James Hutton engaged us to develop a powerful way to communicate the devastating effects of deforestation on soil fertility and landscape water retention in the Bale region of Ethiopia. The Bale region is in the Ethiopian highlands, an area rich in biodiversity with a unique range of flora and fauna. Deforestation for animal grazing has been occurring over the course of decades, causing vast soil erosion and loss of fertility in the soil, negatively impacting communities' long term sustainability and food security.

The key goal was to illustrate in a visual and tactile way the trend in erosion, and what the region would look like if the trend continued. Based on relatively limited land use and satellite data, we developed a digital twin of a large area centred on the village of Rira. We were able to create a detailed 3D model of the region showing the changes in the land use, localised reduction of tree cover and resultant topographical erosion and enlargement of water courses. 

There were two key engagement mechanisms. Firstly, the ability to fly around the landscape to any place or viewpoint and zoom in to see individual buildings and trees or zoom out to get a birdseye view. Secondly, a controllable time slider which allowed any user to drag back and forth to view the changes over time in an interactive way. Being able to manually control the timeline and choose any period to timescrub back and forth gave users a deeper connection with the data, and hence the past, present and possible future state of Bale. 

JHI were able to take the digital twin into the field and engage with stakeholder communities to communicate how the complex multi-factorial prognosis for the area was dependent on their actions.