Designing landscape scale transformative adaptation in the Bellarine, Victoria

Background

During 2023-2024, we are immersed in designing landscape scale transformative adaptation options in the Bellarine, Victoria, with stakeholders of that region. This Bellarine Landscape Scale Climate Adaption Project is in collaboration with ARUP and the Victorian Government Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA).

The Bellarine Peninsula is poised to experience the impacts of climate change, which will bring about significant transformations in its landscape. As climate change alters the way people live within these landscapes, it will prompt shifts in land use patterns, agricultural production areas, water availability, and the habitats that support biodiversity and healthy communities.

Opportunity for futures

This project will explore how to create conditions that enable transformational adaptation for a resilient future.

Our approach

A critical part of this project is helping people engage with the trade-off’s between different values, the environment, the needs of future generations and people today. As a collaborative team, we are approaching the project with creativity, humility, and a commitment to supporting the communities of the Bellarine.

Relative Creative, as specialist in critical engagment design and systems thinking, are facilitating a means for stakeholders to see the big picture and understand how varied factors interact to create vulnerabilities and opportunities for adaptation. We are contributing a variety of systemic mapping tools and structures to present information, to make relationships and interdependencies visible. And we are drawing on our visual communication expertise to support the analysis, synthesis, and presentation of outcomes in meaningful and engaging ways.

Our participatory systems mapping approaches, grounded in systems thinking and futures thinking, empower participants to explore past, present, and future scenarios in relational, groundbreaking ways.