Community-Centered Spatial Intelligence for Climate Adaptation at Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore

2025-09-01

AI Summary

This study addresses climate-induced existential threats confronting rural, marine-dependent communities along Nova Scotia’s eastern coast, Canada. Methodologically, it advances a community-led resilience framework integrating spatial intelligence, artificial intelligence, and digital archiving—uniquely co-modeling participatory citizen science with Indigenous and local knowledge, particularly elders’ oral traditions, through student–resident co-design of a dynamic digital archive system. Its primary contributions are: (1) the first interdisciplinary collaboration framework enabling equitable dialogue between technological tools and place-based knowledge; and (2) a transferable “community-centered” model for co-developing and deploying socio-technical solutions. The approach empowers traditional coastal communities to autonomously implement contextually grounded climate adaptation strategies. As such, it offers a methodological paradigm and actionable blueprint for social-ecological transformation in Indigenous and small-scale fishing communities worldwide. (138 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Strengthening climate resilience in rural coastal communities
• Integrating generational knowledge with digital tools
• Developing replicable models for community-centered climate adaptation

Innovation

• Human-centered co-creation with communities
• Integrating generational knowledge with digital tools
• Interdisciplinary collaboration across science and engineering