“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.”
“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 22nd 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: Continue reading →
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.” Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
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.
As global warming advances, much of the planet’s most vulnerable population is already seeing its livelihood affected. In some cases, the effect is so strong that people must uproot their lives entirely and join the growing ranks of the world’s environmental refugees.
(From left) Dr. Travis Franck, Ovais Sarmad from the International Organization for Immigration (IOM) and IDMC Director Alfredo Zamudio present Climate Interactive’s new simulation before the UN.
It was in this context that Climate Interactive showcased some of our latest climate tools at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Humanitarian Affairs Segment in Geneva last month.
Presented by Dr. Travis Franck, the Kenya Pastoralists Drought-induced Displacement Simulator seeks to apply systems thinking to policies aiding environmental refugees in Northeast Kenya. As pastoralists who live off the land are increasingly displaced by droughts in this part of the world, governments and humanitarian organizations are hoping this model will help them develop the appropriate adaptation strategies.
“We’re using a model that’s never been used in this arena before,” Franck says. Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
“As youth, we don’t have a voice in this fight. In the sense that, like, there’s no way that I can climb the government ladder and end up in a position of enough political power to save myself now. I’m never going to get that chance. And there are kids who are being born today, or born 10 years ago, they’re not really going to get that chance either, if we don’t start winning in the next couple of years.”
Those are the words of Alli Welton, a 20 year-old college student quoted in an excellent article in Grist by Wen Stephenson (The children: Why a generation is putting itself on the line for the climate). Stephenson’s article, and especially the strong clear words of the youth he interviews, can help us all see through the eyes of today’s youth climate leaders, who grasp the narrowing window of opportunity for strong and effective action on climate change and are mobilizing for fossil fuel divestment, against mountain top removal, and to block the Keystone XL pipeline in growing numbers.
At Climate Interactive, we are as likely to tell a story with numbers and graphs as we are with words. Our new CO2 Timeline Tool corroborates the point made in different ways by each of the young people interviewed by Stephenson; decisions about climate and energy that are being made today will reverberate, for better or worse, through lives of today’s children and youth. The long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere guarantees that today’s fossil fuel pollution will warm the Earth for decades to come. And policy that keeps fossil fuels in the ground today, keeps more options open for young people’s futures.
A tenant of systems thinking is that responsibility for important decisions should be given to those who will feel the impacts of the decision. For that reason alone all of us should listen, really listen, to what young people are asking, and, increasingly, demanding. In that sense the CO2 Timeline Tool tells an ethical story, and a story that should make all of us, young and old alike, stop and think about who should have the strongest voice in the climate fight.
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. Continue reading →
Check out this selection of eight simulations that show us pathways to addressing climate change at different scales.
In a world of interacting parts, where one things lead to another, which leads back to the other and off to another, simulations can help us understand the pathways that will address the challenges we face. These tools below complement the simulations we have created at Climate Interactive to see what works in addressing climate change. Thanks to our colleague at MIT’s Climate CoLab, Rob Laubacher, who pulled together this collection. Last year we covered some of these simulations in our popular review of games focused on climate change.
Fate of the World – A computer game based on the work of Myles Allen at Oxford. The game’s goal is to prevent global warming through actions like bans on certain fuel types or investment in new technologies. http://fateoftheworld.net/
Check out this selection of eight simulations that show us pathways to addressing climate change at different scales.
Climate Interactive - The Blog 