that promote health and climate equity, and (2) improve coordination for regionalized climate, health, and equity work.
Goals:
- Generate timely, coordinated regional communication around health and climate impacts and solutions. Messaging should help drive substantive mitigation and rapid adaptation to climate change and climate-related health issues.
- To develop and build an equitable and scalable framework that connects climate and health by incorporating best practices from diverse communities at a regional scale that can be extended into national and international level health equity planning.
- To leverage technology and existing relationships to strengthen connections, bridge divides, and translate established best practices for locally relevant structures, designs, and interventions.
Additional details about this work can be found at:
- Mapping Out Our Future: Using Geospatial Tools and Visual Aids to Achieve Climate Empowerment in the United States published by Springer in 2024.
- The mapping platform was shared at the July 15th Seeding Action network gathering. Here is a recording of the presentation portion, and the slides. They shared this one-pager about the Climate Action Mapping tool. This is the Google Doc used in the gathering.
- CHEP presented a poster at the 2024 American Geophysical Union Meeting on Climate Action Maps Enable Science Centers and Museums to Make Climate Action Visible, Relatable, and Accessible.
Goals for Phase Two include:
- Scaling up the existing mapping project to run the prototype with a larger set of science museums.
- Updating the mapping platform to reflect feedback from science museums and user feedback.
- Connecting regional climate story results to narrative media programs, generating news articles reporting through journalism outlets on positive outliers using this data.
- A research paper to be published describing the results of the experiment.
Status:
In-Progress,
Location:
Santa Cruz,
Managing Organizations:
No organizations
Project Categories:
Climate Change,
Community Engagement,
GIS,
Project Tags:
No tags