Top Ten Reasons the World Needs EnROADS — a Fast, Accessible, Free, Hands-On Global Climate and Energy Simulator

By Drew Jones, Climate Interactive Co-Director

1. Grounded hope. For climate action success, we need a scientifically based narrative of what to do. EnROADS helps anyone (not just modelers) create such a narrative.

Stanford students practicing “grounded hope”

2. Policy-makers are using it.  Jonathan Pershing of the U.S. Department of Energy has asked for specific features and scenarios.

Prof. John Weyant

3. A complement to existing scientific models. Prof. John Weyant of Stanford University is the chair of the EnROADS external review committee. We want this simulation to complement the existing suite of research models. 

February 26, 2014March 19, 2014 by davidpedigo Categories: Project newsTags: climate simulation, ClimateWorks, Drew Jones, EnROADS, hope, John Weyant, Lisa Downey, Miriam Maes, Morgan Family Foundation, optimism, simulation, system dynamics, Zennstrom Philanthropies Leave a comment

Climate Interactive in the UK: Building grounded hope on climate solutions

“The workshop enabled participants to visualize how the various approaches and solutions interact and impact climate outcomes.  Some of the conclusions challenged received wisdom and intuition.”

– Workshop Participant

In the latest leg of our campaign to build understanding of climate change solutions, Climate Interactive Co-Director Drew Jones traveled to London to engage leaders with our simulations at an event organized by the German Marshall Fund and hosted by the U.K.’s Green Investment Bank.

Grounded hope shows us that reducing climate risk is “doable.”

In our first exercise with U.K. policymakers, the team of Drew Jones, Miriam Maes and Alissa Burger used our interactive climate and energy models—C-ROADS and En-ROADS—to spread “grounded hope.”

February 13, 2014March 19, 2014 by davidpedigo Categories: Analysis, Insights, Policy exercises and serious games, ToolsTags: Britain, C-ROADS, climate change, Drew Jones, En-ROADS, England, hope, London, optimism, policymakers, Solutions, UK, United Kingdom 1 Comment

World Climate in French: An Integrative and Multidisciplinary Approach

“Look, they only gave us cake crumb, we won’t give anything to the other countries!”

-a student, just before the negotiation starts

Our friend Laurent Richard, a mathematics teacher at the International School of Boston, saw transformative results after running our  World Climate Exercise with his students in French.  Here’s what he had to say (for the French version, see the bottom of the page):

On January 22^nd 2013, upper school teachers from the International School of Boston (ISB) gathered in the hall of the Orthodox church in Arlington, MA, which the school has the benefit of using for its theater lessons and events.

For three hours, with the help of Travis Franck from Climate Interactive, teachers from every discipline experienced for the first time the negotiation role game, World Climate. They considered it a very enlightening simulation that enabled them to get what makes World Climate such a compelling tool for exploring the complexity of the climate change issue. Some of the themes they delved into included:

January 24, 2014January 27, 2014 by davidpedigo Categories: Insights, Resources, Team and community, ToolsTags: Boston, Climate Negotiation, French, International, serious games, World Climate 2 Comments

Systems Thinking and Business Solutions in a Complex World

Photo by MIT Sloan Sustainability Management

In the latest entry in the Network for Business Sustainability blog, Climate Interactive Member and MIT Professor John Sterman outlines how we can use systems thinking – the analytical approach that underlies Climate Interactive’s models — to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.

Although his suggestions focus on businesses, these strategies can be used by government organizations, NGOs and individuals as well. Here’s what he had to say:

From climate change and deforestation to collapsing fisheries, species extinction and poisons in our food and water, our society is unsustainable and it is getting worse fast. Many advocate that overcoming these problems requires the development of systems thinking. We’ve long known that we live on a finite “spaceship Earth” in which “there is no away” and “everything is connected to everything else.” The challenge lies in moving from slogans about systems to meaningful methods to understand complexity, facilitate individual and organizational learning, and catalyze the changes we need to create a sustainable society in which all can thrive.

Here, I’ll describe how the world operates as a system — and how businesses can respond effectively to the challenges we face.

December 3, 2013December 19, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Analysis, Insights, Media coverage, Team and communityTags: climate change, Climate Interactive, Environment, john sterman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, Network for Business Sustainability, systems thinking, United States Leave a comment

John Sterman on the Power of Simulations

At a recent MIT conference, Climate Interactive member Prof. John Sterman provided an inspiring analysis of the relationship between big data, climate models and climate change action.

Climate Interactive team member, Prof. John Sterman

As we see data and models become more advanced and more available, we’re only really reaching the first step toward solving the problem of climate change.  The real challenge that we’re facing, Sterman said, is communicating all this information so that it teaches and inspires people to pursue the appropriate solutions.

“The burden is on us,” he said. “People are solving problems—data doesn’t solve problems [and] information doesn’t solve problems.”

November 26, 2013November 27, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Analysis, Insights, ToolsTags: C-ROADS, China, Climate, climate change, Climate Interactive, climate model, john sterman, Shandong, Shenzhen, World Climate, World Climate Exercise 1 Comment

Counterintuitive Climate Strategy: See The Solution In Order to Even See the Problem

By Drew Jones, Climate Interactive Co-Director

How can we build political will to take responsibility for climate?

It is time to invest in grounded hope.

We should inoculate the world with an attractive, rigorous, comprehensive path toward climate success, as a means of helping people see and own the climate challenge in the first place.

I think we need to see the solution in order to see the problem.

