Climate Futures Summit

The Climate Futures Summit is a free event featuring projects focused on participation, agency and creative solutions to our climate crisis.

Climate futures are pressing on the present. Some climate realities are already locked in and unfolding, and much remains unknown, unscripted and still to be done.

What can our disciplines contribute to these futures? What work is already underway to understand, intervene in, and support more-than-human communities as they navigate precarious futures?

Presented by the Deakin Motion Lab and the Planet-A Sustainability Science Research Group, this one-day summit brings together researchers from across Deakin’s faculties whose work centres participation, agency and creative responses to climate change. The aim is to draw connections and seed future collaborations.

The morning features eight lightning talks:

• Climate Futures Incubator: a cross-cultural residency and exhibition program in which Indonesian and Australian artists work with scientists and with coastal, rural and Indigenous communities to imagine climate futures through a climate justice lens (Michael Chew, with Sarah Taylor reflecting on the inaugural Climate Futures Incubator in Yogyakarta)

• The Adaptation Game (TAG): a cooperative storytelling game that builds climate preparedness and resilience with local councils in Australia and beyond (Ben Pederick)

• Local SDGs: Resilient Farming Futures: how the Goulburn Murray region can prepare for a future shaped by global climate action and its own choices (Brett Bryan)

• Gathering Place: a post-bushfire art project in Natimuk that engages community in collaborative, place-based environmental repair (Emily Potter)

• The Breathe Project: a citizen science study in which children measure their exposure to air pollution on the school commute (Clare Walter)

• Indigenous knowledge for climate action in Australia and Sri Lanka (Ishnie Dahanayake)

• Artefacts of the Future: science-informed, arts-based futuring with students and teachers (Shelley Hannigan, Jo Raphael and Joseph Ferguson)

Lunch and refreshments provided. RSVP by 2 November

Agenda

9:45 - Registration

10:00 - Introduction

10.15-12.25 - Presentations (8 x 10min each, with break and Q&A)

12.30-1:00pm - Lunch

1:00-4:00pm - The Adaptation Game

4:00-5:00 - Drinks

How the Summit runs:

The day is split into two half - first half presentations, second half playing The Adaptation Game (see below). You may come to either or both - please choose free ticket option(s) that reflects this choice (ie order both morning and afternoon tickets for the whole day).

The Adaptation Game

The Adaptation Game (TAG) is a facilitated, cooperative storytelling game. Players spend a session "living through" three climate-driven disasters over the next ten years in their own town, working together on what one player called "little solutions to these wicked problems." Players report greater agency, stronger local connections and practical follow-up actions, such as joining community groups and setting up neighbourhood networks.