January 27, 2020 By Cassandra Ceballos

Originally posted on the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative website on January 21, 2020 by Dr. Juliette N. Rooney-Varga, re-posted with permission.

A new study published in Simulation and Gaming describes the Climate Action Simulation: a new game to give people the know-how and a sense of empowerment needed for effective climate action.

Climate change can seem like an overwhelming problem. Its scale is global and its main cause – burning fossil fuels – is intricately woven into our economy. We know that in order to stabilize Earth’s climate and avoid many dangerous impacts, we need a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. According to a recent national poll, nearly 4 in 10 Americans say climate change is a ‘crisis’ and about half believe that action is urgently needed to address it. But while many people want to tackle climate change, they often don’t know how.

A GAME THAT GIVES PLAYERS A TOOLKIT FOR ACTION

The Climate Action Simulation is designed to give participants a better understanding of high-leverage decisions and actions needed to meet climate goals. Developed by the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative, the MIT Sustainability Initiative, and Climate Interactive the game also gives participants a stronger personal connection to climate action. Many describe having an ‘eye-opening’ experience that left them feeling empowered to make change in the real world. As one participant, an MBA student at MIT, said:

“I feel surprisingly excited. All of these problems can be solved so I love to think of the post change world that could be. We have a chance to build a new world.”

Comparison of pre- and post-simulation survey responses showed that participants were more likely to support systemic change and less likely to focus on blaming individual choices for causing climate change. They were also more motivated to take social action, such as discussing climate change with their family, friends, and peers, or taking some form of political action.

HOW IT WORKS

Participants in the Climate Action Simulation take on roles of leaders from key sectors in business, government, and civil society who can effect climate solutions. Examples of roles include leaders of major clean technology companies, fossil fuel companies, government representatives from developed and developing countries, industry and commerce organizations, and climate action think tanks and advocates.

Players get short briefing statements about their sector and a set of decisions and actions to choose from. They can put a price on carbon pollution, subsidize or tax any type of energy, invest R&D for new energy and carbon capture technologies, increase energy efficiency, electrify heat and transport, manage land use, and more. Then, they are challenged to build their own plan to save the climate.

But unlike a typical role-play, their decisions are tested using an interactive computer model, En-ROADS, which runs in less than a second on an ordinary web browser. En-ROADS gives players immediate feedback about how their decisions affect the global energy supply, emissions, and climate change. They learn for themselves about how these complex systems respond to interventions—often in unexpected ways. They learn for themselves about which policies and actions are effective and why.

But they can’t reach the goal without coordinating with other players. Therefore, in order to succeed, they also must learn how to talk about climate action and advocate for it.

JOIN A GROWING COMMUNITY OF CLIMATE CHANGE GAMERS

Students from secondary to graduate school, civic groups, corporate executives, and policymakers have all played the Climate Action Simulation. It can be adapted to groups with as few as six and as many as 120 players. The materials needed to facilitate it are freely available online and so are materials to learn about how the climate and energy systems work using En-ROADS. We learn best by trial and error, but with climate change, we can’t afford to learn by making mistakes in the real world. The simulation gives people a chance to learn by simulated trial and error that is free of costs and risks.

Like a similar game, the World Climate Simulation, the Climate Action Simulation promises to motivate effective science-based action. Giving people a way to build their own simulated strategy may help move us towards real-world success.

Dr. Juliette N. Rooney-Varga is an Associate Professor of environmental science at UMass Lowell and directs the UMass LowellClimate Change Initiative. Recently her work has focused on climate change education, communication, and decision support.

October 15, 2019 By Bindu Bhandari

Blog post by Bindu Bhandari, Climate Interactive, and Viktor Jósa, CliMates

Original post found here

What does it really take to stay well below 2°C global temperature rise as agreed in the Paris Agreement? Could technological innovation help remove historical carbon emissions from the atmosphere? How much will afforestation help? What role could a carbon price play?

These are some of the toughest questions in climate policy. But what if you could test them and see for yourself the impacts of policy and technology on our climate system?

While heads of state and government gathered at the UN Headquarters in New York City, participants in the UN Youth Climate Action Summit took off their activist hats, and role-played 6 sectors that will be key to our climate future: World Governments, Clean Tech, Industry and Commerce, Climate Justice Hawks, Conventional Energy and Land, Agriculture and Forests.

They were convened by a fictitious UN Secretary General, Andrew Jones of Climate Interactive, who (with C2G’s help) was running the new game Climate Vision: a model UN roleplaying game on reducing and removing carbon.

The scenario uses En-ROADS, a global climate simulator which allows players to explore how temperature rise is affected by a range of near future scenarios.

Great drama ensued: it turned out that getting to well below 2°C was tough – not helped by groups sometimes fighting over competing agendas!

Alongside traditional mitigation efforts, large-scale afforestation, agricultural soil carbon sequestration, and direct air capture were all proposed as ways to remove CO₂ from the air.

In each case, one thing became clear: there was no silver bullet. In some cases, major interventions, like large-scale afforestation, moved the dial far less than expected. And yet, every bit mattered in reaching the final goal.

At the end, participants described their feelings: enlightened, threatened, hopeful, frustrated, scared, thrilled.

Mihai Toader-Pasti, Cofounder of EFdeN.org, described En-ROADS as “one of the best tools I have encountered during my nine years as a climate activist. It’s educational not just about CO₂ emissions and temperature rise, but also about the social and economic implications.”

Others welcomed an interactive event where they could clearly visualize the gaps in climate action. Some were intrigued by the potential role – alongside other actions – of carbon dioxide removal.

“The full potential of carbon removal technologies to keep global temperatures below 1.5°C have yet to be realized,” said Anna Johnson, Editor, Business Fights Poverty. “So, where did this leave me following the UN Youth Summit event in NYC? Empowered to recognise that we are not without options to turn things around!”

