Coastal Challenge, a new serious video game developed by the Advanced Training and Education Center (ATEC) of CMCC Foundation, has just been released. Developed within the EU-funded REST-COAST Project in collaboration with the game development company Melazeta, Coastal Challenge aims to respond to the growing demand for accessible, science-based educational tools. Thanks to its innovative, interactive format and user-friendly design, the game can be played by a variety of audiences, from researchers to policymakers to the general public.

Coastal Challenge introduces the player to the topic of coastal resilience and the complex governance and physical processes behind it. The player becomes an active part of this process, as they take on the role of a decision-maker in charge of a coastal area over the course of 30 years. Threatened by rising sea levels, storms, droughts, but also economic pressures and social conflicts, players face the challenging task to balance social, economic and environmental priorities and allocate limited resources to adapt to a changing climate. The game offers three modules – a commercial port city, a tourist and fishing town, and a coastal wetland farming area – so that the players can experience and understand the environmental challenges and the possible adaptation pathways associated with these different environments. Solutions and strategies featured into the modules were designed around observations and methods implemented across REST-COAST project pilot sites.

Before the release, playtests of Coastal Challenge took place at Paris Climate and Nature Week and at the University of Bologna.

FERS School is proud to have provided early access to students from the FERS Winter School on Coastal Resilience to Sea Level Rise. Paola Tanguy, one of the authors of the game from ATEC, CMCC Foundation, guided the participants to explore and interact with Coastal Challenge before the official release. FERS School participants worked in groups to tackle the challenge of shaping resilient coasts, thoroughly assessing trade-offs across different dimensions, making choices impacting the local context, and managing the consequences of their choice over time. Coastal Challenge provided participants with a platform to put into practice course concepts, experiment with different adaptation solutions in a safe environment, learn from teammates with different backgrounds, and view the topic through a different lens.

Coastal Challenge is publicly available here through the REST-COAST website.

For more information contact coastalchallenge@cmcc.it or atec@cmcc.it.