Stephen R. J. Sheppard

• PhD
• University of British Columbia

Urban forests are gaining recognition as a nature-based solution to climate change and other social-environmental issues in cities. Yet, the integration of urban forests may conflict with other climate measures such as urban densification, which may create hostile growing conditions for trees and lead to tree decline or loss. While previous studies...

Background Urban forests can provide nature-based solutions (NBS) to complex climate-change challenges via the provision of ecosystem services such as shade and cooling that offset increased risks of chronic diseases and excess mortality. They also confer indirect health benefits by providing regulating ecosystem services that can facilitate climat...

Engaging with the future to make better decisions in the present is key for sustainable development and climate change responses. In this conceptual paper, we suggest a scenario building approach that connects psychological principles of future thinking with future scenario development in order to advance the impact of scenarios. Future scenario wo...

Urban foresters are addressing the challenge of urban biodiversity loss through management plans in the context of rapid urbanization. Protecting the integrity of the urban ecosystem requires long-term monitoring and planning for resilience as well as effective management. The soundscape assessment has attracted attention in this field, but applyin...

Urban forests are increasingly recognized and integrated into cities’ climate policies as a nature-based solution to climate change. However, the integration of urban forests may conflict with other climate measures. Densification of urban areas, a common approach to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet other goals, can create hostile growing c...

Local preferences and priorities for trees and greenspaces are important considerations when planning and designing a community's urban forest. Local residents can provide insight into place-specific contexts such as local aesthetic preferences, social systems, cultures, and attitudes to inform appropriate design responses. Residents also inform re...

Moving to a post-growth economic paradigm requires research to identify compelling ways to more effectively communicate the key ideas of this transition to the public. This study uses framing theory to examine the effects of four message frames about transitioning to an economic paradigm not centered on economic growth. The four message frames were...

While being major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, cities also suffer some of the most severe climate change impacts. Urban forests have gained increasing recognition as nature-based solutions to climate change via the various benefits they provide, such as carbon sequestration and temperature regulation. Many cities have developed climate change and...

(1) Research Highlights: Afforestation is one of the most effective urban greening practices for mitigating a variety of environmental issues. Globally, municipal governments have launched large-scale afforestation programs in metropolitan areas during the last decades. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban greenspace patterns are seldom st...

Scientific knowledge of marine pollution and oil spill response (OSR) innovation has diffused over half a century. Local community resilience to spills and the equitable application of knowledge worldwide are constrained by several barriers. These range from access, governance, cost minimisation, through austerity and poverty in affected areas, to...

The need to involve the public and stakeholders in decision-making around issues of technological complexity and conflicting values and knowledge systems is widely accepted in the field of natural resources management. Addressing both analysis and deliberation, analytic-deliberative processes are increasingly used for complex decision contexts. Yet...

The Visualisation Protocol for Urban Forestry has been developed in association with public realm and planning tree officers/managers and urban forestry researchers. It aims to provide anyone working in the field of urban forestry with a basic understanding of the planning and production process for using visualisations. This Protocol will help to...

It is increasingly evident that exposure to green landscape elements benefits human health. Urban green space in cities is also recognized as a crucial adaptation response to changes in climate and its subsequent effects. The exploration of conceptual and practical intersections between human health, green spaces, and climate action is needed. Evid...

Urban green equity, broadly defined as equitable access to and governance of urban forests, mediates urban residents’ ability to derive ecosystem services from urban forests. This article explores conceptions of, barriers to, and strategies for urban green equity as understood by urban forestry and related green practitioners in three multicultural...

This study examines public opinions about economic growth, prosperity and the environment, and segments the sample based on some of these attitudes. A sample of 1001 Canadians participated in an online survey in January 2016. Data shows that economic growth is received with positive reactions, although very few participants strongly agreed with the...

