How can “Fresks” pave the way for change?

Climate Fresk (from the word “fresco”) is a wildly popular thematic storyboarding concept created by an NGO of the same name. A playful, collaborative, and educational activity, it brings citizens together to demystify the major complex challenges of our time. What accounts for the massive appeal of this unique approach—the use of a game to explore the natural and social sciences and to reconstruct contemporary social paradigms, the causes and effects of climate change, and the collapse of biodiversity?

Imagine the scene: people volunteer or are invited to take part, sometimes knowing little or nothing about each other, their curiosity provoked by the prospect of tackling these major issues together. Through dialogue and the intelligence of the group, they must organize 42 cards in a logical sequence to help explain the causes and effects of human activities and planetary limits. At the end of the three-hour activity, participants return to their individual milieus with a renewed appreciation for the systems governing our world. More broadly, they are inspired by the solidarity and social capital that can be acquired within a community of learners. From then on, the effects of this training grow exponentially, continuously refreshed by the influx of new leaders and the creation of new Climate Fresk communities.

But is understanding the causes and effects of social and environmental problems enough to solve them? Is overcoming ignorance a meaningful gesture toward positively changing the system? Raccords met with these innovators in gamification to understand the bet they’re making: to bring about change by—first and foremost—creating a shared understanding of the current socio-ecological impasse. If we rely on the tenets of systems thinking, behavioural change requires a series of transformations, including a recognition of the paradigms that govern how we coexist. Raccords invites us to consider the Climate Fresk model as a lever for creating “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos” with the power to shift us towards a sustainable system.