Download The Climate Change Habitability Index - Eli Blevis

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EDITOR
Eli Blevis
[email protected]
The Climate Change
Habitability Index
Yue Pan
Indiana University at Bloomington | [email protected]
Chit Meng Cheong
Indiana University at Bloomington | [email protected]
Eli Blevis
Indiana University at Bloomington | [email protected]
Motivation
Whether the causes are due to human activities—anthropogenically generated—or not, according to many accounts we are on the precipice of
imminent and irreversible climate change. The
2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) predicts we are under very considerable and
likely danger of climate change with unprecedented
implications [2]. A new report of the IPCC is due in
2013. Already, much of the climate change data
suggests the effects of climate change are worse
than even the worst-case scenarios put forward by
the IPCC in 2007. To put it simply, changing people’s
attitudes toward bottled water and having a hybridelectric car in every driveway is likely not going
to be enough to prevent the need for adaptation
to certain imminent large-scale changes in terms
of where people can live, grow food, obtain fresh
water, and create harmony with the natural world.
We need interactive systems that allow access
to data about the habitability of particular regions
and predictions about the future habitability of
particular regions [1]. It will be critical to make such
information readily available to ordinary people
to ensure that the absorption and evacuation of
populations as a response to the effects of climate
change are as orderly and peaceful as possible.
Definition
To reiterate, the CCHI is defined abstractly as a
metric that can be stated in ordinary language and
diagrams that allows people to answer the following
three questions related to sustainability and adaptation to climate change:
• Can I continue to live where I am living?
• Where can I move if I can’t continue to live
where I’m living?
• How many people can the place where I live
sustainably support, if where I live continues to be
habitable?
By “can I continue to live where I am living,” we
mean to ask if a place is habitable enough for people
to live in accordance with water and food supplies,
health conditions, and the habitability of coastal
environments in particular and other environments
in general.
By “where can I move if I can’t continue to live
where I’m living,” we mean to ask which places are
habitable or have better, more sustainable living
affordances respective of the five factors identified by the IPCC—water, coasts, food, health, and
[1] Blevis, E. and
Blevis, S. “Hope for the
Best and Prepare for
the Worst: Interaction
Design and the Tipping
Point.” interactions 17,
5 (2010).
[2] IPCC. “Summary
for Policymakers.” In
Climate Change 2007:
Impacts, Adaptation
and Vulnerability.
Contribution of Working
Group II to the Fourth
Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate
Change, edited by
Parry, M.L., Canziani,
O.F., Palutikof, J.P., van
der Linden, P.J. and
Hanson, C.E. 7–22.
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007;
www.ipcc.ch.
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The most recent Sustainably Ours forum addressed
the implications of climate change and fostering
the sustainable use of resources, especially in the
context of digital interactivity and its agency in the
world [1]. The article suggested a number of possible approaches. In this issue, we address one of
the approaches that we call the Climate Change
Habitability Index (CCHI) as a design exercise and
catalyst to a program of ongoing research. The
idea of the CCHI is to allow ordinary individuals in
general—rather than climate scientists in particular—to understand the state of the world in terms
of habitability at particular places. In the face of
climate change, individuals will need to be able to
use the CCHI and other measures to answer questions of habitability. The CCHI will need to be stated
in a way that is easily understood by nonscientists,
similar to how weather forecasting is employed.
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Climate
Fresh Water
Water
Flood
Drought
Availability
Crop
Food
Vegetable
Fish
Livestock
Wild Animal
Ecosystem
Tree
Mountain
• Figure 1: CCHI view on a specific day given a specific amount of warming (Not real data—for illustrative
purposes only)
Marsh
Hurricane
Coasts
Cyclone
Tornado
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Coral Bleaching
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Mortality
Health
Natality
Disease
Biohazard
• Figure 2: CCHI Risk Factor Icons. The
five categories of the risks—water, food,
ecosystem, coasts, and health—are
arrayed in the first row, with the small
factors listed to the right.