This research examines the distributional equity of urban vegetation in 10 US urbanized areas using very high resolution land cover data and census data. Urban vegetation is characterized three ways in the analysis (mixed vegetation, woody vegetation, and public parks), to reflect the variable ecosystem services provided by different types of urban...

Canada is embarking upon a low-carbon energy transition, which will involve the diffusion of innovations and the reconfiguration of energy systems. This paper examines the potential contribution that transition experiments can make to this process. Transition experiments can be understood as deliberate interventions which test novel configurations...

Substantial public engagement in and support for climate action is needed to prevent the worst impacts of climate change from occurring. Efforts to boost such engagement can be collectively referred to as “social mobilization” initiatives, which can take a number of forms, from government-led planning processes to neighbourhood-scale grassroots ini...

Urban vegetation, and in particular urban forests, provide a wide range of ecosystem services to urban societies and may thus be classified as environmental goods. Their status as goods suggests that urban societies’ interactions with urban vegetation should be subjected to equity analyses to determine the fairness of such interactions. However, de...

To be successful, actions for mitigating climate change in the forest and forest sector will not only need to be informed by the best available science, but will also require strong public and/or political acceptability. This paper presents the results of a novel analytical-deliberative engagement process that brings together stakeholders and Indig...

The relationship between impervious land cover and tree development is an important component to understanding urban ecological systems. While impervious surfaces are associated with degraded soil conditions, rerouted hydrological networks and urban microclimates, the overall impact of these effects on tree development is highly variable. This stud...

With the majority of the world’s human population now living in cities, urban forests provide an increasingly important range of ecosystem services, from improved air quality and climate change adaptation to better public health outcomes and increased tourism revenues. The importance of these ecosystem services in urban environments, and the centra...

This chapter focuses on concepts, issues and practices of governance and public participation and how these apply to urban forestry. It highlights trends in governance and community engagement to date, and explores how emerging challenges and opportunities in a changing world may influence governance and engagement for urban forestry in the future.

This perspective documents current thinking around climate actions in Canada by synthesizing scholarly proposals made by Sustainable Canada Dialogues (SCD), an informal network of scholars from all 10 provinces, and by reviewing responses from civil society representatives to the scholars’ proposals. Motivated by Canada’s recent history of repeated...

This paper describes a research project exploring future urban forests. This study uses a Delphi approach to develop a set of key indicators for healthy, resilient urban forests. Two groups of experts participated in the Delphi survey: International academics and local practitioners. The results of the Delphi indicate that “urban tree diversity” an...

Urban resilience frameworks and strategies currently taken up in cities around the globe fall short of adequately preparing urban communities for the scale of change that many will face in coming decades. For cities aiming to address the impacts of climate change in a proactive sense as well as post-disaster, urban resilience presents itself as a u...

Executive Summary Background Fifty-five percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the City of Vancouver come from buildings. To address this major source of climate-warming emissions, the City set a target to reduce HG emissions from existing buildings in the city by 20% from 2007 levels by 2020. One of the intended actions to achieve energy ret...

Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in urbanized areas, with a trend toward increasing urbanization and density in cities. As pressure on finite urban forest resources intensifies, appreciation of the benefits that they provide to residents and visitors is growing. In Canada, the urban forest includes a variety of vegetation and l...

Energy has become an important topic for policy makers, industry, and householders globally (e.g., IEA-International Energy Agency, 2015). Changing the way we generate and use energy could make a huge contribution to reducing carbon emissions and help address climate change. There is also concern over energy security where energy is imported from o...

There are many barriers and challenges associated with climate change communication focused on promoting community-based action for sustainable futures. Of particular interest is the challenge to embed community perspectives in a communication process of climate change solutions. In this paper we argue that 3D interactive simulations using design i...

In this paper we discuss the theoretical, design and evaluative underpinnings of the experiential learning context central to the design processes of the Future Delta 2.0 serious game. The game is aimed at facilitating understanding and action on local climate change. We begin with a discussion of play as it relates to designing serious games. Then...

