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

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

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

Climate Interactive’s Travis Franck talks insights at UMass Lowell

Travis Franck presents Climate Interactive’s “Climate Pathways” mobile app

As part of its ongoing interview series, the Climate Change Initiative at University of Massachussetts Lowell talked recently with Climate Interactive’s Travis Franck about some of our simulators and the insights they’re providing on climate change.

As Franck explains, Climate Interactive’s emphasis on an analytical approach called systems thinking gives its models a uniquely comprehensive view of the complex systems involved in climate change.

“Very often in academia, we work in silos, or departments,” he says. “With systems, it’s really thinking across those silos…and it’s really taking that perspective that combines those multiple disciplines and then looks at all the feedbacks and interactions.”

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Analysis, Insights, Media coverage, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Carbon Dioxide Will Persist in the Atmosphere Long After Current Decision Makers Have Left Their Roles: On Ethical Grounds, Young People Should Have a Say

Even if today’s college students live to be 100 years old, more than half of the CO2 released into the atmosphere during the four years they are in college will still be present there at the end of their lives – warming the planet and contributing to extreme events, like droughts, floods, and storms all the while – long after the decision makers behind those investment choices will have left office. The college students across the US who are arguing that their education should not be funded by actions that diminish the health of the world in which their future will unfold have a strong case, supported by the basic physics of the climate.

The New York Times has a front page article about the growing number of student-led campaigns at colleges and universities across the US calling on board’s of trustees to divest of investments in fossil energy companies. According to the article, some college administrations are listening to the students and taking steps to eliminate fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. Others are, so far, not agreeing with the link the students are making: that fossil fuel investment undermines the very future colleges and universities seek to prepare young people for.

As students around the US find their voice and begin to insist that their generation’s stake in the long-term future be taken into account in investment decisions at educational institutions, we, as we like to do on timely issues at Climate Interactive, ran the numbers, asking a simple question:

Just how long will the fossil fuel related decisions made by college Presidents and Board of Trustees today continue to impact the lives of current students?

December 5, 2012December 6, 2012 by bethsawin Categories: Analysis, InsightsTags: divestment, fossil fuels 3 Comments

Another Report Says We Are Steering the Planet Into a Dangerously Hot Future

Ahead of climate talks in Doha, Qatar next week, the UN Environmental Programme has released the third Emissions Gap Report. Climate Interactive Co-Director Beth Sawin is once again one of the report’s authors. Like the World Bank report released last week, this report reminds us that reducing our emissions is paramount.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, summarized the Emissions Gap report by saying, “This report is a reminder that time is running out, but that the technical means and the policy tools to allow the world to stay below a maximum 2 degrees Celsius are still available to governments and societies”. The reminder that the gap between a 2 degree future and where we are now is still widening, and that countries are still putting forward targets that are far short of what is needed is sobering.

The Emissions Gap report goes beyond the stark assessments of where we are relative to where we need to be, by identifying sectors where dramatic reduction can be made to bridge the gap.

November 23, 2012November 23, 2012 by Ellie Johnston Categories: AnalysisTags: Beth Sawin, climate emissions, COP18, Doha, Emissions Gap, UNEP Leave a comment

Copenhagen Goal Within Reach, But Only With Global Action Far Beyond Today’s Most Ambitious Actions

Even if the world also has sustained success eliminating deforestation, reducing emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gasses and improving energy efficiency, new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure can’t occur much beyond 2015 in order to maintain a 50% chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C in 2100.  Having a higher probability of achieving the 2°C goal or keeping these even odds of meeting the goal but delaying the end of the era of fossil fuel investment would require additional measures such as shutting down already-constructed fossil-fuel-using infrastructure before the end of its useful lifetime, further reducing energy demand, or achieving so called negative emissions, where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered.

The goal of the Copenhagen Accord – to limit temperature increase to 2°C is still in reach – but the actions to get there are far beyond what we see being implemented around us today.

A thought experiment with our En-ROADS global energy model makes this clear.

What if, in 2015, we eliminated any new investment in fossil-fuel-using infrastructure, anywhere in the world?  En-ROADS shows a surge in creation of new low-carbon energy sources, and an improvement in the global temperature by 2100 compared to ‘business as usual’. Rather than the 4.5°C of temperature increase under ‘business as usual’, the scenario results instead in 3.2°C of warming.

In this thought experiment using the global energy system model En-ROADS, there is no new investment in fossil fuel using infrastructure after 2015, but the long lifetime of the existing infrastructure means that fossil fuel use continues well into the century.

Eliminating new fossil-fuel-using power plants, automobiles, and factories just a few years from now sounds very drastic, of course, so why don’t we see more impact on the global temperature? The figure to the left helps explain why: even though no new infrastructure is built after 2015, the existing infrastructure lives on (and continues to produce CO₂ emissions throughout its lifetime), only fading away in the second half of the century. (See the black wedge of energy from coal and the red wedge from oil in the figure).

October 16, 2012October 18, 2012 by bethsawin Categories: Analysis, InsightsTags: climate change, En-ROADS 6 Comments

Seeing a Bigger Picture in the Great Lakes: Systems Mapping for Powerful Insights

By Beth Sawin

A team from Climate Interactive recently used systems thinking tools to steer a group of Great Lakes leaders through these powerful questions on the health of the lakes:

How do the interconnected challenges of climate change, invasive species, and nutrient run-off impact the ecological and social health of the North American Great Lakes region?

August 30, 2012 by Ellie Johnston Categories: AnalysisTags: Arabella, Beth Sawin, Great Lakes, systems mapping, systems thinking 1 Comment