Durham Climate Remembrance

This project, funded through SPRC’s Coastal Technical Assistance Grant, was a collaboration between planning commission staff, Durham’s Leadership Team, UNH Cooperative Extension, and NH Sea Grant. Durham’s installation titled, “The Seacoast Remembrance Project,” was one of the first in a larger, national initiative called “Remembrance of Climate Futures” spearheaded by Thomas Starr, professor of Design at Northeastern University.  The installation was intended to strengthen the public awareness of climate change by using site-specific markers of projected climate impacts to induce a personal and thought-provoking response. Each marker is inscribed with a message that places the reader in the future by using the language of historical markers, e.g., “Wagon Hill closed for summer due to health concerns related to outbreak of ticks – June 8, 2044.” By framing these future events in the past tense, the viewer is presented with the long-term impacts of climate change in a more immediate, local, and impactful way. At times, practitioners and researchers are faced with the challenge of downscaling a global problem to the local level. This initiative helps to counteract this issue by making the immediacy and scale of climate impacts more apparent to community members who resonate with impacts they can visualize in their own hometowns.

Read the project featured in the National League of Cities “Leveraging the Arts” fact sheet, available below under documents.