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

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

World Climate Leaves MIT Students with Important Insights

For years, Climate Interactive’s World Climate exercise has been used in classrooms and conferences around the world to help students and professionals better understand the challenges facing international climate change negotiations. Our friends at MIT have documented a recent exercise that beautifully captures the experience:

Led in this instance by MIT professor and Climate Interactive team member John Sterman, World Climate is simple to play–you can download all the materials for free on our website–and gives participants a very accurate glimpse into the issues facing U.N. climate change negotiations. Participants are broken into six different blocs–the U.S., the EU, other developed countries, China, India and other developing countries–and are tasked with crafting proposals to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Participants must agree to a timeline in which they will cap carbon emissions and eventually reduce them. They must also agree to a rate of emissions reductions and can add additional measures such as increasing net forestation. And, of course, they hope to do all this within their own financial means.

August 30, 2013September 3, 2013 by davidpedigo Categories: Insights, Policy exercises and serious games, Resources, Tools, UNFCCCTags: climate change, Climate Interactive, Developed country, Developing country, French, German, global warming, john sterman, Mandarin Chinese, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spanish Leave a comment

Moving Into Action With Climate Change

JMAZ PHOTO; Flickr.com/ Creative Commons

Make it fun! Make it interactive! Leave people inspired! And gracefully interconnect the need to adapt to unavoidable climate change with the imperative to prevent any climate change we can.

These are easily four of the biggest challenges involved in helping people find ways to  act to address climate change. That’s why, less than a year ago, I was excited to help support the work of Vermont educator Ginger Wallis as she stepped up to the challenge of creating a program for parents and grandparents that met all of these criteria.  It’s been a pleasure to act as an informal ‘science advisor’ to the Adapt project, as Ginger has been experimenting with a 5 session workshop series that promises to help parents and grandparents gain knowledge for themselves and gather ideas for being a mentor to the children and grandchildren in their lives. Here’s what she’s come up with, and will launch this month:

June 8, 2013July 16, 2013 by bethsawin Categories: Resources, Team and communityTags: action, adaptation, Beth Sawin, serious games Leave a comment

CO2 Timeline Tool: A New Tool for Youth Climate Leaders (and all the rest of us too!)

This view from the CO2 timeline tool allows student leaders to show the expected tenure of key administration leaders (in gold) along with possible milestones in the student leaders’ own lives (in blue) on a century-long timeline. The shaded grey bar at the bottom of the graphic shows how much CO2 from a pulse released during thee student’s four years in college remains in the atmosphere throughout the century.

Youth climate leaders rightly argue that it is they – not current-day politicians, executives, and administrators – who will have to live with the consequences of today’s decisions when it comes to fossil fuel use. As these young people mobilize in hundreds of fossil fuel divestment campaigns we are excited to release a new tool designed to help them make their case powerfully, creatively, and rigorously.

• With the CO2 Timeline tool, a first year student making a presentation to a board of trustees can show, with accuracy and confidence, that at the time she reaches the age of retirement around 65% of the CO2 released during her four years in college will still be in atmosphere, by which time the trustees she is addressing will be 90-120 years old.
• Another youth leader could use the tool to find out how much CO2 from his college years will still be in the atmosphere around the time he would start a career (93%) or become a grandparent (70%) and use those benchmarks to explain to his roommate or his uncle why the divestment campaign matters to him.

March 5, 2013March 5, 2013 by bethsawin Categories: Insights, Resources, ToolsTags: climate change, CO2, college students, divestment, fossil fuels, systems thinking 3 Comments

4 Tools for Teaching Engaging Climate & Systems Thinking Classes

Climate Interactive has many tools that can be used in classrooms from middle school to graduate-level for interactive and engaging classes on topics like, climate change, energy policy, and systems thinking.

World Climate Exercise:

World Climate is a role-playing climate simulation that gives groups from 6-80 a chance to experience how to negotiate a global agreement to mitigate climate change. The group breaks into teams that represent different parts of the world and then form proposals to limit climate change to 2 degrees, which are then tested with either the C-ROADS or C-Learn simulations. This is a great way to have groups explore the implications of climate change and the level of response needed to address it. Materials to facilitate the World Climate Exercise are available in several languages here.

