When Science Meets Lived Experience: Reimagining Climate Tools from the Ground Up

Tampei Philippines
19 minutes ago
6 min read

While technical data forms a crucial pillar of disaster resilience and climate adaptation, it represents only part of the equation. The remainder lies in the lived experiences and local insights of community members—those who possess firsthand knowledge of flood levels on their streets and subtle environmental shifts following heavy rainfall.

In Work Package 4 (WP4) of Project RURBANISE, the team at the University of the Philippines Resilience Institute (UPRI) set out to answer a vital question:

“How can local knowledge, practices, and capacities improve adaptation planning in the long term through a genuine dialogue with existing scientific knowledge?”

To answer this, UPRI worked alongside our partners at ESSC, HPFPI-PACSII, and Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs) to turn that dialogue into a mutual learning process. The project focused on co-design, technical literacy, and hands-on capacity building using conceptual hardware and interactive 3D models to build community understanding of climate technology.

Top-down technology often fails because it isn't designed for the realities of the ground. Rather than treating communities as passive recipients of installed infrastructure, UPRI’s Technology Development team shifted the focus toward educational hardware building and data literacy by designing and conducting Innovation Workshops from March to May 2026..

3D-Printed Maps: A Hands-On Approach to Planning

Maps are essential for disaster preparation, but traditional flat maps can be hard to interpret. To bridge this gap, UPRI and ESSC developed modular, 3D-printed community maps. These tactile tools allow residents, local leaders, and Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (DRRMO) representatives to collaboratively map out their physical and social environments. Using these modular, "Lego-block" style models, participants, mostly local youth, mapped out residential buildings, key community facilities, and zones vulnerable to high-risk zones for flooding, earthquakes, and fires. The map’s tactile features also enhance accessibility for visually impaired participants compared to conventional 2D maps.

To make these 3D models viable teaching assets, the development team tested multi-color printing, automated map segmentation, and voxelation to balance visual clarity with cost efficiency:

Interactive Features: Designed with detachable parts and custom-colored legends, the maps allow community members to physically place hazard markers directly on the model.
Practical Planning: HOAs can use these models to identify flood-prone zones, locate natural catch basins, and make informed land-use and infrastructure decisions.
Minimalist & Portable: The physical design is continuously refined so the maps remain lightweight, easy to store, and simple to use during local meetings.

The real potential of these visual tools came to life during the interactive field session with partner HOAs:

Kidapawan City (HOA 1 Resettlement): Youth participants mapped flood, earthquake, and fire risks alongside CDRRMO officers, who validated hazard placements and explored using similar 3D mapping techniques for city-wide planning.
Davao City (Nalumville): Residents integrated road network references directly into the 3D map. Another highlight of the workshop is the detailed demographic identification, plotting households with senior citizens, pregnant and lactating women, children, and persons with disabilities (PWDs) to enhance the accuracy of localized hazard data and emphasized the distribution of vulnerable groups.
Mandaue City (SMASH): The community used the 3D model as a practical problem-solving tool to plot newly constructed drainage routes and negotiate the best locations for shared waste management bins. The mapping process brought to light clusters of at-risk residents living near critical access routes, underscoring the urgency for targeted evacuation strategies and prioritized early warning alerts.
Camarines Norte (CASIDHAI): Residents marked ongoing infrastructure developments—such as clinics and paved roads—and used the visual map to explore renewable energy concepts like solar-powered water pumps, solar charging stations and portable solar kits.

To promote long-term sustainability, UPRI included training on assembling, disassembling of the 3D maps, properly storing and maintaining the 3D-printed map segments as a core part of each workshop.

3D hazard map printing

Environmental Sensors: Adapting Complex Technology to Meet Community Needs

Behind the scenes, the tech team focused heavily on system architecture as an educational proof-of-concept. The team engaged in action planning meetings to design sensor packages tailored to the specific hazards. They drafted a preliminary mesh network protocol to demonstrate data resiliency and explored symmetric key encryption to show how individual nodes validate sensor data.

This technical foundation laid the groundwork for field engagement. Earlier, from November 1, 2024 to April 30, 2025, customized environmental sensor prototypes were introduced to selected HOAs during Joint Validation Workshops. Designed to address community-specific vulnerabilities, these devices were presented in accessible terms to ensure clear understanding among residents.

Presentation of hazard maps progress in meeting with communities

The sessions provided a structured platform for collecting qualitative community feedback, including resident insights and sentiments. By pairing sensor design with the results of HPFPI’s HOA Assessments, UPRI ensures that the technology developed directly serves the specific hazards each community faces.

