Role-Playing a Path to Climate Stabilization

February 9, 2009 by Andrew P. Jones

something-bigger-than-ourselves001It was a big week for the Copenhagen Climate Exercise (now World Climate), the role-playing mock-UN policy exercise created here at Sustainability Institute and by John Sterman at MIT where people play the parts of UN diplomats from regions of the world and negotiate a global agreement to address climate change, testing their results in our C-ROADS simulator.

Peter Senge of MIT and the Society for Organizational Learning led one event in Boston for corporate sustainability leaders. An SI team led one with partners in Atlanta (see the poem and pictures above by Doc Klein of Uncharted Territories). And I ran three events for business school students at Duke University.

Time and time again, no matter who is playing, we see similar dynamics: