Climate Interactive

Eric Roston of Bloomberg Green Explores En-ROADS Scenarios – How to Recreate His Experiments & More

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On March 23, 2021, Eric Roston of Bloomberg Green published a newsletter piece exploring the impact of different climate solutions using the En-ROADS simulator from Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative – “What if the Perfect Climate Fix Can’t Arrive in Time?” For those with a Bloomberg subscription, the full article is here. Below you will find a video with detailed explanations of the settings used in the article and the model dynamics at play. 

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The meaning and math behind the “7.5%” number quoted in the newsletter is here: our modeling suggests that immediate discovery and commercialization of a new, zero-carbon electricity source could avoid the emission of 68 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 (notice the gap in Net Cumulative CO2 Emissions in 2050). A scenario that achieves net-zero emissions by 2050 such as this will avoid 908 gigatons of CO2 by 2050 (the best graph to view the value is here – observe the gap in 2050, when 3617 – 2709 = 908). And then 68/908 = 7.5%.

For additional information, please explore these resources: 

The Earth has humans, so why don’t our climate models?

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Over the past few decades, climate researchers have improved our understanding of global warming scenarios by increasing the complexity and precision of climate. These large models, using lots of physics and chemistry, inform projections on related to anthropogenic emissions and the carbon cycle. Often these models also have some integration with economic models that help researchers understand how policy solutions might change rational investment decisions.

However, many of the most referenced “integrated assessment models” have failed to look at a key driver: human behavior.

In a recent paper from the journal Climatic Change, Climate Interactive’s Dr. Travis Franck and co-authors unpack this omission, and how necessary it is for us to include human behavior in climate models going forward. This paper, ‘The Earth has humans, so why don’t our climate models?’ contends that both social and behavioral models should be coupled in parallel with our physical climate models. Franck et al argue that this component is absolutely necessary for us reduce uncertainty and improve our understanding of our future climate system. 

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With current models, we are able to see only half of the picture – analyzing how we emit GHG’s, alter our environment and carbon cycle, and the effect of other interventions which potentially mitigate and/or exacerbate the current climate crisis. While many models stop there, this paper illustrates how many of these actions have significant feedbacks which affect our climate system and ultimately result in regional climate impacts. These climate impacts – such as agricultural yield, weather patterns, and climate-borne disease – can have robust implications for the future decisions people make relevant to emissions behavior and mitigation techniques, at both the societal and individual scale. When climate models omit such feedbacks, it obscures half of the picture. The uncertainty of human behavior and societal decisions can be the same order of magnitude as science-based uncertainty, when considering future climate projections.

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Beyond this, Franck et al emphasize that when developing social-climate models, we need to consider a wide variety of social/behavioral models and underlying anomalies. Human behavior, unlike some geochemical processes, is extremely unpredictable in nature. Due to this, it’s important to also consider the diversity of social systems across the world – and how things like government, culture, wealth distribution, and other elements can play into decisions to mitigate global warming. Similarly, it’s important to look at how regional differences in climate vulnerability may influence how certain societal groups might choose to act on climate change. 

Click here to read the full paper

Big Updates Coming for En-ROADS, Our Climate Solution Simulator

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For the last six months we have been hard at work on a newly updated version of our climate solution simulator En-ROADS that we will release later this year. This new tool will put the best available science on climate change solutions at your fingertips, so you can show others what is needed to address this global challenge.

In the meantime, the time has come to say good-bye to the current version of En-ROADS that is available. On March 25, 2019 the old online En-ROADS will become unavailable. We know some of you have come to rely on En-ROADS for your presentations, classes, and analysis; so if you need access in the interim please email Yasmeen Zahar at yzahar@climateinteractive.org and we will assist you.

To stay informed about the new release of En-ROADS later this year be sure to sign up here.

The new release of En-ROADS will mean:

  • Greater Speed – The next version will be much faster so that you can have seamless conversations using the tool about what works (and doesn’t) to address climate change.
  • More Features – The dialogue about climate action has shifted over the years, and the new En-ROADS will offer expanded options for exploring interventions around energy, methane and agricultural emissions, carbon dioxide removal, electrification, and the equity considerations behind them.
  • Better Accessibility – We’ve been working hard to make the new En-ROADS accessible to many people. This means a modern user-friendly interface and a more intuitive design to help you understand all of the possible solutions that can be explored.
  • Support Across Platforms – Whether you want to run En-ROADS online or download it, we will support a wide array of browsers and operating systems. This will be a big breakthrough for those who have become familiar with the frustrations of using the old En-ROADS, which required Flash.





If you’ve been using our tools for a long time, you may have noticed the significant improvements that we made to C-ROADS. Now we’re bringing those kinds of improvements to En-ROADS as well.

Sign up to be notified about the new release later this year.

Building Systems Thinking Capacity in Africa

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Climate Interactive’s Agriculture team recently held a successful workshop on systems thinking and system dynamics at the campus of our partner Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P). Over 30 participants – representing the University of Ghana and the private sector as well as students and faculty from UM6P – spent five days building models and participating in learning exercises.

