We are developing an online platform ‘Last Haven: Valuing Nature and Human Priorities’ aimed at exploring how people prioritise species conservation against various human interests, such as economic growth, healthcare advancements, or local community benefits.
Our focus lies in understanding the trade-offs individuals are willing to make and how these preferences vary across different cultures. To engage a wide audience, we are crafting online serious games designed as discrete choice experiments. Through these games, we aim to delve into the complexity of these dilemmas, analysing decisions on a larger scale to reveal people’s preferences.
Imagine a green sanctuary, home to endangered species like tigers. Now, imagine if this area was threatened by a government proposal to replace it with an agricultural project for significant economic gain.
How would your feelings change if instead of agriculture, the area was to become a hospital, a mental health facility, or an infectious disease centre? What if the endangered species were not tigers but snakes, unique plants, or microscopic life forms?
Co-design Sessions
We worked with a small group of 12 co-researchers, aged 18-24, to generate the socio-ecological dilemmas and experimental designs for the online platform. Through two co-creation workshops and a focused group discussion, we delved into various scenarios depicting the alignment or divergence of human and environmental interests.
Photos: setting the scene (left) and scenarios development (right)
Last Haven Key Researcher: Dr Edmond Awad
