World Energy Exercise: Putting You in Control of Our Energy Future

Climate Interactive has developed the World Energy Exercise to provide a simulation-based experience to help deepen participants’ understanding of potential policy and investment scenarios to address our global energy challenges. Recently, Drew Jones led a version of World Energy for 100 energy graduate students at Stanford University. More on the event is here. The video below summarizes that event.

“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).

Top Eleven Extensions of the C-ROADS Climate Simulation

Since 2006, Sustainability Institute’s climate efforts — Climate Interactive and Our Climate Ourselves – operating along side our work with international policymakers, has achieved significant successes translating simulation-based insights in eleven different forms.

1. Embeddable Widget. The C-ROADS-based Climate Scoreboard spread virally through the climate policy world during the Copenhagen Conference and was embedded in thousands of blogs and webpages, reaching over half a million views.

2. Online Datasets. The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, and Washington Post used the Excel files of model output that we post online, to create graphics for their media to report the Copenhagen Accord. And 350.org used the same data as part of a poster to influence delegates at the meetings.

3. Simulation Exhibits. A consortium of science museum exhibit designers convened by Brown University integrated the C-ROADS simulation into a “touch-table” exhibit that is now touring New England science museums.

4. “Sticky” Metaphors. Dr. John Sterman (a partner in Climate Interactive) developed the “carbon bathtub” as a framework that was published as the “Big New Idea” in National Geographic Magazine in December 2009.

World’s Countries Ratify Global Climate Deal! in a Dartmouth simulation at least…

Professor David Peart and Dr. Lori Siegel led a powerful learning experience for Dartmouth College students using the C-ROADS simulator as part of the Copenhagen Climate Exercise (now World Climate)

The College created an engaging video on the experience — check it out above. And their press release is here.

Sustainability issues and our team’s connections run deep at Dartmouth College. The founder of our organization, Sustainability Institute, Donella Meadows, taught there for several decades.  Professor David Peart serves on our board. And four members of our core C-ROADS and Climate Interactive team — Dr. John Sterman (MIT), Dr. Beth Sawin (SI), Dr. Tom Fiddaman (Ventana Systems), and me (Drew Jones — SI) — are all alums.

Innovative Partnership Launches Freeware Online Climate Simulation

A new partnership of companies and NGOs committed to open source climate simulations has launched a freeware climate decision support tool.

Check it out here — click on the big “C-Learn” banner.

C-Learn is the more accessible, online version of the C-ROADS simulation, which was recently seen in US State Department Special Envoy Jonathan Pershing’s plenary address in Bonn Germany to the UNFCCC. Now you can explore how changes in fossil fuel emissions from three parts of the world, plus deforestation and afforestation, will affect CO2 concentrations, global temperature, and sea level rise. And you can make your own graphs to show others your simulation experiments.

Running “Mock-UN” Climate Negotiations in Croatia from a Desk in the USA

As I write, 40 Croatian electrical utility executives and youth leaders are playing the roles of global UN delegates and proposing emissions targets to stabilize the climate.

They are in Croatia, feeling disappointed that their cuts in fossil fuel emission starting in 2030 or so keeps CO2 around 500 ppm, missing their goal of 350-400 ppm.

I sit at my desk at Sustainability Institute in the USA, waiting for the phone call that brings the next round of proposals to test in C-ROADS, our climate simulator, and display them in Croatia via our web conferencing link.  Mostly, I’m hoping they can work out a deal that hits 350 (actually, hoping we ALL can work out a deal….).

Miljenko Cimesa, an innovative Croatian leader and member of the Society for Organizational Learning/Croatia is hosting the event. He played this “Copenhagen Climate Exercise” (now “World Climate”) in Boston a couple of months ago as led by Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Michael Goodman, Travis Franck, and other partners in a SoL training and has brought the technology home, hoping to spark more effective action on climate strategy. (Other stories of the policy exercise are here and here.)

I’m feeling amazed by the technological power of international communication, honored to be part of the SoL community that makes such shared learning possible, and happy to be part of a “Climate Action Initiative” team that has created a simulation that can help. May such collaboration and learning translate into a Global Deal. Soon!

…. Gotta go, the “delegates” are calling….

Ran the numbers. Showed the graphs. 377 ppm by 2100.  Not bad.

Developed World Strikes a Climate Deal with Developing World (in a sim at least)

For the first time in our ~20 runnings of the simulation-based “Mock-UN” role-playing exercise, The Copenhagen Climate Exercise (now World Climate), the delegates from the developed world moved first in striking a global deal on climate.

