The Open Map Community Platform project supporting the green transition secures significant funding

Despite changes to Her Majesty’s Treasury’s Green Book to encourage non-economic forms of assessment, local authorities struggle to capture social, environmental and cultural value in a way that feeds into their systems and processes. This new project aims to facilitate this by defining spatial data so that it can be used as a basis for targeted local action for the green transition.

Professor Flora Samuel said: “Climate change cannot be addressed without detecting and addressing inequalities within society and where they occur. Only when we know what is happening, where and how people are adapting to climate change can we make informed decisions.

“The goal of this hands-on project is to create an open-map community platform that brings together multiple layers of spatial information to give a social, environmental, cultural, and economic picture of what is happening in a neighbourhood, district, local authority, region, or nation.”

Green Ecosystems (GTEs) are large-scale projects focused on translating the best design-led research into real benefits. Leveraging design excellence clusters, GTEs will tackle the distinct challenges posed by the climate crisis including, but not limited to, achieving net zero targets.

The GTEs represent the main funding strand for the £25m Observatory of the Future: Design Green Transformation programme, funded by AHRC and delivered in partnership with the Design Museum.

COMP will address the following overarching objectives of the green transition ecosystem advocacy: measurable and supportive green transformation behavior change across sectors and audiences; Design that promotes positive behavioral change in support of green transition goals, including strategy and policy; Area-focused solutions, for example infrastructure that supports rural communities, and finally, Design for Diversity.

To achieve these aims, COMP will provide a model baseline mapping platform for decision making with communities for use by Local Authorities (LoAs) across the UK and abroad. To do this, a pilot COMP will be developed for the Isle of Anglesey to help the Letter of Understanding measure its progress towards green transition and the implementation of the Future Generations Act in Wales in a transparent and inclusive manner.

The Isle of Anglesey/Yenness Moon in North Wales was chosen as a case study for this project largely because it is a geographically discrete, rural, detached and declining place with a local authority that has lofty ambitions to reinvent itself as a hub for sustainable innovation, to be the ‘Energy Island’ at the center of low energy research and development. carbon. The bilingual context in Anglesey provides a special opportunity to explore issues around multilingual participation, inclusion and culture, which are challenging at UK level.

The project, a collaboration with the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Data and Research (Wiserd) at Cardiff University and Wrexham Glyndwr University as well as many other partners, is supported by the Welsh Government and the Welsh Futures Commission who are looking at ways to measure and spatially disaggregate achievement under the Generational Welfare Act. Upcoming (Wales) (2015), a world-leading piece of legislation in the field of sustainability.

The Open Community Maps Platform (COMP) will provide a well-designed and accessible range of information for communities, local authorities and policy makers alike, as well as opportunities to contribute to maps. Map layers will continually grow with information and development, and will be reconfigured according to local politics and boundaries. Most importantly, it will be developed and monitored in collaboration with a representative segment of the local community.

An accessible website will be designed as a data warehouse tailored to a wide range of audiences, and scalable for use across the UK. Social, cultural and environmental map layers will be co-created with children and youth to show, for example, where people connect and interact with cultural activities and do small things to adapt to climate change.

The data generated by the community will be added to existing census and administrative data sets to build a future-generation base map of Anglesey. Layers can be grouped together to measure the progress of the island according to the law, but they can also be reconfigured for other types of measurement charts. In this way, the project will provide a model for inclusive, transparent and evidence-based planning, providing lessons for the rest of the UK and beyond.

This award is part of the Observatory for the Future: Design the Green Transition programme, the largest publicly funded design and innovation research program in the UK. Funded by AHRC in partnership with the Design Museum’s Observatory for the Future, this £25m multimedia investment aims to bring design researchers, universities and businesses together to catalyze the transition to net zero and the green economy.

Christopher Smith, CEO of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, said:

“Design is a critical bridge between research and innovation. Placing the individual act of production or consumption within the context of a broader system of social and economic behavior is critical to productivity, development, and sustainability.

“That is why design is the primary tool for us to confront and chart a course through our current global and local predicaments, and that is why AHRC has placed design at the heart of its strategy for collaboration within UKRI.

“From health systems to energy efficiency to sustainability, the UK’s four green transition ecosystem projects are at the forefront of design, providing models for problem solving, and will touch lives across the UK.”