Upcoming Free Webinar

At some point in the near future, hosted by Michelle Erickson of Citigroup and led by Drew Jones of Sustainability Institute, we will be holding an online and conference-call webinar on our effort to create open architecture sharing of simulations as a path to climate stabilization. Our purpose is to identify financial and in-kind resources towards making this work deliver significant results over the coming years.

Note: this webinar will focus on particularly on our “open architecture” sharing effort. There are other strands of work such as modeling-building, our role-playing policy exercise, and our collaboration with global players on climate strategy with Bob Corell, the Climate Action Initiative and other partners.

This session will include interactive demonstrations of C­-ROADS (we’ll ask “what if” questions of the simula­tor), description of past and potential applications, and an open discussion about how open architecture simulators could help contribute to effective policy de­sign and dialogue towards a stable climate, particularly aiming towards Copenhagen in 2009.

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Climate Interactive’s open architecture effort is a community of corporations, NGO’s, and universities that creates, shares, and uses accessible system dynamics simulations and related media in order to improve the way we all think about the climate. Our purpose is to get powerful simulations “sims” into the world as open architecture products so they can be used, enhanced, translated, and distributed around the world.

The flagship sim of Climate Interactive is C-ROADS. Developed by a team from Sustainability Institute, MIT, and Ventana Systems, this sim is the first decision­-maker ­oriented international climate sim. As opposed to most climate models, which take days or weeks to run and are designed for scientists, a lite version of this simulator will be posted as freeware on the internet, can be used by most anyone, and runs easily on a laptop. In simulated negotiations and in strategy conversations, we’ve seen the simulator help both technical and non­technical people quickly understand the long term implications of climate agreements. Potential uses range from private strategic planning sessions to “mock U.N.” negotiations to posting the simulator globally in multiple languages to help global citizens understand and influence mitigation approaches.

For further information, explore the following links:

An article in MIT Tech Review about Sterman and the sim

Peter Senge on the idea

Marv Adams sparking the “open architecture” approach

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