I attended the final workshop in Wells.  Twenty-four people attended, and we had four full tables, each running a separate simulation.  In order to round out one of the groups, I got to participate, which was a lot of fun.

Having worked with the program “behind the scenes,” if you will, it was very interesting to get to actually experience what we are working on firsthand.  Some of my work has been on the climate risk assessments for the towns, and it was cool to see them actually being used to create the projections for the fictitious towns in the simulations.

It was really cool to see the solutions that the participants came up with.  Each group came to a different agreement, drawing from personal experience and knowledge to make modifications to the options we suggested in the game.  My group managed to come to a unanimous solution that all parties were happy with.

Seeing the groups all come up with solutions -- and especially seeing the variation of possible solutions -- helped me believe that consensus-building and climate adaptation planning like this is possible, especially in states like those in New England with strong town-hall traditions of citizen participation.

One of the participants was particularly skeptical of climate change science, and while that was interesting in and of itself, it definitely showed the range of perspectives that exist in the community when it comes to talking about climate adaptation.

My hope is that by doing workshops like this we can educate people on how to recognize different opinions and interests and still figure out a way to work with all of them.  A major strength of the workshops is putting people into roles very different from those they embody in their everyday life.  I played the head of the town’s Chamber of Commerce and was able to understand their position and argue from that perspective, which is very different from the one I usually take.  Wells participants also commented on this phenomenon during the discussion afterwards.

These simulations seem to be incredibly useful for getting people to think in a way that they will have to in order to build consensus around climate adaptation planning.  I hope more simulations like this will be played among all sorts of people in the future.  One teacher who played the game with me commented that he wished he had a version of this that he could play with his middle school students.  Soon, the game materials will be posted online so that he can do just that!

-Kaylee Brent