Burning Lowlands: A Serious Game to Evaluate Citizen Learning, Communication, and Decision-Making in Climate Adaptation

The Netherlands is increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards such as flooding, drought, and heatwaves, which require adaptation across multiple scales. Raising awareness of these risks and of available adaptation options is particularly important in the Dutch context, as research indicates that fewer Dutch citizens believe that climate change will require them to adapt their way of life compared to the European average (European Investment Bank, 2024). Yet effective disaster preparedness must involve diverse stakeholders across all geographical scales, including at the local and household levels. Innovative approaches are therefore needed to support citizens in understanding climate risks, exploring adaptation options, and reflecting on the consequences of individual and collective decision-making under uncertainty. To address this gap, this study uses a serious game to examine individual engagement with adaptation decisions in an interactive setting.

We present Burning Lowlands, a collaborative board game designed to empower citizens to better understand, navigate, and reflect on climate adaptation choices at both household and community levels. Players represent households within a fictional Dutch city exposed to varying climate hazards such as flooding, drought, and heat stress. The game encompasses adaptation cards, a modular board representing spatial risk differences, and controlled randomness to simulate uncertain climate futures. Over multiple rounds, hazards intensify and compound, increasing time pressure and decision complexity. Players must allocate limited individual and collective adaptation resources, such as household-level measures or shared infrastructure investments, while observing trade-offs, cascading impacts, and unequal risk distribution across the city. 

The objective of the game is of a collective nature: maintain the city’s livability above a critical threshold across multiple dimensions, such as infrastructure, social well-being, and environmental quality. While individual preparedness influences household outcomes, collective decisions significantly improve city-wide resilience, demonstrating the added value of cooperation under climate risk. Failure to adapt leads to visible degradation of the landscape and reduced capacity to respond to future hazards.

To evaluate the game’s effectiveness as a climate adaptation communication tool, Burning Lowlands is implemented as a controlled experimental intervention. The research design follows a pre-post intervention framework, where participants complete surveys before and after gameplay, measuring changes in climate risk awareness, adaptation knowledge, perceived agency, and willingness to engage in collective adaptation. In-game decisions, outcomes, and interactions are observed to assess how players respond to the intensification of climate hazards, spatially differentiated risks, and resource constraints. This mixed-methods approach enables the evaluation of both learning outcomes and decision-making processes, with the resulting insights directly informing iterative refinements of the game.

By linking experimental evaluation with iterative game design, our research contributes to the development of evidence-based serious games as tools for climate adaptation communication. The findings also contribute to improved approaches for engaging citizens with climate adaptation challenges and communicating the role of collective action under uncertainty.

European Investment Bank: Most Dutch respondents think their lifestyle won’t be affected by climate change despite its growing impact, EIB survey finds, https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2024-432-most-dutch-respondents-think-their-lifestyle-won-t-be-affected-by-climate-change-despite-its-growing-impact-eib-survey-finds (last access: 14 January 2025), 11 November 2024.