Reaching out to the community doesn't exceed the grasp of the Sustainable Development Research Institute (SDRI) in UBC's Faculty of Graduate Studies. It is developing exciting, innovative approaches to engage the public in both understanding and action.
"The world is awash in doom and gloom and too many people think nothing can be done to save the planet," says SDRI's director John Robinson, who leads the Georgia Basin Futures Project. "We disagree and are working with the public so they understand their options and roles they can play in determining their future."
SDRI, a UBC think-tank, involves researchers at UBC, SFU and the UVic. At the beginning of the year it was awarded $2.5 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a five-year Georgia Basin Futures Project to enhance human well-being while protecting ecological health in the Lower Mainland and southeastern Vancouver Island by the year 2040.
An additional $1.5 million has been raised from 12 partner organizations in the community. Among this group are B.C. Hydro, the Greater Vancouver Regional District, The Vancouver Sun, Science World, Environment Canada, the Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the David Suzuki Foundation, Westcoast Energy, and the National Research Council.
The Georgia Basin Futures Project includes two dozen researchers from a wide variety of disciplines such as planning, public policy, economics, sociology, health care, resource and environmental management, zoology and global environmental change.
The expert knowledge of the research team will be contained in QUEST, a user-friendly computer modelling system developed for the Lower Fraser Valley by SDRI and Envision Sustainability Tools, Inc.
In a series of workshops, public meetings, focus groups, school programs and Web-based interactions with the public, the project will generate hundreds of scenarios.
Researchers will provide information on how ecological, social and economic systems interact. Citizens will then make decisions about populations, transportation, land use, social health and a wide range of other areas.
An example of the project's innovations in public involvement is the 540 square metres of exhibits and displays to be built at Science World by the year 2001.
"The centrepiece is a 75-seat decision theatre inside a geodesic dome," says Robinson. "It contains a personal envisioning game in which participants press buttons to vote on their planning preferences. They will then see the outcome of their decisions and be able to continue on through the decades."
"During this process the general public will become more aware of technical, ecological, social, economic and policy implications and see the trade-offs and consequences of their choices," he adds. "This information will become part of a database which will be analysed, for example, by age, ethnicity and gender."
The public consultation process will also involve a wide range of government planners, community leaders, decision-makers and non-government organizations.
As the project reaches out to the public it is also adding to its list of partners and collaborating with other similar case studies of rapidly urbanizing regions.
"The ecological goal is to remain within the earth's carrying capacity, the social goal is to create and maintain societies that satisfy individual and community aspirations, and the economic goal is to ensure adequate standards of living," says Robinson. "All three are linked and must be satisfied simultaneously."
"Our research is interdisciplinary, which is a hallmark of UBC's Faculty of Graduate Studies," he says. "But to actually achieve our goal -- sustainability in the Georgia Basin in the next 40 years -- we need to actively involve as many people as possible."
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