Climate Resilience

The proposal’s concept of linking policy-making and behavioral change through efficient multi-stakeholder engagement (based on Hendawy, 2015)

Introduction

This project focuses on climate resilience with an emphasis on behavior change. Previous research has shown that behavior change is essential to addressing climate challenges, and many climate adaptation plans anticipate that stakeholders will modify their actions while working towards enhancing resilience. However, behavioral change in climate adaptation has received limited attention. Further, there has been a recent increase in interest in the use of serious games (games developed for a societal goal) for citizen engagement. Yet, more work is needed to understand how serious games can support sustainable behavior change and effective decision-making for climate resilience. We propose to tackle climate change problems, specifically the sea level rise problem and behavior change, using serious game design. Using a co-design process, the project explores how serious game design can better support behavior change and sustainability through engagement with stakeholders. Specifically, we investigate how to incentivize behavior change through the interplay between two levels: (a) the policy level and (b) the individual and urban household levels. To understand behavioral change for climate resilience, we will focus on the problem of sea level rise in two parts of the world: Alexandria, Egypt, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California, as an emerging challenge for climate change in both regions. By interacting with stakeholders in these areas, we aim to co-design a game concept that allows us to incentivize behavior change as well as experiment with policy changes for behavior change. 

Funder

Team

Magy Seif El-Nasr, PI, Professor, Computational Media

Mennatullah Hendway, PhD., PhD Student, Computational Media