Design for a future of extremes

Given the plausible extent of weather extremes that could occur in the next 25 years, what sort of future should we create and what can we be doing now?

These are fundamental questions a team of University of Melbourne researchers from the Victorian Eco-Innovation Laboratory (VEIL) is helping to answer through a design-led ‘visioning’ process.

VEIL Director Professor Chris Ryan says the design-led institutional transformation for resilience to climate extremes project will work with two Victorian communities and local services to create spatial resilience plans.

“This project applies a consultative and innovative process to adaptation planning through future-orientated ‘scenario-based’ approaches,” he says.

“We’re largely looking at an uncertain future so the project is very challenging, and not in the least because we’re asking these communities to think 25 years ahead.

“We’ll also be working with local institutions – the State Emergency Service, the CFA and other essential services – to see how that kind of future thinking marries with the culture and processes in these institutions.

“When an extreme weather event does occur and there is a range of possible impacts, we generally believe that these institutions will respond to the centre-point of that uncertainty. And yet we know from climate change itself that there are going to be significant and unexpected surprises associated with these events. It’s important for institutions to be confronted with the extreme ‘outliers’, and to work from there.”

Funded by the Australia Government through Emergency Management Victoria (Natural Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme), the project will involve significant data collection about the two communities selected to participate, several workshops with community members and institutions, and ongoing support from climate change specialists.

While careful to point out the project is not about predicting the future, the team will look at the plausible but extreme end of possible climate change impacts.

VEIL research fellow Che Biggs says a lot of assumptions – both from the community representatives and the research team – will be tested throughout the process.

“If we explore the implications of climate change using an extreme but still plausible scenario as the starting point, we can test how our existing systems and institutions would cope, and then work out how we might need to redesign them,” he says.

“Just as the flooding and inland tsunami in Queensland last year tested people’s assumptions about the scale of natural disasters we might face now, this process is going to challenge participants to consider what events might be like in decades to come.

“We’ll be asking institutions and services to analyse and assess how they operate, how they relate to other institutions in crisis events and how they can adapt to an uncertain future.

“When we start delving into the future and exploring what it might look like we can see that everyone’s ideas are often based on deep and very different assumptions about how the world works. It’s important to be aware of that.”

Through the community consultation element of the project, the VEIL team hopes to engage with a broad range of community representatives, welcoming views and suggestions which may never have been considered before.

Prior to a range of community workshops, Professor Ryan says a number of ‘glimpses’ or scenarios will be presented to participants to prompt ideas and views of the future – ultimately leading to the creation of solutions.

“We present the participants with ways of looking at the future which evoke a sense of change and direction, but they’re not so specific that they lead to a predetermined outcome,” he says.

“They require you to engage with it, to think about how the ideas work in the specific context. Certainly one of the reasons we were awarded the grant was because of the engagement activity of the project.

“You’ve got to end up having a solution which works in a complex way for a particular place, and that’s where real input from the people living in these communities is so important.

“Together we can create visions that explore messages about climate change and everything that goes with that. Admittedly, some of it can be fairly depressing, but our view is that there are pathways through.

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