• Figure 3: CCHI view by spreading the risk factor Water (Not real data—For illustrative purposes only)
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Changing people’s attitudes
toward bottled water and
Possible Data Sources
By focusing on the key impacts caused by increasing global average temperature change, we need
access to data that corresponds to changes in food
supplies, water availability, health conditions, and
even to threats to the habitability of coastal environments. The IPCC and the associated science on
which it draws are the main data sources [2]. There
are also some visible organizations and agencies
working on the impacts of climate change that
contribute to IPCC-related data sources or that may
provide additional data sources upon which we
can base the CCHI. Examples of these data sources
include deep explorations and GIS data about
ocean, fish, and coasts from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) [3], and
rigorous scientific work relating to very specific
individual factors, such as Halpern et al.’s “A Global
Map of Human Impact on Marine Ecosystems,”
which contains compelling maps and diagrams
that are in fact less accessible to non-scientists
than what we have in mind for the CCHI [4]. The
idea of the CCHI is to use the best and widest array
of data sources available and still provide a means
to distill this data into an easily understood and
generally accessible form.
having a hybrid-electric
car in every driveway
is likely not going to be
enough to prevent the need
for adaptation to certain
imminent large-scale
changes in terms of where
people can live, grow food,
obtain fresh water, and
create harmony with the
natural world.
In addition to the scientific data sources listed
above, we are also considering enterprise, such as
SAP’s carbon-tracking software and crowdsource
reporting of data implicated in the potential calculations to support the CCHI. As an example, the
USA National Phenology Network uses crowdsource
reporting to collect and make available data on the
visible impacts of climate change in the U.S. [5].
Our Initial Design for the CCHI
We are designing a tool to support the summarization of the suitability of any particular place for
habitation as a dynamically changing metric corresponding to historical, current, and predicted
states of water systems, ecosystems, food supplies,
coastal conditions, and health conditions, as well as
the likelihood of hazard events. Interactivity of the
habitability index may be presented using cloudbased technologies, such as layers implemented as
part of the “Google Earth” or “Google Maps” APIs,
or other GIS systems. Figure 1 shows the essential
interactivity elements we imagine are needed to
[3] NOAA, National
Oceanic and
Atmospheric
Administration; http://
www.noaa.gov/
[4] Halpern, et. al. “A
Global Map of Human
Impact on Marine
Ecosystems.” Science
319, 5865 (2008): 948
– 952. DOI: 10.1126/
science.1149345. This
paper is available
online; http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/948.
A more generally accessible description of how
these authors have created their map is here:
http://www.nceas.ucsb.
edu/globalmarine/.
[5] USA National
Phenology Network;
http://www.usanpn.org/
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ecosystems. This question relates to a person’s ability to understand the habitability of where she or
he lives now and to make plans for moving in the
future, if necessary.
By “how many people can the place where I live
sustainably support, if where I live continues to
be habitable,” we mean to ask how can we inform
policies and decisions related to migration and
absorption of immigrants in a manner that promotes peaceful and orderly sustainable practice
in the face of the potential and realized effects of
climate change.
The CCHI aims to provide a metric to enable
everyone from individuals to intergovernmental
bodies to plan for the dynamic and orderly migration and absorption of populations as climate
change changes the suitability of various regions
of the planet for sustainable habitation. Finally, the
notion of making the habitability index as highly
accessible as a notion like “temperature” is co-requisite to the social imperative to provide for the safety
and security of every person and creature whose
life or home may be impacted by climate change
events and effects.
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Climate
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1900 ...... 1990
2000
2010
2020
2030
2040
......
2100
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• Figure 4: Matrix of possible CCHI Maps according to specific times and degrees of warming (Not real data—for illustrative purposes only)
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support interactivity with the CCHI representation
as a cascading summary of more detailed data. Our
design is deliberately minimalist, and it is easy to
image a grayscale version as a matter of accessibility. The regions defined in the map denote a cumulative summary of the risk factors indicated by the
risk factor icons.
Three levels. We envision the CCHI will support
exploration at three levels of granularity with
respect to the map, namely world scale, showing
regions defined by countries, country scale, showing
regions defined by states, and state scale, showing
regions potentially defined by postal codes rather
than counties. The choice of three levels of granularity as opposed to many discrete levels of zoom as
in Google Maps is deliberate and owes to a concern
for presenting the CCHI in as simple a manner as
possible. Too many levels of granularity make it
hard to think about the world in regional terms that
are essential to understanding how to construct
policies about absorption of new residents. Too few
levels of granularity risk an overly reductive understanding of the CCHI. The postal code as a unit of
granularity may be particularly salient, since it is
generally highly correlated with population density,
which is germane to understanding the capability of
a region to absorb new residents.
