Making Climate Change Local: Connections to Climate Change through Drawings and a Co-Created Traveling Climate Exhibit

Through two museum exhibits, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Center for Science Education (UCAR SciEd) and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) have been facilitating local connections to climate change since 2016. At the climate change exhibit at the NSF NCAR Mesa Lab Visitor Center in Boulder, CO, visitors have been adding their personal stories about climate change to the Climate Stories area that is part of the “Impacts and Solutions” section of the exhibit. Visitors are asked to respond to one of the following four prompts: 1) How have you personally experienced climate change?; 2) If you could invent anything to address climate change, what would it be?; 3) What actions are you already taking? What actions do you want to take?; and 4) How do you want your community to deal with climate change? Once they have written and/or drawn their responses, they place them on the wall, adding to a collection of stories from other visitors to our center. With over 10,000 drawings relevant to the prompts from members of the local community as well as visitors from throughout the U.S. and around the world, we have seen creative solutions, stories of hope and concern, and personal reflections about the current climate crisis. Additionally, we can see what people are identifying with from the exhibits or their own experiences with climate change.

A second way to share climate science is through the Real People, Real Climate, Real Changes traveling climate exhibit created by UCAR SciEd and NSF NCAR. This exhibit tells the story of climate change and its impacts on people’s lives. The traveling climate exhibit is hosted in locations around the United States including many areas without a local science museum addressing climate change. For each location, staff from UCAR SciEd and NSF NCAR work with local residents to co-create community panels with locally relevant climate change information. The exhibit includes the science of climate change, stories from individuals already affected by climate change, solutions and ways to address climate change, and interactive elements that allow for participant response such as a Talk Back Board.

These two exhibits allow for participants to not only consume information about climate change, but also to reflect on how climate change impacts them and what they can do. The local connections to climate change also encourage visitors to think about the very local impacts of a changing climate.