A web-based data visualisation and analytic toolkit to enable multi-stakeholder risk-management and enable better conversations and decision making by bringing together disparate information visually and spatially
Context
Communicating climate risk is a balance between clarity of message and the danger of oversimplifying complex information—leading to bad decisions. On the one hand, there are enormous and growing risks for coastal cities exposed to increased flooding due to climate change, sea level rise, and increasing storm surges. Local governments are under pressure to act quickly to manage development and to keep people safe, whilst protecting property. On the other, the social dimensions of risk are much more complex than blunt and single-issue infrastructural responses can deal with. In Japan for instance, residents living behind seawalls hastily constructed after the 2011 tsunami have since compared it to being in jail, with ill effects on health, happiness, and tourism.
Decision-makers need to be able to visualise and consider complex and overlapping information to be able to plan for future scenarios and their multifarious impacts. But where such data even exists, it is often separated: environmental data is held in different places than data on urbanisation and planning; social and economic data are in different forms, and at different scales, than physical and landscape conditions.
Practice
Flux.Land, developed by the Centre for Landscape Research at the University of Toronto in collaboration with MIT Urban Risk Lab and Broward County, Florida, is a tool for enabling conversations across datasets, and between stakeholders, towards better climate adaptation plans. Presented as a familiar online mapping platform, Flux.Land allows users to overlay data spatially. This allows one to view, say, the soil porosity of a parcel of land together with its zoning in a future urban plan, storm surge modelling, and population statistics. The data available, which can be selected by the user, includes: historic and physical conditions; forecasts such as development plans, population trends, and storm scenarios, as well as live weather and climatic data. It is visible in 2D or 3D, enabling sectional views of below-ground data including geological build up.
As a spatial decision support system (SDSS), Flux.Land is intended to be used by planners and policy-makers as a tool for collaboration, as well as for wider engagement with stakeholders and the general public. Since 2020, the platform has been hosted by and utilised as part of Broward County District School Board’s climate education programme. There, the aim of the project is to build climate literacy amongst the population and to increase awareness of climate risks, as well as opportunities for adaptations, at the local scale. “Climate Action Zones”, a methodology developed by the team using the tool’s analytic capabilities, identify sites where a combination of overlapping factors reveals a need for urgent planning.
In seeking methods by which urban planning can better respond to the complex challenges of climate breakdown, Flux.Land is not about providing so much data that the solution to a problem suddenly and miraculously appears. Instead, it is a tool for communicating complexity, and within that complexity for enabling discursive and deliberative decision making amongst multiple parties—by providing a common reference, and with the understanding that vulnerability is a complex characteristic with physical, social, infrastructural, and economic factors. As a tool for collaboration and uncovering information, it points also to the wider trend in spatial practice and data visualisation from practices of informing to ones of partnering.