Researcher / Landscape Planner
UBC - Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning, Vancouver, BC

David Flanders is a landscape architect intern and currently works as a researcher / landscape planner with the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of British Columbia, and as an independent consultant. His work has focused on urban design and land use planning addressing impacts of environmental change, and community responses including both adaptation and mitigation. David’s current work investigates energy planning for low-carbon, resilient landscapes through locally-driven, and participatory processes involving 3D landscape visualization. His work has taken him throughout Western and Northern Canada and Mexico, including preparing visualizations for the City of Prince George.

At the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), we sculpt and model the potential futures of local landscapes. Sometimes using computer simulations, or “visualizations”, we can demonstrate graphically the consequences of development patterns, policy decisions, or environmental change as they play out in the landscape. We also explore the visual impact, perceptions and acceptability of design and land-use proposals using 3D visualizations with a high degree of realism.

CALP has tested the effect of our visualizations on local perceptions of climate change with over 100 residents and practitioners in Metro Vancouver. ‘Visioning packages’ were assembled consisting of up-to-date climate science data combined with visualizations of the forecasted impacts of climate change scenarios within local Vancouver communities. Over the course of half a dozen controlled research sessions, we distributed before-and-after questionnaires which uncovered some interesting trends. Before they were introduced to the visualizations, 30 percent of respondents felt they were quite or very knowledgeable about the local effects of climate change. After visualizations, some 80 percent felt quite or very knowledgeable. Almost as many people – some 79 percent – found the visualizations “quite or very plausible/credible” and felt that they understood the future climate scenarios. We found that community members were already primed for action on climate change, even before seeing our work: fully 70 percent of one group in Delta, BC, overall strongly agreed that community policies to reduce GHGs must be in place within the next 10 years. In a North Vancouver group, 75 percent strongly agreed. Participants in the Delta group introduced to the visualizations indicated a “significantly higher” willingness to support local greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction measures and local adaptation measures than those who only saw non-visualized (e.g. more standard scientific reports, charts and graphs) versions of the same information. They also felt a greater motivation to act, and indeed, an increased personal responsibility to do so. In fact, after viewing the visualizations, 79 percent of participants felt that society needed to be radically transformed to address climate change, an increase from 53 percent before the workshops. The visualizations of low-carbon futures (showing development which would minimize GHGs and therefore climate change impacts) “show how much you have to do if you want things to stay the same”, said one participant.

We collected consistent feedback from people commenting on the value of focusing on home turf. “I learned how climate change could affect my community in a very graphic way,” wrote one participant. Another commented, “I was somewhat aware of global warming impacts on the Maldives and polar ice caps – this presentation placed my own community in that context.”

Currently, part of the CALP research team continues to help people visualize alternative futures, and move toward shaping resilient low-carbon communities. In Prince George, this includes renewable energy planning by way of heat generation (in order to reduce the need for natural gas, a greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel) that could be part of a low-carbon district energy system.  Sustainable yields of forest biomass within the Prince George Community Forest were estimated using the UBC Forestry Ecosystem modeling tool “FORECAST”.  Biomass isn’t a net producer of greenhouse gases if transportation emissions are kept to a minimum, which can be achieved by harvesting local wood sources.  The potential energy generation from this local forested hinterland is estimated to be able to supply heat for around 1500 homes, though there is a range of possibilities depending on assumptions around production and consumption.  CALP researchers Ellen Pond and Jon Salter have mapped the suitability of rooftops in downtown Prince George for solar hot water heaters, and this cost-effective technology can be used in conjunction with biomass to provide hot water and space heating for residents.

Collaborative planning and design work is funded in part by the Geomatics for Informed Decision Making (GEOIDE) Networks of Centres of Excellence, and received contributions from municipal, provincial and federal partners. Early investigations are providing some initial glimpses into what climate narratives could look like across Canada. In Calgary, a dominant impact will be on water supplies as a result of a diminishing snow pack. In Toronto, relationships between urban design and the urban heat island effect are being explored. The tiny hamlet of Clyde River, closer to Greenland than it is to its provincial capital of Iqaluit, is threatened by melting of the permafrost foundation upon which it is built, and faces increasing storm surge intensity and frequency, and declining sea ice. Our studies also include resilient community planning in Kimberly and wind farm design in Squamish, among others.

The Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning: www.calp.forestry.ubc.ca

UBC CALP Local Climate Change Visioning Project: http://www.calp.forestry.ubc.ca/presentations/GEOIDE%20Delta.htm

Figure: This 3D visualization of North Vancouver in 2050 shows some impacts similar to those Prince George could face over the coming century, including increased presence of forest pests, higher risk of forest fires, forest ecosystem shift and stress on infrastructure and slope failure.