Led by consultant Rebecca Niles, Skuk Jones and Travis Franck of Climate Interactive, and Professor Saad Benjaloun of UM6P, participants progressed from system thinking basics to building their own models. Each day included an immersive exercise or game that provide a novel insight into complex system behavior. The insight was then the basis of model building that day. Participants analyzed the dynamics uncovered by each exercise, explored the general lessons of similar systems, then constructed formal models in Vensim software. Exercises included Climate Interactive’s flagship World Climate negotiation exercise and a beta-test of our new agriculture-focused exercise based on our Agriculture and Land Policy Simulator.

By the end, participants were constructing models based on their own experience and discovering new insights. The response was enthusiastic. Participants cheered each other as they accepted their certificates. Over half of them expressed interest in a follow-on workshop. We expect that this will only be the start of our capacity building at UM6P.

To learn more about Climate Interactive’s Agriculture Program, or to help us envision the future of food security in Africa, contact Travis Franck.

Tips on how to Customize World Climate for Different Audiences

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Laura Tucker, from Jefferson County, Washington, shares her tips of facilitating World Climate with middle schoolers and adults in 2017. 

Participants at a past World Climate event.  © Bindu Bhandari

I was asked by the local Unitarian Church to offer a climate change class for their adult learning program.  After watching an introductory video about C-ROADS, I thought World Climate would be the ideal way to start the class.  I agreed with Climate Interactive’s assertion that you can run the simulation without having all the science behind climate change.

1st Tip: Test

I decided to try out the simulation with high school students first before using it in an adult class since the students would give me honest feedback about how it went.  It would also allow me to adapt the simulation to my adult audience as well as get some good practice before teaching it to a group with high expectations.

I ‘borrowed’ three 10th-grade classes who would study climate change later in the year.  I was amazed at how well it went with no prior instruction.  It took a little while for them to figure out how to negotiate, but once they got the hang of it, and had the right students in charge, they did exceptionally well.  There wasn’t enough time in the class to allow for a second round of negotiations, so the pressure was ‘on’ to get it right the first time.  The students all rose to the challenge. I was fascinated at some of their ideas.

One group representing the European Union decided that deforestation was a huge issue and offered the Developing Nations $1 per tree not to cut them down.  I suggested they get some data about the number of trees that would be cut to get a dollar figure.  They hit the internet.  It was billions.  The next thing I heard was that they were offering $33 billion to The Green Climate Fund.  I asked where they were getting that figure and they responded it was what the EU spends on defence.  They felt the Green Climate Fund was a much better ‘buy’. That took my breath away.

Of the three classes, two got their emissions down to just over 2°C of warming.  One group actually got their emissions low enough to ‘save the world’ with only 1.75°C of warming!  In soliciting their feedback during the debrief session, I asked the students what they thought the adults would do when they played the simulation the following week.  The students were worried that the adult group wouldn’t get serious about negotiating and would let the world ‘cook’.  I reminded them that the adult group was a bunch of Unitarians, and I would let them know if their prediction was accurate.

2nd Tip: Animate the roles

The next week, I started the adult climate change class with the C-ROADS simulator.  As a way to get to know one another, I made name tags for the participants with the name of their country or countries and the relative CO2 footprint per capita of that group in a coloured bubble with relative size to the others. For example: –

  • United States – 17 tons
  • Other Developed Countries – 10.5 tons
  • China – 7.7 tons
  • European Union- 6.9 tons
  • Other Developing Countries – 2.5 tons
  • India – 1.9 tons

It was a great way to identify what country each person represented and also see the relative carbon footprint per person in that country or group of countries.  Great visual!

3rd Tip: Customize the slides 

I also edited the slide show and used some of my own slides to augment points I felt were important to this audience.  I always include a visual of the Greenhouse Effect to make sure all participants understand that fundamental part of climate change.  One the negotiations started, the group jumped right in to the negotiations and the room was very animated from the start.  I found the adults were taking their roles quite seriously.  Some were unwilling to budge on what they perceived to be the country or countries’ perspective.  The confidential briefings provided by World Climate were extremely helpful.

4th Tip: Allocate time for deep dive

One addition I found necessary was to have some networked computers available for fact-checking and information gathering.  They were used extensively during the simulation.

After two rounds of negotiations, it turned out that the students were right.  The adults held on to their country’s (countries’) needs and wouldn’t back down, keeping warming at 4+°C.  In our debrief, it took the whole group to come out of their roles and reach some conclusions about emissions in order to keep warming under 2°C.  Mostly, that involved the U.S. capping their emissions quickly and drawing down even faster.  They were amazed at how much that made a difference, and how little a difference the European Union made.  The idea of relative CO2 output was made real!

I will use this simulation again!  It seems to work beautifully as a stand-alone activity, or as the kick-off to a course on climate change.  I deeply appreciate all the hard work Climate Interactive has done  in order to make this so successful!

