High School Students in Vermont Experience World Climate

Climate Interactive’s Phil Rice recently ran our World Climate exercise for science and social studies students at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. Some of his reflections are below:

Students were eager to engage and asked good questions.

The students wouldn’t get aggressive about % reduction- best they’d offer was 2%. The Developed world was resistant to working with the other groups.

During the exercise and in the debrief, they did ask a lot of good questions and stayed engaged in the role play pretty well. An interesting question in the debrief was basically in the form of, “OK, but do you have a way we could simulate the effects of the changes we could make? Because that is what we need to know now.”

I got a lot out of working with these engaged young adults. They have a lot of energy and they are into learning.

Videos of the exercise at Dartmouth and elsewhere may be found on the Climate Interactive website.

Texas MBA students participate in World Climate

On November of 2010, Professors David Ford and Rogelio Oliva of Texas A&M University facilitated the World Climate UN negotiations exercise for the 2012 MBA Class of the Mays Business School. The exercise, supported by the C-ROADS simulation, was part of the “Enrichment Week” that the MBA program offers to allow students to explore areas not traditionally covered in the MBA curriculum.

The C-ROADS simulation proved to be an effective primer to open up the conversations on the role of policy makes and business leaders in addressing he carbon emissions challenge.

These are some testimonials form the participants:

Serious Climate Games Launched in Asheville — With Drew Jones and C-ROADS

On February 24, several innovative climate simulation and gaming tools will be presented in Asheville, NC (most notably the new and cool “Fate of the World.”) Climate Interactive’s Drew Jones will be one of the presenters, showing C-ROADS.  For more information, download the event description and agenda here.

Leaders for a New Climate Workshop Engages and Empowers

Last week, Climate Interactive and Seed Systems held the first Leaders for a New Climate workshop at the MIT Sloan School School of Management in Cambridge, MA. This three-day workshop combined lessons in system dynamics and organizational learning, to empower diverse leaders to act effectively in these challenging and exciting times.

The workshop opened with a session of our World Climate exercise and featured a guest lecture by the director of the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Dr. John Sterman. We also held an “Under the Hood” session with our C-ROADS model.

Participants included students, advisors, and citizen activists from as far away as Nigeria.

Some of the quotes from attendees are below:

C-ROADS and Climate/Energy Leadership Workshop to be Held at MIT

Leaders for a New Climate:
Systems Thinking and the C-ROADS Simulation

Held at MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Mass USA
Oct 19-21, 2010

Climate Interactive and SEED Systems are offering a powerful three-day workshop for innovative climate, energy, and sustainability leaders from business, non-profit, government, and university sectors, led by Drew Jones and Sara Schley, with a guest lecture by Dr. John Sterman at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Information and Registration at: http://climateinteractive.org/events

Attend to develop your capacities in:

• Systems thinking: Causal loop, stock-flow and computer simulation tools for seeing the climate change system as a whole. Participants will receive a copy of C-ROADS.
• Working across boundaries: Tools for surfacing, testing and revising mental models to build effective multi-stakeholder networks for climate progress.
• Creating climate, energy, and sustainability strategies: Reflections with insights from international experts and a diverse community of leaders.
• Learning from success stories: What’s helping create a new low carbon economy.

View the video below for John Sterman’s lecture at IBM’s Almaden Institute

The Power of C-ROADS and World Climate

Today we have a thoughtful guest post by Ian Lamont, who recently played our interactive simulation-based role-playing exercise, World Climate. Ian is an MIT Sloan Fellow and technology blogger. His full bio can be found twitter.com/ilamont. The original article is here.

The missing constituency in climate change negotiations

Friday, June 18, 2010

On Tuesday, about 50 of us from the Sloan Fellows “A” section participated in a fascinating — and depressing — climate change simulation. The exercise was based on international negotiations to reverse several global warming trends, as well as a tool called C-ROADS (“Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator”). After arriving in a large conference room, we split into groups representing various nations (I was in the India group) and attempted to negotiate a climate treaty that balanced our national interests with the global imperative to reverse the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere. The C-ROADS tool, which was developed by MIT and several partner organizations, has actually been used by governments and NGOs to model policy actions and their impact on long-term greenhouse gas emissions and sea level changes (I’ve embedded a video below that explains how it works.)

