Bringing Climate Change Science to the Landscape Level: Canadian Experience in Using Landscape Visualisation Within Participatory Processes for Community Planning - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 117

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 infor-
mation 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.

Keywords Climate change visualization Visioning processes Landscape
visualization Visual imagery Landscape planning Community engagement
Community planning Decision-support tools Policy change Public awareness
Climate change scenarios

7.1 Introduction

Global warming is fundamentally changing the context within which landscapes
and communities have traditionally been planned and managed. There is an urgent
need to mitigate and adapt to climate change (IPCC 2007 ), requiring communities
to do their part in reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) and plan for a range of
possible energy futures, impacts on ecosystems, risks to infrastructure, and gen-
erally unfamiliar circumstances. However, action, policy change and the necessary
public support are moving slowly in many parts of the world. Concerns have been
raised by climate change scientists over their difficulties in achieving uptake of
global modelling by practitioners and decision-makers at the local level (Kriegler
et al. 2012 ). There is therefore a huge need for better communication and decision-
support tools to enhance the sense of urgency and help accelerate informed,
integrated, and effective responses to climate change.
In this context, realistic landscape visualisations may offer special advantages
in bringing the potential consequences of climate change home to local citizens
and decision-makers, in a compelling and useful manner. This chapter considers
the role of science-based visualisation tools and processes in improving commu-
nity planning and engagement on climate change; and particularly in making
climate

change science meaningful at the local level, increasing peoples'