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,

Transparent, Real-Time Analysis Works

Climate Interactive is a small team with big goals.

One of our founding goals was to offer rapid turnaround analysis of the most important climate and energy issues, and to make that analysis available ‘open source’. In doing so, we reasoned, we’d be boosting the effectiveness of the many, many parties –- from negotiators to civil society leaders — who are calling for climate policy ambitious enough to be consistent with the latest science. And, if such groups found our analysis helpful and clarifying, we assumed they would share it with their networks and constituencies, reaching more people than our small team ever would on its own.

Over the years, from Copenhagen to Cancun, this has been a productive formula for us, and it paid off again in Durban, where we analyzed the impact of waiting until 2020 to increase the ambition of pledges.

• The Washington Post covered our analysis on Dec 6th: U.N. climate talks move slowly as new studies urge more dramatic emissions cuts;
• Out of dozens of side events offered that day, the analyses from our team was included in the ECO – the Climate Action Network handout, widely read across the COP;
• In a youth briefing Jonathan Pershing was asked: “The current commitments that are on the table put us on a trajectory to around 4.3°C according to analysis by Climate Interactive.  Are you suggesting that the commitments that have been put on the table are good enough and we should now look at 2020 and beyond?”;
• Civil society groups 350.org and Avaaz organized a global online petition drive that got 700,000 signatures in 48 hours. The petition said: “The world cannot afford delay on climate action. I urge you to abandon your proposal to postpone a binding global agreement until 2020, and stand with vulnerable countries around the world by stepping up your ambition and accelerating your timeline for bold climate action.”;
• The “Climate Progress” blog of Joe Romm reposted our findings; and
• Our analysis was shared within the TckTckTck network (a global alliance of more than 300 civil society groups). It also was included in a joint press release from Greenpeace and WWF.

While celebrating our role in these remarkable events, we also soberly acknowledge that, in the end, Durban did not increase the ambition of 2020 pledges to be in line with a feasible 2°C pathway. Our efforts helped the world to see, without any illusion, what was being decided, but we didn’t get a better deal.

So, we’ll be keeping at it, in 2012 and beyond.  We’ll be ‘adding up’ current pledges, and we’ll be offering analysis of the ‘how-to’ of the  transition to a low carbon economy, which is, after all, the fundamental re-orientation needed to deliver a liveable climate. As long as there are leaders out there calling for policy that matches the science, we’ll be doing what we can to offer analysis that helps them make their case.

To Avoid Expensive and Disruptive Rates of Emissions Reduction In Coming Decades Parties Must Increase the Ambition of 2020 Pledges Today

To see a reposting on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog, click here. And a corroborating report by ClimateWorks Foundation here plus another by Climate Analytics here.

Postponing commitment to ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO2 emissions reductions in decades beyond 2020 that exceed those typically seen in the current generation of energy system models, making future efforts to limit temperature increase to 2°C more expensive and disruptive than needed. Without deeper reductions than are currently pledged by 2020, future generations will have sustain very rapid rates of reduction in emissions.

In the press and in the halls of the climate negotiations some parties, including the US, have been saying that 2020 pledges are essentially fixed in the form of the voluntary commitments made under the Cancun Agreement, and that current political and economic pressures mean that the time for more ambitious commitments to emissions reductions can come only after 2020.

Sterman in the Boston Globe: Preventive care to the utility grid saves dollars and lives

Coming on the heels of an announcement that a forthcoming IPCC report confirms that climate change is causing more extreme weather events, Climate Interactive consortium member and MIT professor, John Sterman, challenges governments and companies to prioritize infrastructure maintenance to prevent accidents.    

Opinion: Utilities need to cut trees, not costs

Author, John Sterman, on skis removing a tree after a New England snowstorm

By John Sterman

Published in the Boston Globe on November 05, 2011

NEARLY A WEEK after the Great October Snowstorm, thousands were still without power yesterday. Many blame the utilities for delays in restoring the juice, while the utilities argue that trees in full leaf caused unusually high damage.

