Game Thinking for Landscape Restoration

Nils Bunnefeld (University of Stirling) reports on a new game, presented at the Landscape Ecology UK conference in July, designed to engage the public in landscape restoration scenarios.

Landscape restoration is essential to stop biodiversity loss and plays an important role in climate change mitigation. Public engagement in restoration is often limited by lack of accessible tools or incentives. Thus, we need creative ways to engage people and gather insights at scale.

We have developed a new online tool, called “Restore”, which is a free, interactive game developed as part of the RESTOREID project Healthier landscapes for a stronger future | RESTOREID, in collaboration with the Edinburgh based game company Glitchers GLITCHERS - Reshaping Global Health with Games. Restore explores the link between ecosystem degradation, restoration strategies, and zoonotic disease prevention. Players engage in 11 real-world-inspired scenarios, making decisions about tree planting, food production, and disease risk. Restore lets players experiment with how to rebuild landscapes while managing budget and ecological constraints.

The Restore game can help to raise awareness of restoration challenges, engage policymakers and local communities, support SDG-aligned sustainability and monitoring goals and transforms engagement into action, making restoration efforts visible, accessible, and participatory.

Play Restore here Restore by GLITCHERS, Nils Bunnefeld, Brad Duthie

A screenshot from ‘Restore’: a free, interactive game designed to engage the public in landscape restoration scenarios