(For more on the sim behind the exercise and why the heck we ask people in nice clothes to sit on the floor, click here).

The players were corporate and government partners of The Climate Group – a coalition of governments and the world’s most influential businesses all committed to tackling climate change. Bob Corell of the Heinz Center was playing Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon, and I (Drew Jones) from Sustainability Institute, was playing session chair Michael Zammit Cutajar.

Normally, the delegates from US, EU, Japan, Russia (that’s them in the chairs) and others wait at their comfortable table with the snacks, flowers, and power. And the delegates from the developing world (that’s some of them — Africa, island nations et al. — on the floor) crowd around the rich countries, asking for help.

But on Monday in Washington it was different.

Press Covers Climate Interactive and Security Policy Exercise

 

Got some good press in the Mountain Express about our climate simulation work.  Check out the dramatic lead….

The United Nations secretary-general speaks in grave tones to a room packed with officials from some of the world’s largest, most powerful countries. He’s called them together, he says, to help them save their nations by saving the planet. The situation’s getting desperate: A Category 5 hurricane has reduced much of Miami to ruins and urban swamps, and millions of people in India have become “environmental refugees” after a killer cyclone swept through Bangladesh. Meanwhile, deprivation and fighting escalate in conflict zones around the globe.

Don’t worry: It’s only a war game (at least for now).

What still strikes me as so important in that simulated negotiation we did months ago now was the chance for Americans and Chinese people to talk together and listen to each other about their priorities, their concerns, and what it will take to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Role-Playing a Path to Climate Stabilization

It was a big week for the Copenhagen Climate Exercise (now World Climate), the role-playing mock-UN policy exercise created here at Sustainability Institute and by John Sterman at MIT where people play the parts of UN diplomats from regions of the world and negotiate a global agreement to address climate change, testing their results in our C-ROADS simulator.

Peter Senge of MIT and the Society for Organizational Learning led one event in Boston for corporate sustainability leaders. An SI team led one with partners in Atlanta (see the poem and pictures above by Doc Klein of Uncharted Territories). And I ran three events for business school students at Duke University.

Time and time again, no matter who is playing, we see similar dynamics:

The Copenhagen Climate Exercise

Most people get lost when they just see the results of models. But people really understand when, as I saw in this Copenhagen Climate Exercise, they experience the results.

– Dr. Bob Corell, Global Change Program of the Heinz Center, USA, former chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

“The Copenhagen Climate Exercise” (now World Climate) is a half day simulation-based role-playing climate game designed by SI’s Drew Jones and MIT’s John Sterman that gives groups from 10-50 an experience of reaching a global agreement to mitigate climate change. Set up as a highly simplified “Copenhagen-2009-like” U.N. negotiation, participants play the role of delegates from three regions of the world and work together to reach a global accord that meets the group’s goal for CO2 levels. The UN Secretary General receives pledges from three different “blocs”, asks his technical staff to simulate them in C-ROADS (formerly called Pangaea), and informs delegates of results, often sending them back for another round of debate, strategizing, and collaboration.

Jones has led it most recently for a group of European and South African business leaders gathered in Greenland. And Sterman led it for MIT students — MIT’s Technology Review covered the event. More information is here.

Players have tended to identify strongly with their roles — we’ve seen politically conservative Americans arguing vigorously for the rights to economic development for the south, Chinese nationals defending the US position, and “climate refugees” from Bangladesh climbing on the desks of the Indian delegates to escape sea level rise.

The photo below, taken in the Greenland event, shows the three groups, set up to experience the (exaggerated) relative economic conditions of the three blocs.  On the floor are the delegates from most of Africa, South America, island nations, and others. To the left, with chairs but no table, are China, India, South Africa, Indonesia and others.  To the right, with the table, tablecloth, candles, paper, and pens, are the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan et al.

The game debrief tends to go in several of many directions: international geo-political dynamics, the biogeochemistry of climate (oceans, plants, the carbon cycle, tipping points), cultural barriers to global agreements, managing hope and fear amidst an uncertain future, a “systems” perspective on complex issues, and the technological, legal, and behavioral changes that will help stabilize the climate.

Overall, we’ve seen the Copenhagen Climate Game help people quickly learn the policy-relevant science of climate change, viscerally experience the international dynamics, and succeed at crafting a solution to the challenges, while taking a realistic look at the scale of changes ahead as we shift to a low-carbon global economy.