C-Learn:

C-Learn is a simulation that helps people to understand the long-term climate effects (CO₂ concentrations, global temperature, sea level rise) of various actions like, reducing fossil fuel emissions, reducing deforestation, and planting trees. It is specifically designed for climate communicators, educators, and leaders of the World Climate Exercise, who want to use a web-based simulation to improve understanding of large-scale actions to mitigate climate change. C-Learn can be found here. 

October 4, 2012October 9, 2012 by Ellie Johnston Categories: ResourcesTags: classroom, Climate, climate change curriculum, interactive learning, role-playing, simulations, systems thinking, teaching Leave a comment

19 Climate Games that Could Change the Future

The prevalence of games in our culture provides an opportunity to increase the understanding of our global challenges. In 2008 the Pew Research Center estimated that over half of American adults played video games and 80% of young Americans play video games. The vast majority of these games serve purely to entertain. There are a growing number of games that aim to make a difference, however. These games range from those that show players the complexity of creating adequate aid packages and delivering them to places in need to games that require people to get out and work to improve their communities to do well in the game.

Looking at the climate change challenge there are a number of games and interactive tools to broaden our understanding of the dynamics involved. Climate Interactive, for one, has led the development of the role-playing game World Climate, which simulates the UN climate change negotiations and is being adopted from middle school all the way up to executive management-level classrooms. Many are recognizing the power of games and everyone from government agencies to NGOs to a group of teenagers is trying to launch a game to help address climate change. Below are some of the climate and sustainability-related games we’ve found. Let us know if you’ve found others.

March 9, 2012March 9, 2012 by Ellie Johnston Categories: Policy exercises and serious games, Resources, Team and communityTags: board games, climate change, climate games, Fate of the World, games, global warming, role-playing, simcity, simulation, video game, World Climate 11 Comments

UNFCCC Submissions Due February 28th: C-ROADS Assistance Available!

In anticipation of the Feb. 28th deadline, modeling and simulation analysis is available from Climate Interactive to support parties and observers who are preparing submissions with suggestions for increasing the level of ambition of the global climate negotiations.

Last December when the  Durban Platform was agreed to at COP-17 it included a call for negotiating parties and observer organizations to  submit “their views on options and ways for further increasing the level of ambition” in the global climate negotiations.

As one of many organizations around the world highlighting the scientific imperative for increasing that ambition we were pleased to see that solicitation, and now, with the deadline for submissions less than one month away, we are happy to announce that, during the month of February, Climate Interactive’s analytical team will be setting aside some time to assist those parties and observer organizations who are preparing submissions where scenario modeling could help clarify the submission or add rigor to the argument.

We can either help get your organization or delegation set up with the latest version of our freely available C-ROADS simulation in order to run your own analysis or, for a limited number of cases, we can provide customized analysis to support your submission. To see some examples of the types of questions that can be asked and answered with C-ROADS, take a look at our Climate Scoreboard pages, or some of our analysis of the Durban talks themselves.

To learn more and discuss what might be possible please contact CI co-director, esawin(at)climateinteractive.org

February 6, 2012February 9, 2012 by bethsawin Categories: Analysis, Resources, UNFCCCTags: C-ROADS, COP-17, UNFCCC Leave a comment

Can a Graph Be a Call to Action?

A new article,  2011 Climate Change in Pictures and Data: Just the Facts, shares, in just two pages, seven of the most important graphs on the planet. The datasets are striking, and  author Peter Gleick draws clear conclusions in a very tightly worded piece:

• ” CO₂ in the atmosphere continues its inexorable rise.
• Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases leads to a hotter planet
• A hotter planet means an intensification of the hydrological cycle
• A hotter planet means disappearing glaciers and ice, especially in the Arctic.
• A warming planet also means more extremes of climate.”

I wish policy-makers, business leaders, and citizens around the world had these conclusions, and the datasets behind them, more deeply in mind. Most of the time, these trends aren’t in the headlines, though. They are crowded out by emergencies that feel more immediate, or by stories that feel more entertaining. Our planetary life-support system is changing quickly, but our collective awareness of that fact is slow to catch up with reality.

Is there anything to be done about that?

January 23, 2012January 23, 2012 by bethsawin Categories: Insights, ResourcesTags: climate change, Peter Gleick Leave a comment