The Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series

Dr. John Robinson November 7, 2002

On Friday, November 7, 2002 the Environment Canada Policy Research Seminar Series welcomed Dr. John Robinson, whose presentation was titled: Interactive Science for Sustainability in the Georgia Basin. Dr. Robinson is Professor and past Director of the Sustainable Development Research Institute, at the University of British Columbia. The following is a précis of his talk.

Sustainability and Community Engagement

Dr. John Robinson contends the most serious obstacle to achieving sustainable development is not the scientific or economic knowledge requirements, but achieving public acceptance of sustainability goals. Without significant public acceptance, we cannot evoke the social mobilization necessary to achieve sustainability, no matter how strong the knowledge base.

Given the paramount importance of mobilization to achieving sustainability, citizens must first understand environmental issues and the impact of their behavioural choices on the environment. Therefore, educating the public on environmental issues is crucial. However, present approaches to environmental education often portray 'doom and gloom' scenarios. Purveying doom leads to apathy, and may not lead to behavioural change since people tend not to respond to situations they feel are hopeless.

People are not truly apathetic about the future. However, they lack the opportunity and tools to act on their concerns. Many people feel alienated from large systems since they can be quite confusing. We need better ways to engage citizens and mobilize them to make more sustainable choices. We need to build tools so that informed decision-making can take place. The Georgia Basin Futures Project (GBFP) aspires to address these needs by providing a number of tools to citizens living on the west coast of British Columbia.

The Georgia Basin Futures Project

The GBFP is 5-year $6 million initiative funded by a network of partners to provide citizens with simple, mental models to empower them to interpret and ultimately influence their world, and engage them in planning a sustainable future for their region. It combines expert knowledge with public perspectives to enable discussion about desired futures informed through understanding of social, economic and ecological consequences of actions. The underlying philosophy is that the real purpose of modeling is not to describe the world, but to change the thinking of users.

We do not need huge or complex models to engage citizens and build understanding. Instead, we need to move beyond the traditional model of data-information-knowledge-wisdom, and utilize a more interactive model: data-information-dialogue-action. We should move beyond information into journeys of collective understanding.

Accordingly, the goals of the GBFP are:

• a better-informed, more engaged public;
• a nuanced database of public opinion;
• research on the relationship between values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour;
• relevant policies and technologies for a sustainable future.

The GBFP deliberately avoids the traditional approach to modeling, which is to start with our scientific knowledge base, then create a model, and next add a user interface. This process almost always fails since it starts at the wrong end. The GBFP starts by identifying what people have as priorities, then designs an interface, proceeds to design models to fit the interface, and finally data is gathered.

QUEST

The GBFP employs an interactive game named QUEST (Quite Useful Ecosystem Scenario Tool) to engage the public in dialogue and collective decision-making. It enables users to develop "what if?" scenarios for the Georgia Basin region. A forty-year time horizon was employed since it is a time horizon people care deeply about; they can imagine themselves and their families during this timeframe. It also captures turnover of the capital stock.

QUEST was designed to balance 'fun to use' with 'true to life'. It moves outside of the quantitative box by feeding inputs to the model that are deeply qualitative, since much of what matters to people is non-quantitative - such as love, power and trust.

QUEST Sessions

A QUEST session begins by bringing a group of people together for about seven hours. The first part of the exercise is determining the group's priorities. What are the members' collective vision of sustainability? They then select external conditions for global scenarios, the larger scale systems that influence their region. Views are then solicited on how the world works. Next, participants are asked to make collective decisions on what they would like the future to hold in terms of outcomes such as demographics, urban growth, transportation systems, land usage, etc. Next, a simulation is run based on these inputs from the group.

A powerful tool for building understanding is iterative play. Participants can explore different cases to see the impact of various choices. After they see the future that results from their initial choices, they re-evaluate and change where they want to go. Participants iterate until they find the future scenario they find most satisfactory.

The QUEST process is all about debate and argument. It allows people to move away from ordinary predictions about the distant future, which almost always prove to be wrong. Most long-term predictions also seek the answer to misguided questions. At any given point in time, why should we care about the most likely future if it is not the one we want? It is preferable to look at what a desirable future would be and then try to figure out how to make it feasible. In playing QUEST, people learn what it takes to arrive at the future they want.

