Welcome to the “Clout and Climate Change” War Game led by the Center for New American Security.
It is 2015. A category 5 hurricane ravaged Miami in 2012 and millions of Bangladeshi environmental refugees poured into India after a cyclone, so UN Secretary General John Podesta (that’s him and Drew Jones to the left) convened the top two developed country emitters (US and EU) and developing country emitters (India and China) for 2.5 days to achieve progress on “managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.”
Each delegation of 10 was played by about half Chinese, Indian, US, EU nationals and half US colleagues.
The director of the event, Sharon Burke of CNAS, wrote to me this afternoon to articulate the event’s purpose. She wrote, “To us, there were layers of purpose: the most general was that we wanted to define climate change as a national security challenge; second, to give all the diverse, assembled players a common frame of reference (i.e., to educate them about climate change & national security). Those are low bar goals, easy to jump over. But the game was not really about achieving an agreement — that was a goal within the context of the game, and while the results are relevant, this is one of those exercises where process is everything. The goal is really to see how people behave and whether you can make real world, useful observations about today from that.”
Our team of SI contractor Lori Siegel, Ventana Systems’ Tom Fiddaman and I used C-ROADS (formerly called Pangaea) to help delegates understand what climate results their commitments would create.
As we had hoped, C-ROADS worked well, helping the parties understand and commit to (as much as possible) mitigation targets. [Read more…] about Supporting the “Clout and Climate Change” War Game