Making climate change visible: A critical role for landscape professionals

•Climate change can be made visible to the public by building local climate literacy with landscape architectural techniques.•Signs of climate change can be seen in high or low carbon landscapes, and vulnerable or resilient communities.•Landscape messaging through design, labelling, and signage helps people recognize climate change problems and solutions.•Visualizations of future conditions can alter awareness and motivation on local climate change action. The central message of this essay is to make climate change more visible and meaningful to community members through landscape architectural techniques and building literacy. It identifies general principles for opening people's eyes to climate change, demonstrating the potentially powerful role that landscape can play in helping citizens to see and foresee climate change in their own backyards, where they care the most. In this context, the author emphasizes the value of local landscape & place-based experience, as well as the importance of designing visible solutions. The essay describes two linked frameworks that address respectively the possibility of seeing and recognizing climate change, and the need to consider not only climate change impacts but also its causes, mitigation and adaptation solutions. Landscape architects and landscape planners can play an integrative, educational & visionary role in creative design and engagement of communities on climate change. The essay offers four pathways for landscape professionals to integrate & enhance public engagement and literacy on climate change, through: applying landscape messaging to make climate change more visible on the ground; using compelling visual tools that reveal signs of climate change in local landscapes and depict resilient, low-carbon futures; local climate change visioning processes to help communities understand the implications for communities; and helping neighbours to self-educate and mobilize for local climate change action. Better training and a professionally endorsed code of ethics for visual media are needed to support this vital work.