THE LONG DASH: PHILADELPHIA

Four players rotate in circles holding Long Dash paddles

The Long Dash is a collaborative climate change resiliency dance challenge. The Long Dash challenges four players to carry linked paddles representing city neighborhoods from now until the year 2100. The game focuses on the impact of sea level rise and the potential of positive cumulative actions of the three generations between now and 2100.

4 players at a generation station taking on sea level rise

The Long Dash was created for the Philadelphia Science Festival to explore the city’s relationship to climate change and sea level rise. The game makes Neighborhood Keepers of four players.

Each player carries a Philadelphia neighborhood with a cup sunk into its surface. This cup represents the Delaware River. The neighborhoods are joined together by short links.

4 very large ping pong like paddles joined by lengths of white and yellow jump rope cut into the shape of Philadelphia neighborhoods with cups of water sunk into the surface of each paddle

the same four paddles as above, 1 getting water added to it with a large dropper

Because our game was about climate change we decided it should travel through 2100, a classic marker in climate change modelling. We split the time between now and 2100 into 3 generations. At the start of each generation players take on sea level rise for that generation.

As they reach each generation they also accept resiliency and mitigation challenges translated into dance moves. These challenges explore different ways cities can help themselves and others in the face of climate change and sea level rise.

a close up of a large playing card with a resiliency challenge and a dance move

four players holding paddles spin in a circle as they approach 2100

As the dance moves pile up players collectively choreograph the moves to avoid flooding their linked neighborhoods. The game ends when players reach 2100 and assess how their collective movements protected or endangered their neighborhoods.

The Long Dash: Philadelphia

The City & The River

A map of the Atlantic Seaboard shows how the Delaware River connects Philadelphia to the Atlantic Ocean — The Delaware River connects Philadelphia and the Atlantic Ocean

As the crow files Philadelphia is about 56 miles from the Atlantic. If you follow the Delaware its more than 90 miles. So it's no surprise you might not realize Philadelphia is directly threatened by sea level rise. But the Delaware is a tidal river, and geographically the river and more broadly the East Coast of the USA are particularly sensitive to sea level rise. As Global Mean Sea Level rises the Delaware River in Philadelphia will rise as well.

The three main impacts of climate change on Philadelphia will be:

More extreme temperatures, especially in summer
More extreme and unpredictable storms
Flooding in low-lying areas: both from storms and sea level rise

These three impacts are interconnected. For example, while most of Philadelphia is high enough to not be directly threatened by the first few feet of sea level rise, the rising river will increase risk of flooding from storms even for higher areas of the city. The Long Dash uses sea level rise to express the urgency of climate change mitigation and resiliency but addresses other climate change impacts through the choreographic challenges.

A street map of Philadelphia shows how Old City, Northern Liberties, Fishtown, and Olde Richmond are situated along the Delaware River and overlays the Long Dash paddles on this map — The paddles edges are cut to match the riverfront edges of the four neighborhoods

Old City, Northern Liberties, Fishtown, and Olde Richmond, four adjacent neighborhoods, were chosen for The Long Dash because they are, excluding their shorelines, high enough to avoid inundation from sea level rise alone until 2100 on a high emissions scenario. This allows The Long Dash to be played without catastrophic flooding across all but the most extreme sea level rise scenarios.

For The Long Dash we used neighborhood boundaries from Google Maps. Google Maps uses a variety of undisclosed sources to determine neighborhood boundaries. Northern Liberties is the oldest, originally founded in the 1680s while Olde Richmond is such a recent invention that it is not found on the city’s neighborhood and places list.

A map of Philadelphia shows the flooding that will occur at 6 feet of sea level rise — Climate Central's Risk Zone tool helps visualize flooding at different amounts of sea level rise

We had originally imagined having three levels of difficulty following 3 different RCPs (Representative Concentration Pathway)*. Because we had limited time to explain RCPs at the Philadelphia Science Festival we sent all teams down RCP 4.5, a scenario in which we drastically curtail carbon emissions by 2040. As we develop future versions of the game we will bring back multiple RCPs.

*RCPs replaced emission scenarios as the primary way to talk about climate futures with the IPCCs 2014 report. Our RCP 4.5 is based on NOAA’s January 2017 Technical Report.

A table of different levels of Global Mean Sea Level Rise based on different greenhouse gas scenarios — NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 083: GLOBAL AND REGIONAL SEA LEVEL RISE SCENARIOS FOR THE UNITED STATES. Silver Spring, Maryland: January 2017. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, National Ocean Service, Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services

The global climate is very difficult to predict. Many factors play into predicting how fast sea levels will rise. For our sea level rise timeline we used data from a 2017 NOAA report*2 that considers projections from multiple sources. These projections are more dire than previous due to recent research around rapid ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica however they do not reflect the most recent findings of the IPCC.

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THE LONG DASH: PHILADELPHIA

The three main impacts of climate change on Philadelphia will be:

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