Senate Curriculum Proposal

The central message of this essay is to make climate change more visible and meaningful to community members through landscape architectural techniques and building literacy. It identifies general principles for opening people's eyes to climate change, demonstrating the potentially powerful role that landscape can play in helping citizens to see an...

Within sustainable forest management (SFM), there has been a much greater emphasis on environmental and economic values than on social values, especially aesthetics. In order to assess the relative importance of people's aesthetic values, we administered public surveys to nonforestry students and to forestry graduate students in the Republic of Kor...

This study synthesizes two evaluations of a local climate change planning process in a rural town in British Columbia (Canada), which was supported through landscape visualizations. First, the impact of the visualizations, based on scientific environmental modeling and presented in three different presentation formats, verbal/visual presentation, p...

Time is at the heart of understanding climate change, from the perspective of both natural and social scientists. This article selectively reviews research on time perception and temporal aspects of decision making in sociology and psychology. First we briefly describe the temporal dimensions that characterize the issue of climate change. Second, w...

Time is at the heart of understanding climate change, from the perspective of both natural and social scientists. This article selectively reviews research on time perception and temporal aspects of decision making in sociology and psychology. First we briefly describe the temporal dimensions that characterize the issue of climate change. Second, w...

Climate change is an urgent problem with implications registered not only globally, but also on national and local scales. It is a particularly challenging case of environmental communication because its main cause, greenhouse gas emissions, is invisible. The predominant approach of making climate change visible is the use of iconic, often affectiv...

This extension note is the first in a series of eight that describes a set of tools and processes developed to support sustainable forest management planning and its pilot application in the Arrow Timber Supply Area (TSA). Conducted under the Arrow Innovative Forestry Practices Agreement (IFPA) Sustainability Project, and initiated by an interdisci...

Increases in the environmental awareness of global consumers coupled with pressure from regional stakeholders has forced forest managers to demonstrate the potential implications of forest management activities for a broad range of indicators. This paper describes the construction and application of a hierarchical decision-support system for evalua...

For landscape ecology to produce knowledge relevant to society, it must include considerations of human culture and behavior, extending beyond the natural sciences to synthesize with many other disciplines. Furthermore, it needs to be able to support landscape change processes which increasingly take the shape of deliberative and collaborative deci...

This chapter addresses the role of visualisation tools within participatory processes in bringing climate change science to the local level, in order to increase people’s awareness of climate change and contribute to decision-making and policy change. The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is becoming more widely understood in scie...

While the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, provides guidelines for flood risk management, it is local governments’ responsibility to delineate their own flood vulnerability, assess their risk, and integrate these with planning policies to implement adaptive action. However, barriers such as the lack of locally specific data and public per...

This paper provides an overview of a collaborative study on visualizing climate change at the local scale. A conceptual framework has been developed, in which local scenarios and visualizations of climate change impacts and response were created to facilitate local dialogue on incorporating climate change into long-term planning and implementation...

Scientists continue to be frustrated at the slow uptake of climate change science and the lack of action in policy and behavior change. Often blamed for this disconnect are the complexity/uncertainty of future projections, alongside psychological factors such as the perceived remoteness of impacts, the global nature of the problem, and discounting...

Efforts are intensifying to design effective flood management strategies that account for a changing climate and that make use of the wealth of resources and latent capacities associated with action at the local level. Municipalities, however, are subject to a host of challenges and barriers to action, revealing the critical need for sophisticated...

Virtual globes, i.e., geobrowsers that integrate multi-scale and temporal data from various sources and are based on a globe metaphor, have developed into serious tools that practitioners and various stakeholders in landscape and community planning have started using. Although these tools originate from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), they ha...

In this paper we discuss the Future Delta game, as a time-forward 3-D visualization and simulation tool that aims to motivate actions and behavioral changes and to educate players about climate change mitigation and adaptations solutions and challenges. The game simulation is situated in a recognizable community locale: the flood-prone neighborhood...