Environmental sensor package development

During the 2026 Innovation Workshops, the mechanics of environmental sensors were presented to the local residents, particularly youth. Instead of installing static weather stations, the workshops taught participants how to build their own low-cost, functional instruments from scratch, including DIY anemometers to measure wind speed and tipping-bucket rain gauges for rainfall intensity.

By integrating simple electronic components for real-time data readouts, these exercises demystified how localized weather data is generated. Moving from theoretical concepts to practical DIY construction, the team ensured that communities gained relevant technical skills without the burden of maintaining unneeded infrastructure, preparing communities to run local science initiatives and handle future emergency alerts.

Real-World Lessons: From Community Dialogue to Adaptive Pivots

Bringing technical tools into neighborhood settings presented valuable operational and social learning opportunities for UPRI and the RURBANISE team.

The Power of Dialogue and Shared Language

Underpinning these successful field activities was the facilitation of HPFPI-PACSII, whose team provided essential logistical management while serving as a bridge to ensure clear, transparent communication of project objectives to all community members.

Early community dialogues and Joint Validation Workshops highlighted crucial insights:

Flexible Engagement: Scheduling sessions on weekdays in areas like ULHOA limited turnout, leading to inconsistent attendance between project phases and making it harder to build a continuous community narrative. This underlined the importance of flexible scheduling to capture broader, uninterrupted insights.
Simplifying Technical Jargon: Leaders from KABALAKA noted that while visual tools like 3D maps were highly effective, accompanying technical explanations were sometimes too complex.
Bridging Perceptions: Discussions also revealed fascinating gaps between scientific datasets and local perceptions—such as differing views on land movement in Iloilo. These moments underscored that bridging the gap isn't just about sharing data, but building shared language and mutual confidence.

Despite these challenges, community members highlighted several key takeaways. Many appreciated seeing their personal experiences validated by scientific data—particularly through clear explanations of color-coded hazard indicators, localized fault lines, and how changes in well depth can signal land movement. The 3D mapping was praised for its accuracy, especially in pinpointing natural catch basins and dispelling previous misconceptions about water flow in areas like SMASH. Leaders from SMART noted that the interactive format created a welcoming space for idea exchange, encouraging broader participation across the community, fostering deeper connections, and driving collective learning.

Translating Insights into Adaptive Plots

Listening to these ground-level realities during early dialogues directly shaped how UPRI approached the subsequent Innovation Workshops:

Navigating Supply Chains and Hardware Constraints: Producing high-density, multi-layer 3D maps for communities with complex terrains required weeks of precise printing. Hardware downtimes and component procurement delays meant some initial workshop sessions were conducted with partial map models. However, UPRI remains committed to returning to every partner HOA to deliver fully completed, high-standard 3D map sets.
Refining the Strategy Based on Local Context: While initial plans considered deploying operational weather stations, ground-level evaluations revealed that neighborhood priorities focused far more on man-made hazards, drainage, and basic community development. In areas like the SMASH community in Mandaue, analysis showed that flood monitoring devices would actually be more effective if installed upstream outside the community’s legal jurisdiction—requiring broader inter-governmental coordination rather than a localized neighborhood deployment.
Pivoting Hardware to Hands-On Education: Recognizing these realities, the team deliberately pivoted. Instead of forcing hardware installations that didn't fit immediate local needs, UPRI utilized its electronic components to host hands-on weather sensor-building workshops. This ensured that residents still gained foundational knowledge and hardware appreciation—transforming supply and context challenges into an opportunity for meaningful community education.

Project RURBANISE demonstrates that true resilience lies at the intersection of scientific data and local wisdom. By shifting the focus from static hardware deployment to hands-on capacity building—through tactile 3D hazard mapping and DIY weather sensor construction—UPRI and its partners empowered communities to become active leaders in their own disaster preparedness.

Grounded in transparent dialogue and adaptive learning, this collaborative effort proves that technology is most effective when it is co-designed to serve real community realities. Moving forward, sustained efforts to simplify complex data and nurture local technical literacy will ensure these neighborhoods possess the confidence, tools, and self-reliance needed to build a safer, climate-resilient future.

—

Research supported by CLARE is bridging critical gaps between science and action: developing new toolsand supporting partner governments, communities, and the private sector to use evidence and innovation to drive effective solutions to the climate challenge, whilst building capacity of both those carrying out the research and those using the resulting evidence.

Through long-term commitments and partnerships worldwide, and needs-driven, action-focused research, CLARE links up short-and long-term issues, enabling long-term, sustainable, and fair economic and social development in a changing climate whilst supporting early action to reduce impacts of climate variability whilst providing a better understanding of the risks associated with climate.

About the Author

Janina Salubo is a Knowledge Management and Development Communications Volunteer for the RURBANISE project, specializing in translating complex resilience research into accessible insights for funders and grassroots communities.