ABSTRACT
Climate change is often conceptualized as an impending ecological disaster. However, vulnerability to its impacts is more accurately defined by social factors that present daily challenges to communities. Moreover, the predicted impacts are often difficult to comprehend or ignored. Building resilience to these impacts will require engaging communities in defining indicators for vulnerability and co-designing opportunities for adaptation. This is especially true for communities of youth who will inherit the socio-ecological challenges of our current climate crisis. This chapter argues for a place-based participatory design as an effective youth engagement tool that can lead to greater community resilience to climate impacts. The authors, who developed the tools discussed as part of the Resilient by Design challenge, discuss obstacles to, and existing models of, successful youth-based community engagement plans. This includes using popular social media to build youth capacity for observing and communicating climate concerns and advocating for resilience. Finally, the site-specific climate engagement project Alameda Creek Atlas is detailed as a case study for employing such a methodology, and preliminary results are discussed. Alameda Creek Atlas served as the public engagement tool for the selected finalist team, Public Sediment, for the 2017–2018 Rockefeller-funded Resilient by Design, Bay Area Challenge.
