If you are interested to learn more about the book’s contents in detail please refer to the chapters’ overview links below.
Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10. Chapter 11. Chapter 12. Chapter 13. Chapter 14.
Part 1: Setting the Scene on Climate Change
Chapter 1. An Invisible Truth? Perceptions and Misperceptions of Climate Change
Introduces some basic scientific realities of climate change and its solutions, contrasting these with our often misguided perceptions, as revealed and sometimes reinforced in the media and in our communities. Chapter 1 argues that we need a ‘climate change lens’ with which to see our own lives and surroundings, transforming our perceptions through vital ideas such as carbon consciousness, energy literacy, and careful observation of our own neighbourhoods. Explains how to use the book, to learn concepts and practical techniques for seeing our world through a radically different climate change lens.
Return to Top
Chapter 2. Limited Vision: Understanding Perceptual Problems with Climate Change
Explains why we often fail to grasp the realities of climate change and why these seem so disconnected from our daily lives. Chapter 2 synthesizes in simple language a range of recent social and psychological research findings, and illustrates gaps in our knowledge, attitudes, emotional reactions, behaviour, and policies that hold back the actions which are so urgently needed to manage the growing climate crisis. It concludes with a summary of what social scientists recommend for communicating climate change and fostering social change.
Return to Top
Chapter 3. A New Climate Change Lens: Principles for Shifting Perceptions of Climate Change
Presents three core principles for making climate change real to people: reframing our perceptions and stimulating action on climate change, that expand upon the usual recommendations of psychologists and climate change communicators:
- Making it local: bringing climate change down to the local scale, contextualizing it within our own neighbourhoods to make it relevant and personal
- Making it visible: revealing climate change visually, through visual media and the landscapes we see around us every day
- Making it connected: seeing the big picture holistically, joining the dots between the many aspects and implications of climate change that affect us; and not dwelling exclusively on the impacts of climate change, but looking at the local causes and the local solutions.
Return to Top
Chapter 4. Learning to See: Reframing Community Perceptions of Carbon and Climate Change
This Chapter explains in more depth how we can actually see climate change in our own backyard: how we put on the climate change goggles. By putting together what we know from the science and the media with what we can observe in our local landscapes, we can learn to recognize multiple signs of climate change. Chapter 3 introduces a cast of six fictional characters living on the same block in Climateville, from Adam the climate change skeptic to Farah the green-living student whose family was displaced from Bangladesh by flooding. Together they represent a typical range of opinions and behaviour about climate change; further chapters track their perceptions of local conditions and how these perceptions and their actions evolve as time passes, climate change worsens, and the world starts to wake up to the challenge.
Return to Top
Part 2: Knowing, Seeing, and Acting on Community Carbon & Climate Change
Chapter 5. Right Before Our Eyes: Seeing Carbon
Chapter 5 takes the first of five journeys through local communities to look for clues to climate change. This chapter hunts for the local causes of climate change, explaining basic facts and revealing in full-colour ‘photo-album’ format the often hidden pulse of carbon flowing through our homes and neighbourhoods. It also looks at the ways we choose to ignore or reframe as ‘normal’ the causes of climate change (our carbon footprints) that are plainly visible.
Return to Top
Chapter 6. Hot in My Backyard: Seeing the Impacts of Climate Change
Chapter 6 illustrates what climate change impacts look like in typical communities, from increasingly frequent extreme events to the much more subtle and creeping changes in plants, animals, and cultural practices. It also shows how we can spot our vulnerabilities to future climate change events, and how people (such as the Climateville residents) react to and interpret these threats and changes.
Return to Top
Chapter 7. Cutting the Carbon: Seeing Mitigation Solutions to Climate Change
Here we look for the signs that people and communities are cutting their carbon emissions. The photo-album reveals that there are many ways to do this at the local level, from behaviour change to technology to community design, and that indeed some low-carbon communities have been functioning very well for a very long time. However, many mitigation solutions are not recognized as such, and some such as windfarms, bioenergy plants and electric vehicles are vigorously opposed or outlawed by regulations.
