Investigating the Impacts of Immersive Visualizations and Ethics-Based Group Discussion on Community Leaders' Flood Risk Perceptions and Protective Actions

Climate change is disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities, who face varied weather threats, as well as less resources to prepare and protect themselves. Community leaders and emergency management personnel are at the forefront of helping these communities prepare for weather disasters, such as storm surge flooding. This presentation will show preliminary findings from two workshops conducted with community leaders from across Long Island focused on multifaceted decision making scenarios. These workshops evaluated how immersive visualization and group discussion impact decision making, risk perceptions, and protective action intentions. This work builds on our previous research where the two interventions were used concurrently in an online workshop with college students. Separating the interventions will allow us to assess and compare the individual efficacy of the interventions for further exploration and use in communities. The overall goal of this work is to determine if these interventions help increase risk perceptions and intentions to take protective actions. We aim to help communities equip themselves with effective decision making, through visualization of information and/or ethics-based group discussions.

One workshop featured the use of Stony Brook’s Reality Deck, a 3-D immersive visualization facility, with census-tract data on top of current and future storm surge flooding scenarios. Participants were shown a map of Jamaica Bay (in Queens NY) with storm surge inundation from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 overlain. They were then asked to interact with demographic data, such as race, income, and vehicle availability, and infrastructure data, such as hospitals, evacuation routes, and flood zones, using Augmented Reality over the map of flooding. They were then shown future projections of scenarios involving sea level rise with storm surge flooding. Participants were asked about their perceptions of flood risk and vulnerability and of protective action intentions throughout.

The second workshop utilized an ethics-based group discussion tool, called the Ethical Matrix, which helps to bring to the forefront the different lived experiences and needs and challenges of participants. This approach helps participants to think about a decision’s impact on a wider variety of people and take others’ needs into account. The Ethical Matrix is a two-step process, where stakeholders first list their values of wellbeing, autonomy, and justice, then participants use a matrix to see where there may be conflicts between stakeholders’ values and needs in a particular decision. Participants’ perceptions of flood risk and vulnerability and of protective action intentions were surveyed throughout the workshop.

This presentation will highlight the immersive visualization and Ethical Matrix approaches, and show results of these two workshops, focusing on the impacts of visualizations and of group discussions on perceptions of flood risk and intentions to take protective actions.