Poster Presentation for ACSF

10.29.10

Because our research project in Crete was funded in part by Cornell's Atkins Center for Sustainable Futures (ACSF), my group was asked to design a poster highlighting our findings thus far. We knew most of the audience would be administrative staff and alumni so in addition to our poster, we created a game to teach people them about water use in Crete, Greece. Basically, they would roll a die and the number they rolled would determine how much rain fell in a given year. Rain/water was symbolized by little silver buckets. For example, if they rolled a 1, they would get 16 buckets (400 mm of cumulative rainfall in a year), versus if they rolled a 6, they would get 36 buckets (900 mm of cumulative rainfall in a year). They would then allocate these water resources to different uses. Some were mandatory (e.g. domestic use) but most were optional and had a monetary value associated with them. For example, if you decided to plant one hectare of rain-fed olive trees then you would use 4 buckets of water and make $3 million dollars that year. Once they allocated their buckets they would have to roll a pair of dice and rearrange their water resources.

In the end we wanted to show that the crop that was least taxing on water resources was the rain-fed olives. The citrus on the other hand might give more money but they take a considerable amount of water to grow successfully; nearly twice as much was as is required by the rain-fed olive trees. If leaders in the municipality can promote the maintenance of rain-fed olives this would be best for conserving water supply for future generations.

This is the poster I made with the help of Margaret (a student in Natural Resources), Michael (a student in the law school), Gail (the director of the Mediterranean Studies program), and Tammo (my advisor).

This is the poster for our game. The finished product had bright green foam letters spelling out the title: 'Tipping Points: A Race to Sustainable Water Resources'.

All my heard work on the game paid off when we were awarded 3rd place (and an $1000 prize to go towards our research) in the poster competition.