This article was originally published on Games4Sustainability.
“When we think of “capital” we often associate it with money or with physical goods. But the capital has a much wider meaning – it may be human, social or natural. It’s natural capital that is the most important for the Natural Capital Project, a partnership between Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund.
As the ecosystems can help us with regulating climate or cleaning water, The Natural Capital strives “to shine a light on the intimate connections between people and nature, and to reveal, test, and scale ways of securing the well-being of both.”.
But as “the process of preparing spatial data, running software tools, and appropriately interpreting results can be challenging”, The Natural Capital decided to prepare a more accessible tool – a serious game.The Natural Capital Project works in many areas, including resilience to climate and coastal hazards in Belize and development planning in British Columbia, The Bahamas, and Myanmar. All that supported by the extensive software and mapping techniques used during meetings with local administration and planners.
The Tradeoff! is a series of “mapping games that simply introduce concepts related to nature’s benefits to people”. With 3 versions of the game already available, Tradeoff! is a complex but easy tool which supports understanding of t coastal zone management, terrestrial/freshwater services and arctic development…”
Read on at: Games4Sustainability.
