A 25 million NOK project, Natureact will develop transition “guide plans” for three representative landscapes in Norway that need to mitigate and adapt to climate risk using nature based solutions (see Figure 1). These transition plans are to be developed in collaboration with the community in these three landscapes.
The Systems Oriented Design unit is working on this project with geologists & risk engineers from NGI, landscape architects from AHO, earth system scientists from NORCE, and archaeologists & historians from NIKU, to develop community-anchored action plans for each landscape.
An externally financed research project (2021-).
Figure 1: The three representative sites in Norway that NATURACT is investigating.
Figure 2: Cause and effect map screenshot from Miro gigamap.
Abel Crawford from the SOD Unit is leading Work Package 1: “frame and support the interdisciplinarity of NBS climate actions” Responsibilities involve:
§ Co-developing a project process together with colleagues for partners to work collaboratively according to what the cases needed, rather than in functional silos
§ Redesigning the project timeline to reflect the new process,
§ Building a sense of togetherness and alignment between partners
§ Building the competence of all partners to work more visually and systemically
§ Setting up a digital platform for effective remote collaboration
Key Achievements
- Close collaboration with landscape architect professor, Professor Karin Helms and associate professor Elisabeth Sjødahl at AHO to develop a transdisciplinary process combining SOD and Landscape Architecture methodologies to engage the community.
- Anchored the need for and developed the project schedule from siloed by discipline to one that would enable a disciplinary integrated approach to each case site.
- Anchored the need for and executed a training retreat, where project partners got to know each other while being exposed to how to use transdisciplinary processes.
Together with the Landscape and Urbanism researchers, aligned project partners to zoom out the system boundary and look at addressing the root drivers of the climate risks, not merely the symptoms, through systems mapping.
Demonstrating the link between climate risks and the economy and the well-being of society and therefore that if we want to address the root drivers, we should be looking at how we manage land use, not merely applying landscape interventions (see Figure 2).