Can virtual reality offer a glimpse into a climate-changed future?

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Future vision

It's 2040 in Miami, and a powerful hurricane has swamped the low-lying city. You stand alone under a dark, foreboding sky, chest-high waves sloshing around you, an abandoned car one of the few objects visible in the expanse of water.

The harrowing scene is from an immersive virtual reality game developed by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center to give policymakers a visceral sense of what their decisions on climate change today could mean in the future, for better or worse.

Climate experts have long struggled to help people see and genuinely grasp likely scenarios as the planet changes, both the dystopian and positive. But virtual reality - particularly games that put controllers in users' hands, letting them make decisions and see the consequences - are changing that.

DNA tracking

A smart bit of technology is also helping researchers better protect nature.

By filtering river water in Peru, for instance, and pulling out DNA samples, scientists have discovered where elusive manatees are living - giving new incentives for conservation of the river.

As countries at the COP15 U.N. biodiversity talks in Montreal negotiate a global pact to stem nature losses, such technology could help pinpoint where protections are needed, and track if they are being achieved.

Carbon underground

A growing ability to estimate the amount of carbon stored in soils is also giving farmers a new financial incentive to adopt climate-smart, environmentally friendly agricultural practices, like tilling the soil less, planting cover crops and rotating pastures more frequently.

So far, payments for changing farm procedures to boost the amount of carbon absorbed into the soil are fairly small - just a fraction of the earnings from growing crops like soy and maize - and big questions remain about how effective soils can be in storing carbon for the long run.

But changing farm practices could potentially capture and store up to 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the United States - or 4% of the nation's emissions - the National Academy of Sciences found in 2019.

For now, "it's like a gold rush. People are trying to figure it out, but there's not a lot of clear structure and knowledge," said Matthew Houser of the University of Maryland.

Children dreaming of a coal-free future

Efforts to find new jobs for young people in India's oldest coalfield are also struggling, with many youth still hoping for unlikely miracles, such as their online videos going viral.

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