Return to Top
Chapter 8. Being Prepared: Seeing Adaptation Solutions to Climate Change
Chapter 8 looks at adaptation in the community, and finds again that there are countless ways that people can and do adapt to changing conditions, but this is often not linked to climate change. Many adaptive engineering solutions (like upsizing drains for greater rainstorms) are hidden from view and definitely not ‘sexy” to the general public! Others, such as raising dykes against sea level rise, may be actively opposed by affected residents. Chapter 7 argues that adaptation measures need to be more clearly displayed and options better explained to the public.
Return to Top
Chapter 9. Seeing the Big Picture on Community Carbon and Climate Change
Chapter 9 puts the pieces together, to see what low-carbon resilient communities would look like that combine mitigation and adaptation. It illustrates many examples of communities already far down that road, and looks at successful case studies (small and large) in Scotland, Germany and China. Many of these communities see co-benefits in terms of health, quality of life, property values, and tourism income. Chapter 9 also takes a longer look into the future of our communities, drawing on climate change projections to describe transition pathways and scenarios that play out in Climateville in 2020, and are further explored in Part 3.
Return to Top
Part 3: Switching Lenses: Changing Minds with Visual Learning Tools
Chapter 10. Landscape Messaging: Making Climate Change More Visible In the Community
Chapter 10 describes the first of four approaches using visual learning tools to communicate climate change, based on a set of practical & ethical guidelines. Landscape Messaging refers to ways of modifying our local landscapes to reveal more clearly the signs of and solutions to climate change. It illustrates numerous ways of making climate change visible on the ground, from interpretive signage to large scale landscape design to highlighting social activities. Chapter 10 shows how such messaging can be planned and implemented by neighbourhoods, businesses, and cities, to increase transparency and build climate/energy literacy.
Return to Top
Chapter 11. Visual Media: Knowing Climate Change When You See it in Pictures
This chapter explores how multiple visual media (eg. photos, info-graphics, mapping, video, and social media) can be effectively used for community engagement by local government, NGOs, businesses, action groups, and even untrained local volunteers/residents. It describes how to plan, collect, produce, and present 2D visual media on climate change. It provides numerous examples (from high-tech to do-it-yourself) that meet recommended guidelines but have different pros and cons.
Return to Top
Chapter 12. The Modern Crystal Ball: Visualizing the Future with Climate Change
This chapter focuses on powerful 3D visualization tools that can depict important aspects of climate change that are invisible to the naked eye, or reveal possible future consequences. Most people have never been shown pictures of theory one community in the future, but it is often a revelatory experience. Landscape visualizations show the real world as it would be seen by someone standing on the ground, but showing additional information such as what low-carbon urban development or impacts of sea-level rise would look like. A range of toolsets are illustrated, from hand-sketching to 3D animation, along with practical tips to produce effective imagery while avoiding inappropriate uses.
Return to Top
Chapter 13. Local Climate Change Visioning: Enhanced Processes for Planning Community Futures
Chapter 13 describes practical approaches to engaging a community in a visioning process that takes advantage of the visual learning tools described in earlier chapters. These processes, whether informal and volunteer-based or incorporated in a systematic city-led official planning process, can address the hunger that most communities have to learn more about what climate change ail mean collectively to them, their families, neighbours, and businesses. Examples and research findings presented in this chapter from Canada and elsewhere clearly show that such processes using visualization tools can quickly transform people’s awareness of climate change, increase their sense of urgency and agency, build public support for new adaptation and mitigation polices, and even lead to policy change.
Return to Top
Part 4: With New Eyes to See: What the Future Looks Like With Climate Change
Chapter 14. Realizing Future Community Visions: Getting to Low-carbon, Attractive, Resilient Communities
The final chapter explores alternative future visions of the community of Delta in British Columbia, depending on how the community and the world responds d to the climate change challenge. Drawing on imagery and results from a local climate change visioning process run by UBC’s Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), it vividly illustrates the very different consequences that our choice today may lead to by 2100 (insert graphics, eg book cover or actual images?): scenes of devastation, or scenes of local food production, renewable energy supplies, adaptation to sea-level rise, local jobs, and sustainable collective behaviours. Chapter 14 concludes with a comparative look at the Climateville neighbourhood in 2100, to see if they met their own carbon targets and successfully adapted to a very different world. Did they survive?
Return to Top