“World Climate” — Our Role-Playing Simulation-Based Policy Exercise is Spreading

More people around the world are getting to experience World Climate: A Computer-Simulation-Based Role-Playing Exercise! Here are a couple of recent examples.

Mike Goodman ran World Climate as part of a week long systems thinking workshop. There were about 25 participants who were part of Systems Approach for Natural Resource Problem Solving sponsored by the King Ranch Institute for Ranch Management in Texas. Attendees included wildlife managers, ranch managers, professors, & graduate students (masters & PhDs).

South and Latin American Leaders Engage in Climate Policy Exercise

Today’s guest blogger is our longtime friend and colleague, the system dynamics modeler and facilitator Chris Soderquist of Pontifex Consulting.

On July 30, I delivered a systems thinking session at George Washington University’s Workshop of Political Management of Change (V Taller de Gerencia Poliítica de Proyectos de Cambio). The attendees (over 100) were from South and Latin America and were all either politicians or representatives of political parties. During the session, when asked what important stock they were concerned about, one participant volunteered CO2 in the atmosphere. After simulating a simple “bathtub” model, I presented C-Learn as a proxy for C-ROADS. There was interest in getting access to C-ROADS for the upcoming Copenhagen summit; in particular, the Brazilian representatives were quite enthusiastic. One area of particular interest that generated discussion…not surprisingly…was the concept of economic and social equity between the developed world and developing worlds. Participants got the message about early and substantial interventions being necessary to achieve suggested targets.

Carrying Our Trash and Simulating Our Climate

Why does our team focus on using simulations to spark action on climate change?

We are struck by the power of interactive simulations to help us see the long term, system-wide implications of our actions in ways that create new possibilities.

And I first experienced that power as a student at Dartmouth College in the 1980s, in an experiment where 120 of us carried our trash for a week. (Hear the story in the video pasted above). The video was shot at the “Systems Thinking in Action” conference hosted by Pegasus Communications (note — the next conference will be in November in Seattle — check it out).

Sustainability Institute’s founder and my mentor Dana Meadows wrote about her experience carrying her trash as part of the same experiment (she was a professor then at Dartmouth) — read her article here. And through the years, we’ve heard of many other schools, summer camps, conferences, garden clubs (!), and others trying the “Carry Your Trash” experiment. My favorite emerged from some consulting we did for American Public Media and the “Marketplace” radio show — they heard this story and chronicled “Tess’ Trash Challenge.”

What if we all had to carry our carbon dioxide?  The best graphic representation I’ve seen is the Carbon Quilt, at www.carbonquilt.org.

Talking Climate at Tällberg Forum

As our Climate Policy Exercise makes its way around the world, we have another guest blogger, long time colleague and partner Alan AtKisson, who details the latest event at the Tällberg Forum on his excellent blog here. We condensed the 2-hour exercise into a 25 minute “interactive presentation” led by members of the Climate Action Initiative team — Jacqueline McGlade, Felicitas von Peter, Drew Jones, and Christine Loh (from left to right in the photo), along with an unscripted visit from Forum founder and host Bo Ekman.

Click here to view a video of the exercise created by the Tällberg Forum team.  Or here to use the simulation tools shown in the session on Climate Interactive.

by Alan AtKisson

Morning again. Somehow folks crawled out of bed after dancing and drinking past midnight, and made their way to the big tent by 8:30 (it is full when I get there) to experience the climate change negotiations game run by Drew Jones and other colleagues.

First, Drew Jones — his voice almost wavers with emotion — reports the passage of the first-ever climate change legislation in the US, to the applause of this crowd. Then (I have skipped several steps here, including Anders Wijkman’s briefing on the not-so-inspiring status of the negotiations for the Copenhagen climate summit) we are divided up into groups. Our task will be the world’s task at Copenhagen: “to avoid the unmanageable, and to manage the unavoidable.”