A collaborative serious game for water resources planning and hazard mitigation

Abstract

Hydrological hazards lead to a broad range of socio-economic and environmental risks. The development of a resilient community and risk reduction rely on the adoption of holistic watershed master planning whereby the adaptation options consider the risk associated with individual or multiple hydrological hazards occurring simultaneously at a specific location. Such planning approaches pose multiple challenges for decision-makers including the access and manipulation of high-volume high-variety data. Moreover, modern planning approaches involve the watershed community in decision-making, hence, these approaches have to include elements of social learning and relationship building. This study introduces a serious gaming framework to assist stakeholders in the decision-making process for water resources planning and hazard mitigation. A Multi-Hazard Tournament (MHT) is described that allows the members of a watershed community to evaluate various adaptation options to develop mitigation strategies for multiple water-related hazards (e.g. flood, drought, and water pollution). The tournament offers a competitive and gamified setting for collaborative hazard risk assessment to minimize damages to water quality, riparian habitat, water resources availability, vulnerable populations, and infrastructure. A web-based decision support tool is developed to provide interactive interfaces and engaging visualizations and serve as a one-stop platform to investigate the challenges presented for each damage center within its geographic context and to analyze the cost/benefit relationship for potential hazard mitigation strategies with dynamic analytics tools. Finally, a case study is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of MHT in increasing collective awareness and conceptual and practical understanding of water-related hazards and mitigation strategies.