Stories of our shared climate future: San Juan

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The UREx SRN’s Scenarios Working Group and each city team have worked tirelessly to create participatory visions of the future for each network city over the past several years. Now that we have rich databases of visions and preferred strategies for each city, the next step is to communicate and promote these visions to catalyze sustainability transitions. This is what several members of the San Juan City Team set out to do in August 2019.

For more than a year, several San Juan City Team members have been working together to design a platform to share the entire collection of scenario visions, narratives, strategies, and timelines for San Juan 2080 in a visual, engaging, and interactive tool. We also wanted to enrich this platform with background knowledge, a diversity of resources, and relevant case studies from other cities to make them more useful. For instance, to connect local stakeholders with the knowledge and financial resources to actually implement some of the strategies.

We used ArcGIS Story Maps as our platform to present these syntheses. The platform includes syntheses for each of the three flood scenarios (coastal floods, riverine floods, and urban floods) as well as the three transformative visions (Connected Municipality, Food and Energy Security, and Just and Livable City) developed during the UREx San Juan 2080 scenario workshops.

San Juan Story Map

We are very excited to share the final version of this platform: Visiones de Ciudad – San Juan 2080. For those who are unfamiliar with the UREx Scenario Workshop process and/or outputs, we have created a landing page (“Inicio“) that provides context for this collection of syntheses. We invite you to view the Story Map and share it with anyone who you think would be interested. Please note that it is in Spanish.

This platform is an example of one possible method for mobilizing each city’s Scenario Workshop data within their communities, and it will ideally serve as an example for other UREx cities to create similar tools – increasing the knowledge uptake of the many invaluable resources co-produced by the UREx over the past five years.

This project could not have been possible without the gracious support of two NSF INTERN Supplement Awards provided to Robert Hobbins over the past year.

Primary contributors to the Visiones de Ciudad – San Juan 2080 Story Map: Robert Hobbins, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Ariel Lugo, Juan González Moscoso, Grizelle González, Ingrid Vila Biaggi, Mandy Kuhn, Maria Maurer, and Anaís Delilah Roque. For the full list of contributors, please see the “Inicio” page and credits section of each page.