Our Changing Climate: Resilience Networks at the Community Scale

N. Claire Napawan
Human Ecology
UC Davis

“Our Changing Climate” addressed the need for local perspectives by leveraging social networks and digital media tools to establish a digital community. This was done by: 1. Providing community members with the ability to better visualize the direct impacts of climate change within their immediate surroundings; 2. Creating opportunities to contribute images and narratives to community-generated neighborhood resilience mapping; and 3. Encouraging communities to participate in on-going local conversations about climate change resilience. The impacts of climate change are well known to the academics who study them. To the average individual, however, predicting environmental change can be difficult to grasp.There is a need to better understand the sometime-subtle, local, and everyday ways in which people are experiencing climate change. This project made the impacts of climate change more comprehensible on the neighborhood scale, particularly within vulnerable communities with limited access, providing the opportunity to contribute to dialogues of resilience.