Saarbrücken (GER), January 2015 - What will our environment be like in fifty years' time, and how does our behaviour influence our climate as well as our everyday lives? The priority for researchers at the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and their cooperation partners, for example DHI-WASY GmbH, in carrying out this project was to inform citizens about the consequences of the use of landscapes and agricultural land.
The objective of "Innovation Network Adaptation to Climate Berlin Brandenburg" (INKA BB) was to make research results accessible to a wider audience and to raise awareness for the issues relating to climate change. The project team found a competent partner for their digital training in IMC, and together they developed a unique serious game with wide-reaching appeal.
The interactive game is geared specifically towards high school and university students, non-governmental organisations, and organisations dealing with water management. The game shows a typical Brandenburg landscape and simulates climate scenarios within a timeframe of fifty years. The gamers play the role of a regional adviser for water management, and over the course of the game, they have to decide how the land is used and water management and rainwater management are organised. They must also assume responsibility for their respective decisions further down the track.
The aim of the project was to visualize possible climate scenarios as realistically as possible and present the content in an easy-to-understand format to interested people of any age. By transforming a real-life river basin into a structured virtual world, it became possible to impart the possibilities and limits of a human response to climate change to this wide audience in a way that was fun and engaging.