Observing Attitudes, Beliefs, Values and Behaviour

In the process of playing QUEST, we gain considerable insights on citizen preferences, opinions, beliefs and behaviour. A strength of the approach is that it moves beyond the limitations of ordinary opinion polling to gain deeper insights into broad public preferences. It assesses the perspectives of citizens not via simple questionnaires, but by engaging them in dialogues and observing the tradeoffs in priorities they exhibit, and how their choices change with successive iterations of play.

Mobilizing Behaviour

How effective is QUEST in changing citizen behaviour?' Do people leave feeling empowered to make better informed choices? To explore these important questions, researchers are tracking how the beliefs and behaviour are altered by playing QUEST.

Further GBFP Tools

Citizens can also use the GBFP's on-line Climate Change Calculator (CCC) (www.climcalc.net) funded by Environment Canada. The CCC provides an interactive software tool specific to Canada to assist citizens in learning about and reducing their personal CO2 emissions, and to help with the challenge of reducing Canada's per person average emissions by one tonne. The CCC allows individuals to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions based on their personal activities and other aspects of their lifestyles. It provides estimates of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions for seven separate categories: home heating, hot water, appliances, local travel, out-of-town, recreation and waste.

Notably, the CCC includes not only direct energy use and emissions, but moves beyond to include energy use and emissions associated with the production of goods and services consumed. Separate estimates are made for each province and territory to incorporate the regional nature of energy production and climate conditions across Canada.

Another action tool is Sustainability Tools and Resources (STAR), a tool kit for individuals and community groups in British Columbia and beyond. It provides online tools and resources to help them further the sustainability of their communities and environments, including a distributed database that will serve as a guide to sustainability-related organizations and resources, as well as a tool for planning, managing and contributing to sustainability projects in the region.

GBFP: The Next Generation of Tools

QUEST was recently released on CD-ROM. Further QUEST products are presently being developed, including simple QUEST models geared at school children, Science World Quest which is played at Vancouver's Science World Theatre, and a high school curriculum based upon QUEST. Ultimately, the GBFP hopes to customize QUEST applications worldwide.

The GBFP is planning a new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) on the campus of UBC. The CIRS will be a focal point for innovative research on sustainability at levels ranging from individual buildings to global issues. It will provide research space for partners from a variety of backgrounds to work and learn together.

Other future plans for the GBFP include a proposal for creating an integration framework to nest models and other tools in a larger process as part of Natural Resource Canada's sustainable development knowledge initiative. Also with Natural Resources Canada, the GBFP has also proposed a national integrated climate change assessment model.

Concluding Thoughts

How do we live within natural limits, while maintaining our standard of living, and enhancing the well-being of our community and the quality of our lives? Dr. John Robinson's work with the Georgia Basin Future Project is premised on the notion that public acceptance of sustainability goals is vital to achieving sustainable development. Without public acceptance, we lack the required grassroots mobilization to achieve sustainability. Gaining public acceptance requires educating the public to make informed choices. New tools and approaches will be needed.

The Georgia Basin Future Project is a five-year research initiative that combines expert knowledge and public opinion to explore pathways to sustainability. The GBFP has developed a number of innovative tools to advance sustainability goals by making challenges seem more real and more manageable. QUEST, the Digital Library, the Climate Change Calculator, and Sustainability Tools and Resources provide citizens with learning tools designed to advance public acceptance of sustainability goals. The GBFP will continue to develop tools to motivate action. The ultimate goal is to make the Georgia Basin region the most interactively engaged citizenry in the world in thinking about sustainability, and acting on this knowledge.

As the information feeding into the GBFP tools are monitored, we learn much about the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of citizens. In turn, we can use this information to develop better tools for social mobilization. The Sustainable Development Research Institute sees these interactive tools as helping make real progress towards sustainability in the Georgia Basin region. These tools position Canada as a world leader in sustainable development and could have tremendous export potential.