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 118

awareness of climate change, and possibly affecting policy and collective
behaviour change. This chapter reviews first the theoretical basis for such effects,
then describes a major research programme conducted in Canada to test the
effectiveness of a visualisation-based participatory process in achieving some of
these goals. It concludes with implications and recommendations for using such
tools and processes in community engagement and planning for climate change
internationally.
7.2 Theoretical Background on the Influence of Landscape
Visualisation on People in Relation to Climate Change
Landscape visualisation exhibits several characteristics which could be powerful
in bringing consequences of climate change home to people. Landscape visual-
isation attempts to represent actual places and on-the-ground conditions in three-
dimensional (3D) perspective views with varying degrees of realism (Sheppard
and Salter 2004 ). This amounts to a unique form of visual communication, con-
veying information in the dominant form to which the human species is genetically
adapted (e.g. visual landscapes), but capable of showing future scenarios and
conditions which people may not be able to imagine on their own.
Early evidence from research and practice, and emerging theory on 3D visu-
alisations, provides some reasons for optimism. Human responses to environ-
mental or visual stimuli such as landscape visualisations can be broadly
categorized as follows: engagement (level of interest and attention); cognition
(related to knowledge, awareness and understanding); affect (related to feelings,
perceptions, and emotions); and behaviour (related to changes in behaviour of the
viewer) (Appleyard 1977 ; Zube et al. 1982 ). In the collective sphere of community
planning, related consequences such as capacity-building (to deal with climate
change), policy change, and decision-making are also important (Sheppard 2008 ).
There is considerable evidence of the effectiveness of visualisation as a planning
tool (e.g. Tress and Tress 2003 ; Sheppard and Meitner 2005 ; Salter et al. 2009 ),
and the advantages of interactive systems in particular for engagement, cognition,
and awareness building (e.g. Winn 1997 ; Furness III et al. 1998 ; Salter 2005 ;
Schroth 2007 ; Mulder et al. 2007 ). In this context, potential benefits of landscape
visualisation include:
• Attractiveness to lay-people, due to the novelty of the medium, its dynamism
and interactivity;
• Combining the predictive capabilities of modelling/GIS with the intuitive and
experientially rich media of photo-realistic representation, providing 'windows
into the future' with changing landscape patterns and meaningful socio-cultural
associations;
• The ability to present alternative futures side-by-side and pose 'what-if' ques-
tions (Ervin 1998 ); and