Putting All Our Begs in One Askit

November 21, 2008 by Andrew P. Jones

2966589085_a98eb0ae31A couple of months back, we had been reaching out to leaders of serious games to see if others could lead the Copenhagen Climate Exercise (now World Climate) while the rest of our team is using C-ROADS (formerly called Pangaea) to affect international climate strategy in Copenhagen, Denmark and Poznan, Poland. (We’re flying over there tomorrow…)

Our colleague Winston Ledet, who has created the world’s most results-producing system dynamics policy exercise, The Manufacturing Game, (see chapter 2.4 in Business Dynamics) replied yesterday:

We will not be available but I would be happy to contribute to financing the [work] in honor of [MIT’s] John Sterman. Let me know where to send the contribution.

As a 501c3 not-for-profit, we at Sustainability Institute were understandably thrilled with this offer and thought we’d reach out for contributors to the results that we are producing via accessible, decision-maker-oriented, vigorously-shared climate simulations.

We’ve experienced such an abundance of resources in this work — we have supporters in improving the C-ROADS model, beginning an “emissions reduction model”, creating a scientific review committee (and learning from it), creating an open-source-like sharing infrastructure for the sims, and supporting the UN climate negotiations.  And yet much is not happening due to a lack of Winston Ledets and other donors in the world.

Would you contribute to this effort?

So, Winston and other individuals, send a check with a tax-deductible contribution to Sustainability Institute, 3 Linden Rd. Hartland VT 05048. And note “for climate simulations.” Institutional, foundation, and corporate partners, please contact me at apjones [at] sustainer.org.

(Kudos to the late Farley Sheldon, mother of Hunter Lovins and development director at Rocky Mountain Institute in the early 90s, from whom I borrowed the blog title…)