Story
Combining arts and science with Climate Ready Places

An adapted upland landscape
Arts in action
Meeting the challenge of climate change adaptation will mean changing both the physical environment around us and the way we live and work. Capturing these changes and embracing this collaborative ethos was at the heart of creating our innovative visual guide to Scotland’s adaptation future. The Climate Ready Places tool was developed as part of the Adaptation Scotland programme, to support people and organisations to explore what climate change adaptation may mean in different types of places across Scotland.
Exploring change together
Rather than simply tell people about Scotland’s climate future, we wanted to involve them in the process of exploring impacts and implications together. To do this, we hosted a multi-disciplinary design workshop, bringing together experts from NatureScot, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, Historic Environment Scotland, and Forestry and Land Scotland, with designers from Architecture & Design Scotland and professional live-illustrators, Scriberia.
Working together, participants created attractive, accessible visualisations of six typical Scottish ‘places’ (City; Suburbs; Coast; Industrial; Lowlands; and Uplands). Our adaptation experts then poured over these six places and suggested over eighty adaptation interventions, all underpinned by robust scientific data. Our artists used these interventions to transform the original six places into new Climate Ready versions, giving us two sets of images: showing Scotland as it is now, and as it could be.
By bringing together experts from these differing sectors through the Adaptation Scotland programme, we created both a visually engaging resource to introduce adaptation to a lay audience and a gateway to more detailed information for policy-makers.
Facilitating change
The Climate Ready Places tool has been used by dozens of organisations to explore what climate change adaptation may mean in their places. It has been used by Glasgow and Clyde Valley Strategic Development Planning Authority to develop its Clydeplan key issues assessment, supported hundreds of Planning Aid Scotland volunteers to understand how climate adaptation can be a central component of development planning, while the associated lesson plans have been used by schools across Scotland to help young people explore the impacts of climate change in their community. The visualisations have also been central to the Scottish Government’s climate change public engagement strategy, featuring prominently on policies and reports, such as the third Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3).
Telling people about science and policy is difficult, particularly climate change. Climate Ready Places lets people explore what it means in their own community.
Jonny Casey, Adaptation Scotland programme manager