Sounds backwards, right?

We’ve flipped the cause-and-effect for too long. We’ve mostly been saying (think “An Inconvenient Truth”), “climate disruption is a huge problem. So let’s solve it. Every small action counts.”

But it isn’t working. Too many people think, “it’s an overwhelming problem without a clear solution. I give up.”

We’ve seen the alternative work first hand. Over the past year, I’ve facilitated large groups of Stanford graduate students, international energy execs, a climate-and-business advisory panel in Washington, D.C. and others, and asked them to chart out viable solution paths and then see the impacts immediately in our simulators En-ROADS and C-ROADS.

They dream, grieve, learn, dream again, then emerge a bit readier to take responsibility for the problem, roll up their sleeves and try something a bit more ambitious. As Gerard Moutet of the French oil company Total said, “It now seems challenging but possible.”

Challenging but possible. Grounded hope.

November 8, 2013March 19, 2014 by davidpedigo Categories: AnalysisTags: Andrew Jones, C-ROADS, climate change, Climate Interactive, climate simulation, Drew Jones, En-ROADS, hope, optimism 4 Comments

Climate Interactive Simulation Opens Minds of 200 International Fellows

A group of 185 Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows from across the world got a crash course in climate change policy from Climate Interactive Co-Director Drew Jones at this year’s Global Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C.

The World Energy and World Climate simulations helped these leaders, who represented 93 countries, gain insights into the complexity of international climate negotiations and what we need to do in order to address climate change.

Kristina Jenkins, the senior program officer at the Humphrey Fellowship Program, said the exercise helped establish a sense of solidarity among participants.

November 4, 2013November 4, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Policy exercises and serious games, Presentation, Resources, Team and community, ToolsTags: Activism, Andrew Jones, C-ROADS, Climate, climate change, Climate Interactive, Drew Jones, energy, Environment, Hubert Humphrey Fellows, John Kerry, system dynamics, systems thinking, Washington DC, World Climate Leave a comment

Beth Sawin at UMass Lowell: Climate Change Solutions for the Future We Need

Creating workable solutions to climate change isn’t easy, but human beings have a history of overcoming obstacles in difficult times (as we’ve said before, ending the slave trade was once similarly thought of as impossible).

In her speech at a teach-in at UMass Lowell, Climate Interactive Co-Director Beth Sawin reminded us that enormous progress on climate change is possible, as long as we’re ready to make some serious changes.  For inspiration, she said, she likes to look to her family history.

Here’s an excerpt from her speech:

In 1943 my grandparents built a house. They were barely out of their teens, already married, with two young children. As far as I know, they had never done anything as huge as building a house

But times were hard, money was tight and they kept getting evicted from whatever rundown housing they could find.

October 24, 2013October 25, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Analysis, Insights, Presentation, Team and communityTags: Activism, Boston, climate change, Climate Interactive, Environment, Massachusetts, UMass Lowell, university of massachusetts lowell 1 Comment

Two Interactive Graphics to Illuminate the UN Climate Report’s Latest Findings

After much anticipation, the U.N. recently released its Fifth Assessment Report on climate change, leaving us with more certainty than ever that we need to do more to address the effects of climate change

In case you don’t have the time to read over the entire 900-page document we recommend a few visual aids that can help you understand some of the report’s major findings and what their implications will be for life as we know it.

To see how the U.N. projects temperatures could change over your lifetime, check out The Guardian’s interactive graphic, which allows you to input your birthday and see how much the planet has already warmed over your lifetime and how much hotter it will get. According to The Guardian’s analysis, if the world continues along with business as usual, a child born today would see rise of 2.7 – 6.3 degrees Celsius in his or her lifetime. To put that in perspective, 4 degrees was enough to take the planet out of the last ice age.

Image taken from The Guardian website

Because of the long time span and the detail of The Guardian’s graph, you can also see how temperature fluctuations have varied over time while exhibiting a clear general upward trend. This is especially important given the reactions of many climate skeptics to the lull in temperature increases over the last 15 years. As the graph shows, however, there’s no reason to believe this lull will continue if we continue business as usual.

October 7, 2013October 10, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: ToolsTags: C-ROADS, Carbon budget, Celsius, climate change, En-ROADS, Friday, global warming, Greenhouse gas, Guardian, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tools, United Nations Leave a comment

Online En-ROADS Model Debuts at Stanford World Energy Exercise

Stanford grad students experienced the thrill and complexity of dealing with climate change head on recently, as Climate Interactive brought our World Energy exercise to Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy for the second year running.

Drew Jones briefs Stanford students ahead of the World Energy exercise

Led by Climate Interactive Co-Director Drew Jones, World Energy challenges participants to create an energy policy that will limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius while at the same time meeting economic and political goals. With our En-ROADS model, participants can adjust inputs such as emissions prices, efficiency standards, taxes and subsidies, land use changes and breakthrough improvements from R&D, and see the effects in real time.

Much of this year’s exercise was familiar — groups of astute grad students plugging away at the models on their computer screens, lots of invisible light bulbs clicking on, a good deal of surprise — but this time around, we offered a slight twist — thanks to funding from Stanford, the entire simulation was run online.

“One thing the students found particularly helpful this year was the fact that the simulation was online and accessible via a web browser, so the students could run scenarios from anywhere at any time and share results with teammates,” Jones said. “We’re now exploring the possibility of moving it into a shareable space so educators across the world can have access to it”

September 27, 2013December 19, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Uncategorized 1 Comment