Our Three Big Impacts

By Drew Jones, Beth Sawin, and Stephanie McCauley

What has our impact been?

Eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models — what does it add up to?

Here’s our informal assessment of how much of a contribution we’ve made to the global effort to curb climate change

Together with our partners, we see three big areas. We have:

Christiana Figueres with Beth Sawin at the UN Climate Talks in Bonn, April 2010

1. Kept things honest. Our mentor Dana Meadows operated out of the theory that societies will only find fundamental solutions to the challenges we are facing when the escape hatches of wishful thinking have been closed, and we’ve been working hard to follow her lead. When, in the first week of the Copenhagen summit, some global organizations began proclaiming that success was close at hand, we re-grounded our global audience in biogeochemical realities and watched the “spinning” subside, with global effects. When, during the Durban summit, some parties argued that current pledges were good enough to meet climate goals, we ‘ran the numbers’ with clarity and precision, providing solid backing to the young people and climate advocates who were questioning such easy assertions (view our Durban results blog post). More recently, when voices rose to declare an energy miracle or natural gas bridge solution to climate, while dismissing efficiency and renewables, we ran the numbers, changed minds, and noted that the words of key thought-leaders changed as well.

“[Climate Interactive’s] software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it’s the numbers that count.” — Bill McKibben in the UK Guardian

2. Improved policy design by top decision-makers. We have helped powerful leaders advocate for sound long-term policy. We have made John Kerry better armed with scientific insight, Jonathan Pershing more exact, China’s climate ministry more able to reach targets, EU’s Jacquie McGlade more clear, Bill McKibben more numerate, international analysts empowered, Hal Harvey supported by modeling, the media more informed and millions of activists grounded in solid science.

The hundreds of C-ROADS users can be found worldwide in more than 70 countries.

3. Motivated, inspired, and empowered, creating new possibilities (while avoiding manipulation and zealotry). We have motivated action and reduced emissions through the hundreds of thousands of global professionals and citizens who have taught others with our tools (C-ROADS, C-Learn online, Scoreboard, iPad Pathways app, Climate Momentum, Bathtub), shown others our videos (Beth Sawin on the Scoreboard, Drew Jones on TEDx, Travis Franck’s webinar, John Sterman’s lecture), led their kids through our first or second science museum interactive exhibits, or lived a successful global climate deal through World Climate, our mock-UN “serious game” played around the world.

Not bad for eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models. Let’s see what is next.

Please be in touch if you’d like to support our emerging work.

Climate Scoreboard Helping the Leaders at UN Rio+20 Summit

Happy to see evidence of our tools getting around in places we never knew…

Elevator of Drew Jones’s hotel. Rio.

Drew: “Hi, how are you doing?”

Other guy: “Fine, heading to the Summit…. What organization are you with?”

Drew: “Climate Interactive.”

Other guy: “Oh, I know your work. I use your Scoreboard in my presentations. BAU, Goal, Current Pledges”

Drew: “Great, who are you with?”

Herman Rosa Chavez: “I’m Herman Rosa, the minister of the environment for El Salvador and lead diplomat here at the Summit. Thanks for what you all do.”

Thanks for using it to make a difference, Minister Rosa!

Climate Scoreboard on Climate Code Red

Scoreboard June 4, 2012

Our Climate Scoreboard has been broadcasting the state of global climate commitments since 2009. At the Copenhagen climate negotiations “Climate Scoreboard” and its readings were found on a confidential draft of the Copenhagen Accord that was leaked to the Guardian. In the years since, even with negotiations in Cancun and Durban, the results of the Climate Scoreboard have changed negligibly. Below David Spratt at the blog Climate Code Red recently reviewed the tool. As ever, the scoreboard calls for more ambitious action, as we work towards the day when the gap between climate proposals and climate goals is closed.

Projected warming increases as emissions rise, politics fails

David Spratt, Climate Code Red (May 29, 2012)

This chart needs no explanation. The Climate Scoreboard is an online tool that allows the public to track progress in the ongoing negotiations to produce an international climate treaty. The Scoreboard automatically reports, on a daily basis, whether proposals in the treaty process commit countries to enough greenhouse gas emissions reductions to achieve widely expressed goals, such as limiting future warming to 1.5 to 2.0°C (2.7 to 3.6°F) above pre-industrial temperatures. And users can explore the analysis behind the numbers. At time of posting, the scoreboard projected an increase in global temperature of 4.5°C by 2100.

What we do and why are we doing it: a radio interview with Climate Interactive

What is it that keeps an organization like Climate Interactive ticking? Co-directors Drew Jones and Beth Sawin, along with team member and MIT professor, John Sterman, joined Radio Green Talk host Diana Dehm to discuss this and elaborate on why we provide the tools that we do.

Check out the interview here.

During the program John discusses how we use role playing to help people viscerally experience some of the dynamics at the climate change negotiations in the World Climate Exercise. As Drew put it,

Durban Talks Open the Door to a Future Global Legal Agreement, But Produce No Immediate Strengthening of Pledges

With the close of COP-17, parties to the UNFCCC maintained the same inadequate emissions reduction pledges, thus committing the world to a more costly and risky path forward than is needed given the immediate availability of cost-effective measures to reduce emissions and begin the transition to a low-carbon economy.