This whitepaper is intended to provide a starting point for discussion at a workshop for the National Climate Assessment (NCA) that focuses on the use and development of scenarios. The paper will provide background needed by participants in the workshop in order to review options for developing and using scenarios in NCA. The paper briefly defines...

Forest landscapes are the type of landscape that British Columbians would call "home". One of the biggest challenges for future sustainable forest management is climate change: Impacts as well as human mitigation and adaptation actions will have considerable impacts on BC's landscapes. In order to help decision-makers proactively assessing mitigati...

There is an urgent need for meaningful information and effective public processes at the local level to build awareness, capacity, and agency on climate change, and support planning and decision-making. This paper describes a conceptual framework to meet these requirements by generating alternative, coherent, holistic climate change scenarios and v...

Despite the recent upsurge in research, the complex and inter-related processes driving climate change continue to be characterized by significant uncertainty. One of the major issues for policy-makers is how to deal with this considerable uncertainty in ways that enable pro-active measures rather than complicate or discourage them. A great unknown...

This paper presents a transdisciplinary multiple-case study, set in Switzerland, that was part of the European Fifth Framework Program project VISULANDs—Visualization Tools for Public Participation in Managing Landscape Change (2003–2005). The project sought production of new visualization tools enabling public participation in landscape manage...

This study draws upon the results of a survey of the general public in three communities in British Columbia to examine the social bases of satisfaction with public participation in forest management decision-making at both the local and provincial levels. The main findings are that those members of the general public who are relatively more biocen...

Efforts are intensifying to design effective flood management strategies that account for a changing climate and that make use of the wealth of resources and latent capacities associated with action at the local level. Municipalities, however, are subject to a host of challenges and barriers to action, revealing the critical need for sophisticated...

Although public participation is a requirement of sustainable forest management (SFM), it can be difficult for forest managers to obtain broad levels of representation through traditional public participation mechanisms, such as open houses, information sessions, and public advisory groups (PAGs). Some of the difficulties stem from barriers to part...

in its causes and global in its impacts, climate change still poses an unresolved challenge for scientists, politicians, entrepreneurs, and citizens. Climate change research is largely global in focus, aims at enhanced understanding, and is driven by experts, all of which seem to be insufficient to anchor climate change action in regional and local...

Linking global science to locally significant places with visioning processes and visualizations represents a powerful tool for decision-making in the context of climate change responses. The Local Climate Change Visioning Project in British Columbia, Canada, builds on recent advances in backcasting and scenario-building to bridge the divide betwee...

It is critical to understand how the public prioritizes multiple forestry values when establishing objectives for sustainable forest management. While this is a complex and difficult task, a necessary step is to elicit a broad range of public opinions in forest planning to ensure that decisions serve the needs of various forest stakeholders and soc...

‘Virtual globe’ software systems such as Google Earth are growing rapidly in popularity as a way to visualise and share 3D environmental data. Scientists and environmental professionals, many of whom are new to 3D modeling and visual communications, are beginning routinely to use such techniques in their work. While the appeal of these techniques i...

This paper examines the emerging role of digital tools in a collaborative planning process for British Columbia's Bowen Island. The goal of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of a 'digital workshop', combining the interactive CommunityViz tool with the immersive lab facilities at the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP)...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have been working in collaboration with climate scientists, planners, engineers, and community stakeholders in the Metro Vancouver area to deal with the challenges posed by climate change. The visioning packages were driven by two major data sources including the scientific climate models and commun...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have been working with climate scientists, planners and stakeholders in the Metro Vancouver area to develop a new process for outreach and planning that bridges the gap between global climate science and local action. The Local Climate Change Visioning process uses realistic 3D imagery and spatial m...