New study released: Creating electricity with wood instead of coal worsens climate change

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Displacing coal with wood for power generation will worsen climate change say MIT, UMass Lowell and Climate Interactive researchers

New research challenges European Union policy that wood bioenergy is carbon neutral

Cambridge, Mass., January 16, 2018 – Wood is increasingly being used to replace coal as a source of electricity generation in many regions such as the European Union, where policymakers have declared it “carbon neutral.” However, new research from researchers at MIT, Climate Interactive, and UMass Lowell reveals that displacing coal with wood for power generation can make climate change worse for many decades or more.

In the new study, Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions? Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy, the researchers—John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management; Juliette Rooney-Varga, Director of the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative and Associate Professor of Environmental Biology; and Lori Siegel, PhD, Senior Modeler for Climate Interactive—examine the climate impact of replacing coal power generation in the EU and UK with wood pellets sourced from forests in the Southern United States. The paper is published in the academic journal, Environmental Research Letters and can be accessed online at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/pdf

The researchers found that wood pellets burned in European and UK power plants, such as the Drax facility in North Yorkshire—which has transitioned some of its coal power generation capacity to wood pellets with the support of UK government subsidies—actually emit more CO2 per kilowatt hour than that generated by coal. This is because wood is both less efficient at the point of combustion and has larger processing and supply chain emissions than coal. Their research shows that using wood instead of coal in power generation increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, worsening climate change until—and only if—the harvested forests regrow.

US forests are a main source for EU wood pellet imports, which have been rising as demand has grown. These forests grow back slowly, so it takes a long time to repay the initial “carbon debt” incurred by burning wood instead of coal. For forests in the central and eastern US, which supply much of the wood used in UK power plants, the payback time for this carbon debt ranges from 44 to 104 years, depending on forest type—and assuming the land remains forest. If the land is developed, or converted to agricultural use, then the carbon debt is never repaid and grows over time as the harvested land emits additional carbon from soils.

The research was conducted with the use of a system dynamics model, based on the award-winning Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support (C-ROADS) simulator. Launched in 2008, the model was reviewed by an external scientific review committee, chaired by Sir Robert Watson, former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A summary of their review can be accessed here.

Prof. Sterman sums up the findings this way: “It’s like an investment in which you give your bank $1,000 today. They promise to pay you back, but only over 80 years, and only if they don’t go out of business first or decide there’s something else they’d rather spend your money on. You’re better off if you keep your money. In the same way, it’s better to keep the trees on the land and keep all that carbon out of the atmosphere.”

The researchers also explored an increasingly common scenario in which hardwood forests harvested for bioenergy are replaced with faster-growing loblolly pine plantations. Surprisingly, replanting with fast-growing pine plantations worsens the CO2 impact of wood because managed plantations do not sequester as much carbon as natural forests.

They also found that continued growth in wood use, as many predict, will worsen climate change throughout the rest of this century, or longer.  This is because the first impact of substituting wood for coal in power generation is an increase in CO2 emissions.  Even if the forests eventually regrow, notes Prof. Sterman, each year the new carbon debt from increased harvest and combustion outweighs the regrowth, just as borrowing more on a credit card each month than one is able to pay back will steadily increase what he or she owes. For countries using wood bioenergy as a component of their climate policies this could take them backwards. Indeed, bioenergy from wood made up 44% of the EU’s renewable energy production in 2015.

“We’re seeing many of the countries, states, and even institutions leading on climate embracing bioenergy from wood because they think it is ‘carbon neutral.’ Our analysis shows that these good intentions may be leading to outcomes that are bad for the climate: net carbon emissions that are worse than coal for many decades and, potentially, for the rest of this century or more,” says Prof. Rooney-Varga.

Porf. Sterman says, “A molecule of CO2 emitted today has the same impact on the climate whether it comes from coal or biomass. Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral, as the EU, UK and others have done, erroneously assumes forest regrowth happens quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and combustion. One way to address the challenges raised in this study would be to count emissions where they occur, for example, at a power plant, and monitor and count carbon removed from the atmosphere by regrowth on the harvested land.”

Critically, the analysis does not support continued coal use as it is the most carbon intensive fuel and a major contributor to climate change. The researchers stress energy efficiency, solar, wind and storage as the cheapest, safest, and quickest ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions while providing the goods and services people need.

The model behind the research is available for scientists and policymakers to design their own scenarios for bioenergy, conduct sensitivity analysis, and get immediate feedback showing the full dynamics, including both short and long run impacts.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu

The UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative brings faculty, students, and communities together to address climate change through research, education, and developing solutions to transition to a more sustainable and resilient society. Learn more at www.uml.edu/Research/Climate-Change/.

Climate Interactive is a US-based not-for-profit think tank that helps people see what works to address the biggest challenges facing our lives on Earth. Learn more at climateinteractive.org.

Press Contacts:

Patricia Favreau, MIT Sloan School of Management, pfavreau@mit.edu

Juliette Rooney-Varga, UMass Lowell: Juliette_rooneyvarga@uml.edu

Ellie Johnston, Climate Interactive: ejohnston@climateinteractive.org