As our previous analysis showed, postponing the adoption of more ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO₂ emissions reductions after 2020 far larger than what has been seen either historically or in energy system model projections.  By failing to agree to a mechanism to increase the ambition of mitigation targets before 2020, the decisions made at COP-17 place unnecessary burdens  on future generations who will have to work much harder and endure  much greater costs and risks as a result of these decisions.

Without new pledges for emissions reduction on the table, our Climate Scoreboard analysis projects future global temperature increases far above the global goal of 2°C (3.6 °F) , pointing towards temperature increase of 4.3°C (2.6 – 6.9°C) or 7.7°F (4.6 – 12.3°F) by the end of the century.

Even though countries were unable to agree to increase the ambition of 2020 pledges, many cost effective mitigation opportunities exist today; and the costs will fall as low-carbon, efficient technologies develop and scale. Commitments lacking the necessary ambition delay these cost reductions and the maturation of the technologies needed to make a sustainable, low-carbon economy a reality.

UK’s Guardian Covers Climate Scoreboard

Today, UK’s Guardian news covered the Climate Interactive Scoreboard, including a quote from our very own, Andrew Jones! Check out the excerpt below and read the full article here.

“We’ve made progress but we’re clearly not headed where we need to be,” said Andrew Jones, co-director of Climate Interactive, which is backed by several universities including MIT. “No one is talking about changing any of the 2020 proposals, so we should be worried.” Climate Interactive’s model is also backed by a panel of experts including Prof Bob Watson, chief scientific advisor to the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and a former head of the IPCC.

The Climate Interactive Scoreboard, for which researchers check daily for updates in emissions or other targets which would reduce pollution such as reductions in energy intensity or increases in renewable energy, makes a medium-range prediction of a 3.9C increase in temperatures, with a range of 2.3-6.2C (4.2-11.1F), based on committed targets, and a more encouraging 2.9C (5.2F) average, with a range of 1.7-4.6C (3.1-8.5F) based on “potential” commitments suggested but not enacted by many nations.

“Adding Up” Pledges Gets Official in UNFCCC!

A working group of the UNFCCC officially requested the sort of  ”Adding Up” of mitigation pledges that we do with C-ROADS and the Climate Scoreboard!

Here’s the accepted text:

The AWG-KP requested the secretariat to prepare for consideration by the AWG-KP at its twelfth session:

(a)  A paper compiling pledges for emission reductions and related assumptions provided by the Parties to date and the associated emission reductions;

(b)  A technical paper laying out issues relating to the transformation of pledges for emission reductions into quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives.

Note — this has passed the KP (Kyoto Protocol), not the LCA (Long-term Cooperative Action) yet, but feels significant for our work with C-ROADS and the Climate Scoreboard. And for our collaboration with other scientific groups working on this effort.

One big reason that this “Adding Up” work was proposed is because we and others first established that it could be done with strong science behind it. They needed a prototype first, we think. (And, for the history books, the first ever adding up of climate pledges was shared March 2009 in Copenhagen in our “Sawin et al.” paper).

For an extended analogy about how this work is a lot like paying the bar bill, read a post from last year, “Three Climate Negotiators Walk into a Bar….”

Climate Scoreboard Takes Flight

On the trip home from the UNFCCC meeting in Bonn, Germany I was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly accurate representation of the Climate Scoreboard in the pages of Delta’s onboard magazine, Delta Sky. With the scoreboard having received more than 700,000 views since its release just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit we already knew that the world’s people really are curious about how well policy makers and heads of state are doing at protecting the climate. Now the thousands of Delta passengers this month have a chance to see that, while they’ve made some progress, the climate negotiations have much farther to go. And who knows, it’s plausible that a few climate negotiators themselves came across the scoreboard on their way to or from Bonn.

Summing Up Emissions Reduction Pledges: The State of the Art

Judging from the  well-attended  side-event on the first day of last week’s UNFCCC session there appears to be growing momentum to  assess the question: is it adding up? Is the collective benefit of the pledges enough to deliver our goals for protecting the climate?

Panelists representing five groups of analysts and modelers (including Climate Interactive) who have been working to estimate the collective benefit of the emissions pledges associated with the Copenhagen Accord gathered to describe not only what they are finding, but also some of the biggest challenges they are encountering.

Breaking News in Bonn: Parties Ask for Adding up of Mitigation Pledges

Writing from the UN climate negotiations in Bonn Germany, where the AOSIS island nations and EU recently proposed a formal “adding up” of the mitigation pledges to the UNFCCC.

A recent text in the AWG-KP group included, “The AWG-KP requested the secretariat… prepare an analysis of the pledges for emissions reduction provided by Annex 1 Parties.”  And the EU then added, “and their contribution to the ultimate goal of the Convention.”

We’re excited to see this request — if accepted, it would involve the work of the Climate Scoreboard with C-ROADS as well as our colleagues at Climate Analytics, Project Catalyst, the Grantham Institute, WRI, UNEP and others who were part of a group press release on the “adding up” work.