Serious gaming has gained increasing prominence in climate change communication, and provides opportunity to engage new audiences and new platforms for knowledge co-creation and dialogues. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a serious game on climate adaptation, primarily targeted towards high school students, practitioners and politicians. The game aims to provide an experience of the impact of climate adaptation measures, and illustrates links with selected Agenda 2030 goals, which the player has to consider, while limiting impacts of hazardous climate events. The game design builds on the key goals in Education for Sustainable Development combining comprehensive views, action competence, learner engagement and pluralism. This study draws on game sessions and surveys with high school students in Sweden, and aims to assess to what extent different aspects of the game can support an increased understanding of the needs and benefits of adaptation actions. The results of this study indicate that the game can engage players to reflect upon challenges related to climate adaptation decision making, but also point towards the challenge of including a high degree of complexity which can make it difficult to grasp consequences of individual measures, as well as to link these to the natural variability of the occurrence of extreme climatic events.Sustainability 2020, 12, 1789 2 of 18 mere entertainment such as instructional goals" [6] p. 414, has been addressed in a number of recent studies. Given the complexity of climate adaptation, referred to as a "wicked problem par excellence" [10] (p. 28), scientific knowledge, rivalling social interests as well as ethical consideration need to be recognized, and hence demand new types of educational tools. Enhancing science education by contextualizing the content as socioscientific issues is argued to increase understanding as well as to train ethical reflection and personal judgement needed in modern societies [11,12]. This is also in line with the core of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) that strives for systems thinking and democratic action competence in a world full of conflicting interests [13,14]. In this capacity, serious games can support teachers to strengthen their Education for Sustainable Development as it provides an experience of climate adaptation, based on systems thinking and action orientation. Inspired by these two strategies, we argue that digital games can be a valuable resource in climate communication and education.Climate change games cover a wide range of related topics, such as urban development [15,16], personal action [3], land use models [17], agriculture [18-20], water management [21-25], climate risk attribution [26] and simulations of climate negotiations [27]. In their review of climate adaptation games, Flood et al. [7] present a large number of more recent games with focus on climate adaptation, and discuss their efficiency for "engaging with diverse publics and enable social learning" [7] (p. 18) as well as the role of ...

Climate change communication on anticipated impacts and adaptive responses is frequently presented as an effective means to facilitate implementation of adaptation to mitigate risks to residential buildings. However, it requires that communication is developed in a way that resonates with the context of the target audience, provides intelligible information and addresses perceived barriers to adaptation. In this paper we reflect upon criteria for useful climate change communication gained over a three year development process of a web-based tool -VisAdapt TMaimed at increasing the adaptive capacity among Nordic homeowners. Based on the results from continuous user-testing and focus group interviews we outline lessons learned and key aspects to consider in the design of tools for communicating complex issues such as climate change effects and adaptive response measures.

In this article we present the design and implementation of the web-based visualization tool VisAdapt, developed to support homeowners in the Nordic countries to assess anticipated climate change risks, which are expected to negatively impact their living conditions and to identify possible adaptation measures. The tool guides the user through a three-step visual exploration process to facilitate the exploration of risks and adaptive action, specifically modified to the users' location and house type. We have developed VisAdapt over the course of three years in close collaboration with domain experts and end users to ensure the validity of the included data and the efficiency of the visual interface. Although Nordic homeowners are the targeted end-users of VisAdapt, the insights gained from the development process and the lessons learned from the project could be valuable for researchers in a wide area of application domains. These include how to make global changes tangible on the local level, how to develop easily accessible flow of information and how to incorporate end-user evaluations in the development process.2

The complexity of climate information, particularly as related to climate scenarios, impacts, and action alternatives, poses significant challenges for science communication. This study presents a geographic visualization approach involving lay audiences to address these challenges. VisAdapt TM is a web-based visualization tool designed to improve Nordic homeowners' understanding of climate change vulnerability and to support their adaptive actions. VisAdapt is structured to enable individual users to explore several climate change impact parameters, including temperature and precipitation, for their locations and to find information on specific adaptation measures for their house types and locations. The process of testing the tool included a focus group study with homeowners in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden to assess key challenges in geographic visualization, such as the level of interactivity and information. The paper concludes that geographic visualization tools can support homeowners' climate adaptation processes, but that certain features, such as downscaled climate information are a key element expected by users. Although the assessment of interactivity and data varied both across countries and user experience, a general conclusion is that a geographic visualization tool, like VisAdapt, can make climate change effects and adaptation alternatives tangible and initiate discussions and collaborative reflections.

