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climatACTical: a gamified learning resource

About the partners and project 

Verture collaborated with the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) and Small 99 over a 9-month period to co-design the next phase of the Growing Climate Confidence support offer for Scottish voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations. 

Together, the aim was to develop a new, engaging way to support organisations to take meaningful climate action in the context of limited time and capacity. 

This collaboration resulted in climatACTical – a facilitated, gamified learning resource designed to help organisations explore climate action in a practical, accessible way. 

The challenge 

Many voluntary sector organisations recognise the importance of climate action but struggle to implement it in practice due to limited time, capacity, and competing priorities. While there is growing awareness of net zero, climate adaptation and resilience are less well understood and harder to translate into meaningful, organisation-wide action. There was a need for an approach that could make climate resilience accessible, relevant to everyday work, and engaging enough to support teams to move from planning to implementation. 

What we did and how we did it 

Working collaboratively, we worked with SCVO and Small 99 to develop climatACTical, a team-based game that enables organisations to explore climate decisions through structured, facilitated play. 

The game was designed to: 

• Connect climate action to organisational mission, people, and operations
• Enable teams to explore both mitigation and adaptation in a practical way
• Create space for reflection away from operational pressures through personas 

Making complexity manageable 

To address the challenge of climate adaptation’s complexity, during development we synthesised insights from a wide range of existing resources, identified common, transferable actions relevant across organisations and translated these into simple actionable game elements.  

While individual actions may seem small, the approach emphasised their collective impact in building resilience across organisations and communities. 

Embedding a people-centred approach 

The game was intentionally designed to make climate change: 

• Place-based – grounded in realistic organisational contexts
• People-centred – focused on impacts on staff, service users, and operations 

By exploring the cascading effects of climate events, participants gained a clearer understanding of the urgency and relevance of adaptation. 

Using personas to unlock implementation 

A key feature of the game was the use of personas, allowing participants to step into the roles of different colleagues within a community organisation, from trustees to administrators and service users. We found that this helped players understand diverse perspectives and decision-making drivers and space to explore how to effectively “pitch” and embed climate actions internally.  

This helped bridge the gap between planning and implementation, supporting participants to move ideas forward within their own organisations. 

Testing and refining through live delivery 

The game was tested with a large group at the SCVO Gathering 2026, involving around 50 participants from across the sector. This live testing generated valuable insights to refine the game and that it could be played in this “mass” format, as well as the 4-6 player, closely facilitated format that we had initially envisioned for climatACTical delivery. 

The impact 

climatACTical was launched as a free to download resource in May 2026 through an interactive online webinar with the development team. Part of the subsequent launch campaign included a Pop-up & Play roadshow across Scotland to introduce groups and organisations to the resource and grow confidence in facilitating their own sessions.  

You can access climatACTical resources and further support on the Growing Climate Confidence website.

The Verture team hosted the Edinburgh Pop-up & Play at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute on 10 June. Over the one hour session, participants were able to experience three rounds of the game and a retrospective activity to generate ideas that they could transfer from the game to their real-world contexts.  

Participants were inspired to revisit their own environmental and sustainability policies to make them more engaging, had suggestions for other events and settings where climatACTical could be a useful tool and ideas for collaborating with other charities and groups in the area to build adaptive capacity by sharing skills and resources.  

Other feedback from initial game play has shown that climatACTical helps players: 

• Increase understanding and engagement with climate adaptation
• Improve understanding of organisational impacts of climate-related events
• Strengthened confidence to act 

This project demonstrates the power of gamification to make climate resilience practical, engaging, and actionable. We’re keen to build on this momentum, whether by developing climatACTical further, or creating new tools with partners.  

If you’re interested in collaborating or supporting this work, get in touch at training@verture.org.uk.