Scaling up Transformative Adaptation Using a Crowdsourced Decision-Support Tool

Project Summary

The tantalizing possibility that Great Lakes cities may be the recipient of climate-driven migrants from other US regions has emerged as an important social and research focus. In 2020, the New York Times asked “How will climate migration reshape America?” Emerging research suggests that urban communities in the Great Lakes may become sanctuary cities, offering refuge from the wildfires, extreme temperatures, and drought experienced by other regions of the country as a result of climate change.

GLISA is developing a land-use model and decision-support tool, called the Participatory GIS urban deVelOpment Tool (PIVOT), to help Great Lakes urban communities plan for potential climate migration scenarios. If within the next 25 years urban populations increase on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands, this tool predicts how it is likely to impact urban development. The forecast can be used to help communities explore answers to the following questions: 

• If 50,000 people move into our city within the next 5 years (10,000 per year for 5 years), where is development likely to occur? With our current policies in place, can we expect increased sprawl or an infill development pattern?  The model plans to explore what our community look like under a sprawl scenario or an infill scenario?  Animation is an output. 

• Will we lose our open spaces, impervious surface? Or should we take measures now to preserve our green spaces and agricultural lands?  We are not looking at changes from Ag to forest.

• Future functionality hopes to explore gentrification and developing scenarios exploring whether vulnerable communities are at risk of becoming displaced.

Engaging with practitioners and community partners in these planning activities can contribute to better  land-change modeling (LCM) by capturing knowledge of local processes and issues. GLISA is using LCM to assess changes in Great Lakes communities over space and time. LCM is particularly useful for projecting land changes given the best available information on development trends and testing the impact of different planning strategies. Our proposed LCM enables identifying different opportunities and stressors in cities through a participatory GIS (Geographic Information System) interface. It will also allow communities to test for different management scenarios to better plan and prepare for these risks and opportunities, given best projections of climate risks and urban change. Research questions include: 1) How can participatory spatial modeling and development of alternative scenarios increase decision-makers’ understanding of both stressors and opportunities, including equity and justice issues, for adaptation? and 2) How does in-migration interact with other existing stressors including climate impact (e.g., flooding, heat events), socioeconomic conditions, social inequality, and climate adaptation (e.g., green infrastructure) across space and time? 

GLISA will partner with Great Lakes community and practitioner partners to pilot and improve the decision-support tool to better understand community decision-making for land-use planning given the potential impacts of climate change (i.e. in-migration, flooding).