Participatory mapping for climate resilience

By Emilie Flamme

This research was conducted in Sint Maarten with Supervision from Elle van Beuren, Chair of Urban Management at TU Delft, and Member of Islanders at the Helm at the University of St. Martin (USM), an interdisciplinary research program funded by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).  This work was made especially possible through the support of Antonio Carmona Baez and Raymond Jessurun at the University of St. Martin, and Jay Haviser at the Sint Maarten Archaeological Center (SIMARC

Understanding how climate knowledge is defined and utilized in everyday practices are important steps to publicly shaping the possibilities and obstacles to establishing climate-informed policy and action in the Dutch Caribbean. In the Dutch Caribbean—Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Saba, Statia, and Bonaire— each island faces its respective challenges to enacting climate policy that are shaped by national, regional, and local community dynamics. In a region conditioned by centuries of colonialism and diaspora and shaped by islands increasingly constrained by the ongoing pressures of climate change, it is imperative that climate resilience planning in the Caribbean incorporate varying perspectives on resilience and adaptation while stressing the need to address the major changes climate change will introduce to communities across the Caribbean. In the book What if We Get it Right? (Johnson 2024), American Lawyer and climate justice organizer Collette Pichon Battle asks “[w]hen the land goes, how do we honor it?…What does “home” mean in the context of diaspora, and of the climate crisis?”[1] Building from these questions Pichon Battle poses, what does “climate crisis” mean in the context of a Caribbean island, and how can it ground the actions needed to protect and honor a sense of home and a sense of futurity. In response to this question, maps as visual communication tools can support the documentation of climate change and facilitate narratives and stories related to climate changes at the island and regional level for the Dutch Caribbean. By extension, participatory mapping for climate resilience, as a form of participatory action research (PAR), is a tool to spur more capacious forms of planning and policy-building, ones that shape and be shaped by community imaginations while honoring centuries of lived experiences in the Dutch Caribbean.

[1] Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth, What if we get it right?: Visions of climate futures, Random House Publishing Group, 2024, pg. 373.

Climate change is a complex, intersecting phenomena which are felt and observed through events such as high heat and hurricanes. These events have differing  impacts over a given time period. Climate change is difficult to represent because it can be experienced through slow, increasingly extreme changes such as heat waves and sea level rise, as well as through drastic, cataclysmic events such as tropical storms and torrential rain. Though often unprecedented, the gradual increases in climate extremes taking place at the scale of millimeters per year and fractions of degrees in temperature (e.g., sea level rise, coastal erosion, extreme heat). Gradual changes to climate are difficult to capture individual as well as community perceptions of their local climate. More extreme events such as hurricanes and torrential rain showcase the increasing volatility and severity of climate change-induced events but does not necessarily highlight the long-term implications for communities located where these events and potential future events may occur.[2] These types of climate events both invisible and hyper-visible present long-term implications for communities including extensive economic loss, physical damages to homes and businesses, and which islands in the Caribbean, faced with risks such as extreme heat waves, sea level rise, and increasingly severe hurricanes.

[2] In 2024 alone, the increased volatility and severity of extreme events was observed across the world torrential rain catalyzed catastrophic flooding in Valencia, Spain; six named storms, including four tropical typhoons,[1] hit the Philippines in just 10 days; Hurricanes Milton and Helene impacted communities across the Southern United States, some are more than 800 kilometers inland in less than two weeks.

Participatory Action Research, with much of origins in Latin America, has now extended to contexts planning and policy development processes around the world. Participatory Action Research (PAR) prioritizes forms of experiential knowledge to address “problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives” (Cornish et al. 2023). PAR is composed of six central facets, which aim to (1) build relationships, (2) establish working practices, (3) establish common understanding of the issue, (4) observe, gather, and generate materials, (5) conduct collaborative analysis, and, lastly, (6) plan and take-action. These components of PAR research can be iterated over short- and long-term processes, placing communities and key stakeholders affected by the problem(s) in a given social system at the center of the small steps needed for large solutions to take place.

Figure 3: Diagram tracing possible steps in a participatory mapping process, one which also holds the possibility for counter-mapping processes which deviate from traditional cartographic representations. 

Participatory mapping as a form of Participatory Action Research (PAR) utilizes the following strategies: (1) Stakeholder Engagement is used to build relationships to ensure experiential knowledge is centered through the voices of relevant stakeholders, including government leaders, community advocates, conservation specialists. (2) With stakeholders, working practices can be established to explain what mapping is as an outcome of process, and how, if applicable, a map services both the discourse around critical questions of climate resilience, and the actions necessary to address these questions. (3) Through common working practices, mapping can help to establish a common understanding of the issue and translate experiential knowledge into data which can become mutually interpretable with climate change impact and scenario data. In order to develop both common working practices and common understanding (4) observation and material gathering is critical to gain an understanding of what current social, cultural, geophysical landscape condition, generating comprehension relative to what is known about exposure and what can be determined from past and present observation. Lastly, participatory mapping seeks to support 5) collaborative analysis and planning by working with stakeholders to identify how to act, both in terms of implementation and  support immediate as well as medium- and long-term needs relating to climate resilience as an intersectional process requiring inputs from a broad range of stakeholders.

For islands in the Dutch Caribbean, participatory mapping can create opportunities to generate shared languages between policymakers and community members with varying levels of familiarity with the concepts embedded in maps and climate forecasting. Participatory for climate resilience helps to identify and render both historically informed and present understandings of how climate impacts are shaping islands today and in the future. These visualizations can serve as critical intermediary outputs to support needed policy reforms, community awareness building and education programs, as well as create strategies for critical infrastructure implementation projects. Visualizations through participatory mapping can be especially helpful for climate storytelling and can offer opportunities to engage the impacts of climate change in contextually sensitive ways. Participatory mapping can generate the building blocks needed to shape meaningful local discussions around climate change and island futures. This process can help to inform local actions that address increasing climate risks  for communities across each of the six Dutch Caribbean islands.