Community-Centered Spatial Intelligence for Climate Adaptation at Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore
This addresses climate resilience for traditional coastal communities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing human-centered approaches.
The paper tackles climate adaptation in rural Nova Scotia by co-creating tools with communities, resulting in a replicable model for integrating local knowledge into digital archives to enhance resilience.
This paper presents an overview of a human-centered initiative aimed at strengthening climate resilience along Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore. This region, a collection of rural villages with deep ties to the sea, faces existential threats from climate change that endanger its way of life. Our project moves beyond a purely technical response, weaving together expertise from Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, and Coastal Geography to co-create tools with the community. By integrating generational knowledge of residents, particularly elders, through the Eastern Shore Citizen Science Coastal Monitoring Network, this project aims to collaborate in building a living digital archive. This effort is hosted under Dalhousie University's Transforming Climate Action (TCA) initiative, specifically through its Transformative Adaptations to Social-Ecological Climate Change Trajectories (TranSECT) and TCA Artificial Intelligence (TCA-AI) projects. This work is driven by a collaboration model in which student teams work directly with residents. We present a detailed project timeline and a replicable model for how technology can support traditional communities, enabling them to navigate climate transformation more effectively.