The real problem, however, is the failure of the utilities to implement the maintenance and system upgrades that would have limited the damage in the first place. That failure includes

Announcing En-ROADS — A new decision support tool from Climate Interactive!

Climate Interactive is excited to introduce the development of a new simulation, En-ROADS, which will build on our robust suite of open-source tools for decision-makers. En-ROADS is a fast, powerful simulation tool to enable understanding of how changes to our energy use, consumption, and policies can lead us to achieving our climate goals.

Beth Sawin On Hurricane Irene from Vermont Bioneers: The Big Four Lessons

One lesson from Vermont's response to Irene is that the fabric of community and caring is a critical resource for recovery after a disaster. Shown here are volunteers at a damaged farm in Randolph, VT.

At the end of August, Vermont was hit by catastrophic flooding as result of Hurricane Irene, which dumped six inches of rain on already saturated hillsides around the state.

On Saturday, I (Beth Sawin) was one of two panelists (along with Bill McKibben via Skype) asked to reflect upon lessons Irene and Vermont’s response to it might offer to all of us, as a part of the Vermont Beaming Bioneers Conference in Montpelier, VT.

I found myself with four lessons to offer:

1. Like it or not, we are entering a new era; it’s time to begin expecting the unexpected.

2. Given that there are limits to how much and how quickly communities, families, businesses and governments can adapt, we need to work harder than ever to eliminate heating-trapping greenhouse gas pollution. As members of impacted communities we have direct experience and the moral authority that we can bring to the climate and energy policy debate in the US and internationally.

3. Being prepared for extreme weather events may require new technologies and new infrastructures, but it also calls on, and can be served by, good old-fashioned community building. from strong local businesses to effective volunteer organizations, a lot of what was most helpful in the aftermath of Irene was a pre-existing web of connection and caring.

4. The window of opportunity for adaptation is during ‘normal times,’ not after a disaster. It is in our day to day planning and investment decisions that we make our world more resilient and better prepared for disaster. Immediately after a disaster the need to get ‘back to normal’ makes it very difficult to be innovative and experimental.

“World Climate” Game Sparks Simulation-Based Learning at MIT

Professor John Sterman of the MIT Sloan School of Management led World Climate, the role playing exercise that uses C-ROADS, in a Sustainability Lab event at MIT. The pictures show students playing roles of various simulated parties to a mock-UN negotiation, including lobbyists and environmental activists. In the last image, the blue tarp simulates sea level rise.

Drew Jones Presents C-ROADS Lessons at EPA Climate Impact Simulation Conference

Last month, Drew Jones presented at the EPA’s “Integrated Modeling to Characterize Climate Change Impacts and Support Decision Making” conference in Atlanta, GA. In the video above, he discusses the lessons our Climate Interactive team has learned while developing and sharing our C-ROADS model and its climate insights with the world.

 

C-ROADS Introductory Webinar from Climate Interactive – Real-time modeling made easy

Please join Climate Interactive’s Dr. Travis Franck on March 3 for a free introductory webinar on “C-ROADS,” a powerful yet simple interactive simulator that you can use, for free, to analyze UNFCCC country pledges and proposals and quickly calculate climate outcomes such as temperature, uncertainty ranges, per-capita emissions, sea-level rise, and historical responsibility.

The webinar will cover:

-Using C-ROADS to analyze proposed international agreements in a scientifically rigorous framework.

-Analyzing climate agreements in real-time — the Copenhagen Accord pledges will be analyzed in a live demonstration.

-Discuss the independently scientifically reviewed underpinnings of the simulator.

-Provide an overview of some of the more advanced features of C-ROADS, such as historical “Contribution Analysis.”

More information on C-ROADS is at: http://cl.ly/4hJC

Participants will receive access to download the stand-alone version of the full simulator.

John Sterman on C-ROADS Impacts in the World — at System Dynamics Conference in Korea

Check out the video below of Dr. John Sterman’s presentation of “The Road from Copenhagen: Supporting International Climate Negotiations with the C-ROADS Simulation” for the International Conference of the System Dynamics Society in Seoul, Korea this past July. He discusses C-ROADS use in the policy process, including the Copenhagen conference.