Risk factors. The IPCC considers five factors in its
assessment of climate change scenarios that we
have adopted here—water, food, ecosystems, coasts,
and health. Looking more closely at how the IPCC
defines these factors, we arrived at an initial inventory of subfactors for each factor. Figure 2 shows a
design for factors and their column-wise subfactors
as an initial iconographic design. These subfactors
must be considered carefully. As with the choice of
levels, we also need to consider if we have made too
few distinctions to actually inform the CCHI. On the
other hand, there is a danger that we may make too
many distinctions—doing so may make the CCHI
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to include formal scientific data sources as well
as crowdsource reporting and the wiki-style editing of data about global habitability conditions.
The latter form of data collection risks confidence
in the data compared to peer-reviewed reporting by the scientific community, but so long
as such contributions are clearly demarcated,
they also have the benefit of involving the public, raising awareness, and prompting debate.
Summary
The program of research and practice that has
evolved in our interaction design and HCI community around sustainability is important and promising work. We need to augment our efforts to also
focus on adaptation in the face of the likelihood of
climate change regardless of our efforts to mitigate
such changes. This initial design sketch of the CCHI
is one step in this direction.
As always, if you are engaged in interaction
design or HCI research related to adaptation to climate
change, kindly consider contributing to this forum.
—Eli Blevis, Editor
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the valuable discussions
about the CCHI we had with Beth Plale, Paul Dantilio,
and Shunying Blevis.
About the Authors Yue Pan is a doctoral
student in the Human-Computer Interaction Design
program at Indiana University’s School of
Informatics and Computing. She has a background
in computer science, and her area of research is
sustainable interaction design.
Chit Meng Cheong is a master’s student in the
Human Computer Interaction Design program in
the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana
University Bloomington. He works in the field of
sustainable interaction design.
Eli Blevis is an associate professor of informatics in
the Human-Computer Interaction Design program
of the School of Informatics and Computing at
Indiana University, Bloomington. His primary area of
research—sustainable interaction design—and his
core expertise are situated within the confluence of
human-computer interaction as it owes to the computing and cognitive sciences, and design as it owes to the reflection of design criticism and the practice of critical design. His research also engages
design theory, digital photography, and studio-based learning.
DOI: 10.1145/1865245.1865253
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/1100 $10.00
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too hard for average people to acquire intuitions
about the relationship between the CCHI, its constituent factors and subfactors, and the actual habitability of a particular place.
The CCHI interaction design affords a view of the
habitability of a place in accordance with the summarization of the five main risk factors. The CCHI
interaction design can also display the habitability
of a place in accordance with a sub-selection of
the risk factors. For instance, in Figure 3 the map
expands only the water risk factor apropos of four
detailed risk subfactors, namely freshwater systems,
drought, flood, and drinking water availability.
Simple design. In constructing a design for the
CCHI and initial notions of interactivity, we want
to choose the simplest possible representations we
can think of. There is a lot of data available, and
assessing the actual habitability of a particular
location in terms of risks associated with climate
change is a tremendously complex and intricate
calculation. Our goal here is to hide all this complexity inasmuch as it is possible to do so. We chose
to use color to denote degree of risk, using typical
semantics of green through red hues. As we have
mentioned, grayscale may also be substituted as a
matter of accessibility without loss of semantics.
Time and temperature. Another two essential features of CCHI are time and degrees of warming (or
cooling). Our purpose is to allow people to see historical trends and future predictions about how climate change affects our Earth over periods of time.
People need to be able to see what the Earth may
look like when the average temperature increases
by a specific amount, which in the IPCC summary
diagrams ranges from 0 to 6 degrees Celsius of
warming [2]. Two degrees Celsius of warming is generally considered to be the tipping point. Figure 4
illustrates as a matrix the space of what needs to be
represented apropos of time and degrees of warming historically and in prediction as underlying data
to support the interactivity. Based on the assumptions of the IPCC reports, we define year 2000 to be
the base point and set the temperature change to be
0 for 2000, relative to the period from 1980–1999 [2].
Crowdsourcing. One primary goal of the CCHI
is to target a wider audience than climate scientists, local policy holders, planners, and managers—namely individuals in the general public
and societal groups at various levels, from civic
groups and municipal officials to regional,
national, and international bodies. We also hope
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