THE RESILIENT URBAN SYSTEMS & HABITAT (RUSH)
The RUSH project within the INSPIRE program aims to support the RUSH initiative. The initiative seeks to foster ecological healing through community engagement. They asked their Garage Apprentice team to create an interactive landing page that reports information about regional climate change vulnerabilities: NatuR&D. As a result, the community can develop consensus on the risks and corresponding preventative actions that are needed. This tool will connect communities to the data that motivates policymaking. Further, by leveraging geographic information systems (GIS), the data can be made comprehensible and accessible to all community members. In the long term, NatuR&D can become a tool for the region to develop community autonomy, awareness, and agency.
TEAM MEMBERS
Kris Pewar
Third-year student at UVic
K'sana Wood Lynes-Ford
Third-year student at UVic
Yassin Guitouni
Second-year computer science & business student
Aikaterini Tavri
Project Ambassador
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
NatuR&D is part of a collaboration across sectors to create an open-source & accessible mapping platform that integrates emerging, existing, and real-time datasets on community and ecosystem health indicators on the regional geographic information system (GIS) system to facilitate climate action. The municipal GIS maps are missing information to assess health outcomes. Without integrated data on projected climate change impacts, ecosystem health status, and hazard areas, it is impossible to know whether we are making good decisions. The aim of this project is to make complex data accessible through the technologies we use day-to-day so that active users as well as people living within these areas can verify and participate in revealing the opportunities to make the world a better place.