‘Neighbourhood with Climate’, the SGGW researchers’ project for urban residents
Encouraging local communities to take action to adapt residential areas to climate change is one of the tasks of the Co-Adapt Co-Adapt; Communities for Climate Change Action project. On 25 April 2024, an exhibition promoting successfully implemented solutions for adapting urban residential areas to climate change was opened at the Zodiak, Warsaw Pavilion of Architecture.
The opening of the ‘Neighbourhood with Climate’ exhibition was also an excellent opportunity to summarise the “Local Communities’ Actions for Climate Change Adaptation” project and to present one of the results of the project, i.e. the board and electronic version of the game “Neighbourhood with Climate” free for all, at www.osiedlezklimatem.pl.
Serious games are increasingly used as decision-support tools. The ‘Neighborhood with Climate’ game is designed to adapt the environment of a residence to climate change. One can introduce various solutions (40 in total) including rain gardens, absorption basins, climbing plants, trees, flower meadows, and special algorithms that allow us to verify the effectiveness of the solutions chosen in the estate and check whether we have reduced air temperature, improved air quality, how much rainwater has been captured, and at the same time whether those proposals will promote biodiversity and be economical to use, said dr hab. Agata Cieszewska, SGGW project leader at the opening of the exhibition.
Dr hab. Anna Baryła, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, emphasised the great importance of the possibility of testing and implementing the solutions developed by the researchers.
About the Project
The CoAdapt project – “Communities for Climate Change Action” – benefits from the so-called Norwegian Grants under the EEA funds. On the Polish side, the project operator is the National Center for Research and Development. Polish partners of the project are represented by scientists from leading Warsaw universities and scientific institutions: SGGW (Department of Landscape Architecture) and the University of Warsaw and we also cooperate with scientists from the Warsaw University of Technology, the Institute of Geography and Spatial Management of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Gdansk. The Norwegian partners are the West Norwegian Research Institute (WNRI) and the University of Oslo. They are landscape architects and geographers including climatologists, hydrologists and landscape ecologists, dendrologists, environmental engineers and architects, i.e. all those who impact shaping the environment we live in, sociologists, computer scientists and game designers.
