Morecambe Bay Timescapes; Engaging Young People in Visualising Coastal Futures

This project aims to help young people understand how climate change will shape the future of Morecambe Bay and the communities that inhabit it. By bringing together information on past and future coastal changes, and personal histories, this project will reflect on alternative futures and different ways to build community preparedness to environmental challenges.

Current predictions show the significant impact that sea level rise and extreme weather events will have on coastal areas worldwide. However, what exactly will happen to individual coastal communities will vary greatly, and will largely depend on local geology, climate, infrastructures and community preparedness.

Shoreline management plans presenting regional risk assessment and strategies are available, but the specialised formats and the language used in these documents make them effectively inaccessible to the public. In addition, these documents disregard the perspectives of coastal communities, and the tacit knowledge developed by people who have been affected by flooding and weather events in the past.

Collecting localised knowledge and making it readable to the lay public is essential both to understand the impact of climate change in specific places and to inform local policies and public participation in decision making.

In this project, students at Lancaster Our Lady's College, Morecambe Bay Academy, Carnforth High School, and Lancaster and Morecambe College will work with researchers in design, computing, and environmental science to create visualisations of place-specific coastal pasts and futures based on an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that brings together predictive models, citizen science, and ethnographic approaches. These visualisations will be presented as reels of stereographs accompanied by zines (also produced by the students) telling stories of coastal pasts and futures.

They will reveal stories, questions, and images co-produced by researchers and young people, based on data collected in the first stage of the project. Each zine will feature a map indicating the coastal location of the stereoscope to use for bringing the visualisations to life. When looked at through the corresponding stereoscope, the images printed on the reel will appear as tri-dimensional visualisations.

A sensor will also activate an audio track with sounds, stories, and critical questions for the audience. These audio-visual 'Timescapes' will be displayed during a Coastal Futures Festival as site-specific installations, which will enable members of the public to look at their surroundings through the lenses of costal change.

This is an innovative approach, which enables students to design and produce the tools that are used to create immersive visualisations. The project appropriates the optical and mechanical tools of stereoscopy for a novel, creative purpose. No programming, proprietary software, or expensive equipment will be necessary, and young people will have full control over the whole process.

As part of the Coastal Futures Festival, students will be engaged in a programme of talks and events in which they will share their visualisations with local councils, and environmental groups, including Environment Agency, North West Coastal Group & Forum, Heysham Heritage Centre, Lancashire Archives, and Lancaster City Council. The event will act as a catalyst for conversations on local futures and the role that public and professional bodies and members of the community can play in planning for response and adaptation to climate change, showing clear pathways for how young people can play an active role in these processes.