This paper addresses the potential role of visualisation tools in rapidly increasing peoples' awareness of climate change and possibly affecting behaviour and policy, together with ethical dilemmas to be overcome if such a course of action is pursued. The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is becoming more widely understood in scie...

This review synthesizes some of the main themes of social sustainability indicators for forest management, and addresses conceptual categories, issues, and limitations associated with the use of social indicators. Socio-cultural values and conditions associated with quality of life, public access to non-market benefits and resources, governance, an...

For many people, outdoor recreation provides one of the main opportunities to experience, interact with, and learn about forested landscapes. Yet public recreation use of forests in Canada is not yet well understood; knowing more about this important forest stakeholder group would help to address aspects of social sustainability in forest managemen...

The case of recreation in the Sea-to-Sky Corridor in British Columbia (BC) is used to explore the issue of the representation of outdoor recreation in forest landscape management. The widening array of outdoor recreation activities in high-use areas poses new challenges to the equitable participation of diverse recreation user groups in forest land...

Given the growing importance of forest-management strategies which seek to emulate natural disturbance patterns, and the increased incidence of pest epidemics in some parts of North America, there is surprisingly little published research on perceived visual quality of pest infestations, especially, at the landscape level (middleground viewing dist...

Members of indigenous communities may find it difficult to engage with technical information presented using typical resource management planning media, such as maps and reports. One technique that has been successful in public consultation in other fields is the use of realistic three-dimensional (3D) visualizations of the future landscape under d...

This extension note is the third in a series of eight that describes a set of tools and processes developed to support sustainable forest management planning and its pilot application in the Arrow Timber Supply Area (TSA). It summarizes the main public involvement processes used to obtain input to the Arrow Innovative Forest Practices Agreement (IF...

This extension note is the first in a series of eight that describes a set of tools and processes developed to support sustainable forest management planning and its pilot application in the Arrow Timber Supply Area (TSA). Conducted under the Arrow Innovative Forestry Practices Agreement (IFPA) Sustainability Project, and initiated by an interdisci...

This extension note is the eighth in a series of eight that describes a set of tools and processes developed to support sustainable forest management planning and its pilot application in the Arrow Timber Supply Area (TSA). It summarizes the criterion and indicators used to evaluate quality-of-life opportunities for the sustainable forest managemen...

There is a substantial gap between awareness and action on sustain-ability issues. This paper addresses the potential of landscape visualisa-tion, integrated with other participatory modelling tools and disseminated through the mechanism of community visioning hubs, in advancing peo-ples' awareness of sustainability issues such as climate change, a...

This extension note is the eighth in a series of eight that describes a set of tools and processes developed to support sustainable forest management planning and its pilot application in the Arrow Timber Supply Area (TSA). It summarizes the criterion and indicators used to evaluate quality-of-life opportunities for the sustainable forest managemen...

The urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change is becoming more widely understood in scientific and policy circles, but public awareness lags behind. The potential of visual communication to accelerate social learning and motivate implementation of the substantial policy, technological, and life-style changes needed, has begun to be recogn...

The spiritual values of indigenous peoples represent a challenge for forest managers to understand and integrate in their management activities. This article reports on the results of research with the Cheam First Nation of British Columbia to explore their spiritual perceptions of forested landscapes. Cheam conceptions of spirituality are deeply r...

Forest management decisions are often based on long-range projections of future forest conditions. These conditions and effects can be complex and difficult to understand for those not trained or experienced in forest management. Modern computer-based environmental data visualization systems have been found to be of considerable assistance in this...

In recent years, we have seen a great deal of expansion in our knowledge of forest ecosystems and the underlying management dimensions that support decision-making in this context. Forestry, much like other natural resource management disciplines, is faced with the challenge of integrating information from many different perspectives often with lim...

There is an increasing demand for active public involvement in forestry decision making, but there are as yet few established models for achieving this in the new sustainable forest management (SFM) context. At the level of the working forest, the fields of forest sustainability assessment, public participation, decision support, and computer techn...