How an app is reimagining climate change in Labrador
The coastal community of Rigolet has teamed up with researchers from the University of Guelph on a ground-breaking project to produce a community-led data logging system. Taking the form of an app called eNuk, community members will be able to map and log environmental changes and mental well-being while out on the land.
Rigolet, Nunatsiavut is an Inuit community of about 300 located on Labrador’s northern coast. It is only accessible by plane, with no connective roads or ice road.
The Ontarion sat down with population medicine professor Dr. Sherilee Harper and computer science professor Dr. Daniel Gillis to talk about the project’s development and potential outcomes.
The two have undertaken the project along with Canada Research Chair and Director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University Ashlee Cunsolo, along with graduate students Oliver Cook and Alexandra Sawatzky and community members from Rigolet.
The eNuk app and web portal are the latest iteration in a series of projects in partnership with the people of Rigolet. Though funding was granted in 2015, talk of the project began two years prior.
“We had done previous research in the community, looking at how climate change was impacting different facets of health,” recalled Harper. “How it was impacting mental health and wellbeing, waterborne disease, food security—a variety of different health outcomes.”
The logical next step, then, was to create a platform where the data collection process was more interactive and directly beneficial to the community.
Preliminary inquiries showed that community members were already collecting and sharing environmental and health information via platforms like Facebook.
“People, when they were out on the land, they would take a photo using their iPad or their camera, or take a short video of trail conditions, or something that’s happening, and then they come home and they post it on Facebook,” said Harper.
The team and community were both interested in creating a platform specific to this kind of information sharing. That’s when Gillis entered the picture.
The idea was to create a user-friendly app to collect relevant data available for the community’s use.
“We wanted it to be simple and convenient, but also when the data are collected, they’re getting something out of it,” said Gillis. “It’s not just going to some nebulous spreadsheet or database that they never see again. We wanted to make sure that the data-sharing was a two-way path.”
In October of 2015, the team made a trip up to Rigolet to engage more directly with community members and get a better sense of what they wanted to monitor. The team returned in February of 2016 to offer some prototypes and to narrow down the app’s structure.
“It’s [about] trying to get a broader sense of health and environment in the community, but through an app that’s got to be somewhat structured,” said Gillis. “The trips up there have been really to figure out what to build and how to build it.”
[media-credit name=”Photo courtesy of Daniel Gillis ” align=”aligncenter” width=”1020″]
For the team, this collaborative style is what drives the project forward, and what sets it apart from similar projects.
“I’ve been calling it ‘participatory app development,’ using participatory principles and approaches to research and applying that to the app development,” said Harper.
The app will also allow community members to log information about how ecosystems are impacted by developments like the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam.
“They could take photos of flooding or fish [species] that are there that weren’t there before—all those things,” said Harper. “But they can also comment on how they’re feeling about it, so you can get this idea of how a dam development is impacting mental health and wellbeing.”
The dam is not yet fully functional, which means any changes can reference back to the current environmental conditions and emotional responses.
The app was conceptualized from a paper-based system currently being used in Alaska. The same documentation takes place, but community members must mail a physical copy of their observations to a central location.
The major turning point in the app’s development was the inclusion of mood markers in the form of emoji, for people to log their mental health and feelings of wellness while in a particular place.
“We had a massive map and [we wanted community members] to identify where in general on the map they would go to do certain things,” said Gillis. “When we were getting it all set up, we were cutting out these icons for fishing, or for hunting, so we could track where this stuff was and get a better sense of [everything.] That was the intent.”
During a town hall-style event, one community member began cutting out emoji and placing them on the map along with the other icons. The emotional connections quickly became integral to the information-logging process.
“It was especially interesting, because Ashlee [Cunsolo] was saying to me after the fact that the men who were coming in who were using the emoji were not typically the ones that would provide that kind of information,” said Gillis. “If we weren’t in the community to see this, this never would have been part of the app.”
For research associate and Rigolet local Charlie Flowers, the project’s I.T. liaison between Rigolet and Guelph, those connections made all the difference.
“It was amazing to see people’s faces light up when they were talking about certain areas that meant a lot to them, and how it sparked conversations with others who were waiting their turn in line at the booth,” Flowers told The Ontarion via email.
The project’s overall flexibility in terms of the community’s interests has proved to be instrumental; strategies of data collection and documentation are constantly being refined to accommodate shifting needs.
“It’s more than community-engaged,” said Gillis. “It’s community-led.”
A big component of the project’s method involves valuing local, especially Inuit, knowledge and interpretations.
“I’m excited about the fact that it will be able to preserve traditional Inuit knowledge so that future generations will be able to access it and learn from their elders,” said Flowers.
“It speaks in some way to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where we want to make sure that stuff that’s being developed is used to empower the community,” added Gillis. “The community knows best what to do—we’re just providing a tool so they can collect and visualize the data that they’re collecting.”
“They can pull in Western knowledge when they want to, but it’s up to them to decide how those two get [integrated],” said Harper.
Community-based research (and research priorities) combined with its Arctic landscape and its focus on climate change and public health give the eNuk project its uniqueness.
Five Rigolet families are currently piloting the eNuk prototype that was developed, which will continue into this spring. The app will then be further refined and piloted by 30 families over the next year.
Photos courtesy of Dr. Daniel Gillis.