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.
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Youngest “World Climate” players yet!
Climate Interactive’s Drew Jones led a class of eleven seventh graders from Hanger Hall School for Girls through the “Mock-UN” policy exercise where three teams represent country groups and negotiate a global climate deal. They learned the biogeochemical carbon system through the “Bathtub” analogy and improved their understanding of climate dynamics.
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Nine weeks away from their attendance at the COP 17 Climate Change Negotiations in Durban, South Africa, students of Dickinson College’s delegation joined with classmates to participate in Climate Interactive’s World Climate Exercise. These eleven undergraduates are taking four courses this semester to provide them an interdisciplinary study of how we can address climate change. Each of the student delegates reflected on their experience on the class blog http://blogs.dickinson.edu/cop17durban/.
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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). Continue reading
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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.
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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.
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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.” Continue reading
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.
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.
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:
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