Radostina Slavkova, Energy and Climate Coordinator with Young Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “it was valuable to experience that even some of the most promising and climate friendly measures combined weren’t bringing enough positive change to reach 1.5°C. It became clear that we need all sectors aboard showing at least middle to high ambition.”

Timothy Damon, founder and President, Global Youth Development Institute, said the game offered hope “by concretely illustrating the choices we could make to protect our future against climate catastrophe, while also revealing the scale and complexity of this challenge.”

Negotiations underway in the end stages of the SimPlanet simulation. Image credit: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

C2G, Climate Interactive and other partners are keen to keep this conversation going, by exploring ways to educate and amplify the voices of young people in the governance of climate-altering technologies. If you would like to learn more, please get in touch http://en-roads.org !

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ClimateVision roleplaying game was hosted by C2G on September 22, 2019, facilitated by Andrew Jones of Climate Interactive with co-facilitators Bindu Bhandari and Viktor Josa.

September 16, 2019 By Bindu Bhandari

On the last day of MIT Orientation Week, I found myself in a room with about 50 other new MIT students participating in an interactive climate policy game called “SimPlanet.” Over the course of four hours and under the guidance of John Sterman, Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, our goal was to work together to implement policies that would hold global warming to 1.5 degrees by 2100.

To help inform that goal, we were given the opportunity to beta-test a new climate model called En-ROADS. The first thing I was struck by when I saw the model was that it was the first time I had seen so many potential climate policies in one place. The model takes 18 different variables into account, allowing users to see how different policy decisions impact warming. Crucially, it also takes into account how each policy decision will impact the decisions that follow.

As I looked at the model, I realized that I didn’t actually know how these different policies compared to one another. I had thought a lot about individual climate solutions as a student and as a journalist, but I had rarely thought about all of them at once. Would a carbon tax impact projected warming more than a renewable energy subsidy? How many trees would we have to plant to lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in a meaningful way? I was eager to find out, but this simulation was meant to model the real world, so there was a catch.

We couldn’t just toggle all those enticing variables at will. As soon as each student entered the room, we were seated at one of eight tables that represented a different interest group. My tablemates and I were standing up for Land, Agriculture, and Forestry. Others spoke for interests like conventional energy and environmental justice. We were given primers that told us which policies were in our individual interests, and which we should object to. This aspect of the SimPlanet simulation served as an important reminder: the policies that got through were as likely to be determined by political interests as the best available science.

Sterman explained to us how the first round would work. Each table would debate internally and choose a few pet policies they might promote or oppose, and then we would go around the room, one by one, and propose a single policy to implement or block. The model would be updated as we went. Since my table represented agriculture, our primer told us we strongly opposed regulation of methane, while afforestation was something we could get behind.

When I read over the primer, it was difficult for me to see how any progress could be made. As a student sitting in a room playing a game, I just wanted to figure out which single decision could make the biggest impact on warming. As a representative for land and agriculture, I was more interested in making sure no one turned their attention to cows.

Predictably, many tables used their turn to block a solution against their own specific interests rather than propose one, and in the end, we had gone from a “do nothing” scenario of 4.1 degrees of warming to a “do barely anything” scenario of 3.1 degrees of warming. Not an inspiring start. To represent the flooding of coastal cities and general peril we had consigned ourselves to, Sterman went to each table one by one, passing a large blue sheet over our heads.

I had never been chastised by a sheet before, but it was surprisingly effective. As he swept the sheet over us, Sterman told my table about all the crops we had just lost to flooding, drought, and heat waves, and the land we had lost to rising sea levels. Then he showed slide after slide of climate change-related disasters and extreme weather events happening right now—not 80 years in the future. The message was clear: If we couldn’t work together to find policies we agreed on, we would all suffer. Point effectively proven, Sterman gave us a second round to fix our mistakes. This time, though, we would have to talk to each other.

Things went differently. Each table sent out ambassadors to persuade other tables to make compromises or form alliances. Some negotiations took longer than others. When time was called, at least half the room had converged at the Conventional Energy table—a physical reminder of the sway of the fossil fuel industry.

The second vote was noticeably more strategic. My own table whispered about proposing a carbon price but decided against offering up a measure with a good chance of getting nullified by someone else. Instead of going after specific industries, many tables decided to propose investing in new technologies or improving energy efficiency. And almost none of us blocked. A coal tax and carbon price both slipped through, and my table allowed some methane regulation. At the end of the second round we had gotten down to 1.9 degrees of warming—not quite our goal, but much better than we had done before we had reached out beyond our respective silos.

This process was fascinating to me. I was struck by how different the two rounds had felt psychologically. In the first round, we were all playing a game, and everything felt very abstract. I was supposed to stand up for land and agriculture, and that’s what I did. In the second round, after a fresh reminder of the consequences of climate change and an urge to find common ground with other groups, the goal felt different. There would be negative consequences for all of us if the climate warmed to 3.3 degrees. We had to band together and find a solution while we still could.

The event ended on a hopeful note, with Sterman highlighting environmental movements and MIT alumni who were making a difference. I left frustrated that we haven’t already implemented some of these policies that have such a clear effect, and nervous about the monumental effort required to mitigate climate change.

But I also felt strangely empowered by the knowledge provided by the model. Because it put so many potential solutions in one place and took their interactions into account, there was a degree of clarity I had never felt when thinking about climate change, which can feel at times like a distressingly nebulous problem. The model also made one thing very apparent—no single solution can come close to solving the problem. It has to be a team effort on a global scale.

Rachel Fritts is a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and the resident science writer at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. SimPlanet was hosted by ESI on September 3, 2019, with the support of Professor John Sterman and Climate Interactive.