Movement datasets collected using today's advanced tracking devices consist of complex trajectories in terms of length, shape, and number of recorded positions. Multiple additional attributes characterizing the movement and its environment are often also included making the level of complexity even higher. Simplification of trajectories can improve the visibility of relevant information by reducing less relevant details while maintaining important movement patterns. We propose a systematic stepwise methodology for simplifying and thematically enhancing trajectories in order to support their visual analysis. The methodology is applied iteratively and is composed of: (a) a simplification step applied to reduce the morphological complexity of the trajectories, (b) a thematic enhancement step which aims at accentuating patterns of movement, and (c) the representation and interactive exploration of the results in order to make interpretations of the findings and further refinement to the simplification and enhancement process. We illustrate our methodology through an analysis example of two different types of tracks, aircraft and pedestrian movement.

This study explores visualization-supported dialogues with water management and ecosystem stakeholders from four catchments in Sweden, Latvia, Germany and Poland. An interactive visualization tool was designed to present information regarding modelled effects of chosen future pathways including different measures that address ecosystem issues under present and future scenarios of land use and climate change, and estimated benefits and costs of the measures. This paper assesses if and how visualization-supported dialogues hinder or support key components of good governance of water and ecosystem management among expert stakeholders. We discuss challenges and opportunities related to the tool and dialogue design, and performance of dialogues. Results from a cross-case workshop indicate that the form and functionality of the tool contributes to participation, empowerment, accessibility and flexibility, while dialogue design is instrumental for encouraging trust and inclusion of local knowledge and competence.

Background. Serious games are gaining increasing prominence in environmental communication research, but their potential to form an integrated part of participatory research approaches is still strikingly understudied. This is particularly the case for applications of interactive digital formats in research on environmental challenges of high complexity, such as climate adaptation, which is a specifically suitable case as it involves complex interaction between climate systems and society, but where the response also involves trade-offs with potentially negative -maladaptive -outcomes.Intervention. This article presents the Maladaptation Game, which was designed to facilitate dialogue about potential negative outcomes of agricultural climate adaptation.Methods. We conducted test sessions with agricultural stakeholders in Finland and Sweden, and analysed quantitative and qualitative, audio-recorded and transcribed, material for opportunities and challenges related to dialogues, engagement, interactivity and experienced relevance.Results. The qualitative analysis of recorded dialogues shows that the Maladaptation Game has potential to support dialogue by challenging players to negotiate

Municipal actors are increasingly expected to consider climate adaptation in operative and strategic work. Here, digital environments can support strategic decisions and planning through visual representations of local climate risks and vulnerabilities. This study targets visualization of vulnerability to heat and floods as a means of supporting adaptation action in preschools, primary schools, caring units, and municipal residential buildings in Norrköping, Sweden. Workshops with sector leaders identified vulnerability indicators used as a basis for collecting, calculating and representing self-assessed vulnerability of individual units and buildings. Informed by user inputs, a map-based interactive visual tool representing resulting vulnerability scores and risk maps was developed to support (1) planners and sector leaders in strategic prioritization and investments, and (2) unit heads in identifying adaptation measures to reduce local flood and heat risks. The tool was tested with adaptation coordinators from targeted sectors. The study finds that the tool made it possible to overview climate risks and adaptation measures, which arguably increases general governance capacity Allowing yearly updates of set scores, the tool was also found to be useful for monitoring how vulnerability in the municipality evolves over time, and for evaluating how adaptive efforts influence calculated risks.