From popular game to sustainability

Our planet can no longer meet the demand for raw materials. That is why the United Nations (UN) has drawn up sustainable development goals, which have been signed by 192 countries, including the Netherlands. But how do you put them into practice? Behavioral change begins with awareness and gamification is a fun and effective way to achieve this goal. Moreover, a game perfectly matches the way young people experience the world. However, because it works very intuitively, it can also be used as a civic participation tool for other target groups.

Ecocraft is based on the popular game Minecraft. This game lets you use all kinds of building blocks to make your own world. Minecraft is often described as the virtual version of Lego and has often been used successfully in education. The game increases spatial insight, but can also support history lessons, for example, because historical cities and buildings can be reconstructed in their entirety. Ecocraft adds sustainable elements to what Minecraft can do, such as solar panels and wind turbines. The game has been successfully tested several times in the Netherlands. Geodan is joining forces with the UN to use Ecocraft on a global scale.

Ecocraft was officially launched during the Livable Smart Cities by Design event in June 2018, where it was seen by Jan Dusik, European director of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). EduGIS Foundation and UNEP also signed a Memorandum of Understanding. The common goal is to make the data that’s necessary to make the world more sustainable publicly available, and linkable to Ecocraft. We’ll start close to home in Amsterdam Zuidoost, but Warsaw will likely be the first major city in Europe to join in.

Within Ecocraft, you can design and test solutions to make the world more sustainable. Ecocraft is now focused on the energy transition: the transition to sustainable energy. In the future, we will expand Ecocraft to focus on other sustainable challenges using gamification. For example, to investigate how we can cleverly deal with food production and transport, or how we can reuse more and more raw materials