Raising awareness about the health and management of Atlantic Harbours.
“RAH is about how the next generation is showing up, how we’re talking about it and how we can become closer to it. It is about collective impact and bringing everybody together. When people share their most meaningful engagement with water, we collect these stories to showcase one story, one data upload, one waterfront at a time.”
Starting as a project of the Sierra Club Canadian Chapter, Reimagining Atlantic Harbours has brought together the public in a number of interventions, engagements, and events to raise awareness about the health and management of Atlantic Harbours.
“We have a virtual safari underwater. I’m passionate about helping people visualize, understand, and really conceptualize what we can’t see that’s buried in terms of pipes or the ecosystems underwater”
- Kelly Schnare
How are they helping restore water and coastal areas?
RAH has brought together the public in a number of interventions, engagements, and events. An early project of theirs focused on an integrated partnership of like-minded citizens comprised of scientists, artists, and storytellers, collecting and sharing their stories to encourage the public to think about the harbour in a new light.
Rainfall Gauge Project
RAH has addressed the localization of rainfall patterns by giving rain gauges to local community members to measure the rainfall patterns in their backyards, allowing citizens to become agents of change. Seeing as rainfall is becoming more intense and frequent, it is invaluable to capture that from a backyard perspective.
50 rainfall gauges given to folks all over Nova Scotia.
Rainfall is then tracked by local participants through a simple phone app, allowing data to be collected and shared in an easy, transparent way.
Swim Guide App
Humans create a significant quantity of wastewater that travels through pipes to undergo primary treatments. The treated and cleaned water is then directed back into the harbour.
“As citizens, we don’t know how often the sewage and wastewater pipes are overflowing and therefore are not responsible or capable of participating in preventing those overflows ”
Reimagining Atlantic Harbours promotes the right to know this information publicly. Users are advised through a green or red light if beach water is swimmable through real-time temperatures, allowing for strengthened transparency in water quality information for community members.
Didactic Panels
“Reimagining Atlantic Harbours works on bringing scientific voices and welcoming them in an artistic space. The ocean needs a lot of creative solutions and we can see our collective impact happen when we connect the creative artistic and scientific processes together.”
RAH enables the connection of art and science to foster positive solutions that overcome stigma while celebrating interesting parts of the harbour. Through didactic infrastructure panels, RAH connects people to their shorelines so they feel ownership and care about them, encouraging curiosity and understanding their harbour as an ecosystem.
“When it’s everybody’s problem, then it’s nobody’s. When we have a context specific area that we want to focus on an issue, a community, we really need to identify that problem to be a part of it. And if we don’t, there’s no solution. So we are a part of the problem. It’s about accountability. It’s about identification. It’s about awareness. It’s about learning your history so that we don’t make the same mistakes”
Connection to Clean Technology
Reimagining Atlantic Harbours’ (RAH) 2050 mission is to promote community-driven science and pollution reduction across Atlantic Canada. To achieve this, RAH is using a form of clean technology (cleantech) in their Rainfall gauge project, which monitors and tracks precipitation changes in Atlantic Canada over time. Clean technology (cleantech) includes technologies that either reduce environmental impact or generate environmental benefits. The purpose of the Rainfall gauge project is to promote community-level precipitation monitoring (e.g., rainfall, hail, and snow), which is important for educating communities on regional climate change and long-term weather trends. RAH gave 50 rainfall gauges to community members to record precipitation as rainfall, hail, or snow. The precipitation data was then uploaded to another grassroots organization, Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow (CoCoRaHS). CoCoRaHS is a volunteer-led organization focused on collecting and compiling volunteer precipitation data across North America. The Rainfall Gauge Project has helped to increase the presence of Atlantic Canada in CoCoRaHS and provided participants the opportunity to engage as citizen scientists. The program has helped to inform future decisions in Atlantic Canada on water management and climate-related strategies through providing more local data on precipitation trends.
