WIRED
- Heather Higinbotham Davies
What even happened at the UN climate summit—and could you do a better job?
These online and in-person simulators let you take a swing at saving the
world.
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Photograph: Christoph Soeder/Getty Images
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Author
Heather Higinbotham Davies
is a writer, poet, TEDx speaker, and eco-warrior. She is
literally writing the book on being an environmental
hypocrite. She holds an MS in Environmental Science and MBA
in Sustainable Systems, and works in sustainability education and
climate action.
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From October 31 to November 12, all
eyes were on Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties
(COP26).
Humanity waited with collective bated breath, hoping
world governments would commit to sufficient emissions reduction targets to
keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and imploring developed countries to
make good on climate finance promises to help developing countries manage
disproportional climate impacts.
World leaders negotiated,
peacocked, blamed, pleaded, and threatened in attempts to come together to
avert catastrophic climate change.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opened COP26 with an
urgent warning: “We are digging our own graves … recent climate action
announcements might give the impression that we are on track to
turn things around. This is an illusion. Even in the best-case
scenario, temperatures will rise well above 2 degrees Celsius.”
He added emphatically, “We are still heading for climate
disaster … Failure is not an option. Failure is a death
sentence.”
The cost of our inaction and procrastination has drastically
upped the stakes in our fight against climate change: To keep
warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world must reduce annual
greenhouse gas emissions by
45 percent over the next eight years.
As the week wore on, I got the sinking feeling we’d seen this
movie before, and we knew how it would end. Guterres confirmed
these fears in his
closing remarks: “The collective political will was not enough to overcome
such deep contradictions … our fragile planet is hanging by a
thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate
catastrophe. It’s time to go into emergency mode or our chance
of reaching net-zero will itself be zero.”
What Happened, Exactly?
There were
some successful outcomes
from COP26, both inside and outside of the formal negotiations:
bold commitments to reduce methane emissions and halt/reverse
deforestation, commitments to end support for international
fossil fuel development, and an agreement to
phase out domestic coal
(the US was not a signatory on this agreement).
For
the first time, the conference addressed “
loss and damage,” the phrase used for impacts that climate-vulnerable nations
have already experienced and can no longer adapt to (for example
land lost to sea-level rise or forced climate migration due to
drought).
Still, the commitments are not even close to what is needed to
stave off devastating impacts from climate change. According to
the
World Resources Institute, plans and commitments coming out of COP26 would limit warming
to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, a far cry from what scientists
agree is a safe target. Many countries made net-zero pledges,
but most don’t even have policies in place to achieve their
updated 2030 pledges, much less net-zero commitments.
In all, 197 nations signed on to the
Glasgow Climate Pact, the final agreement of COP26. The pact “requests” that
signatories reconvene in 2022 (breaking from the precedent of
meeting every five years), with strengthened 2030 emissions
reduction targets to align with the Paris Agreement goal of
limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
It also requests that countries commit more
resources to provide aid to vulnerable countries saddled with
the most devastating impacts of climate change. Several
countries (including high emitters like Australia) have
already stated
that their targets are fixed and that they have no intention of
submitting strengthened targets in 2022.
Last-minute pressure from China and India resulted in heavily
watered-down language in the
final agreement: Rather than calling on countries to accelerate the “phasing
out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels,” the agreement’s
final language states the goal of “accelerating efforts toward
the phase-down of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil
fuel subsidies.”
This is not simply a matter of
semantics. The text is littered with phrases like “requests” and
“calls upon” and “invites” and “encourages,” starkly reminding
us that the pact is not binding.
See Clearly What's At Stake
It’s infuriating to watch world leaders fail to deliver the
necessary commitments and action on climate change. If you’re
feeling frustrated by the lack of meaningful outcomes from
COP26, why not try your hand at saving humanity from itself and
host your own international climate negotiations? Or try
figuring out the right combination of emissions reduction
strategies to prevent the end of life as we know it?
Thanks to nonprofit think tank
Climate Interactive, you can role-play the UN Climate Negotiations or calculate
the emissions reduction potential of your favorite “save the
planet” policies and climate-friendly actions. Climate
Interactive, in partnership with the
MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, created two tools to make climate science and climate action
more accessible and less science-y:
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En-ROADS
(Energy Rapid Overview and Decision Support) is a free, online
simulation tool that models warming based on input climate
actions and policies focused on things like taxes, subsidies,
economic growth, fuel mix, energy efficiency, technical
innovation, and other factors.
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C-ROADS
(Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) is a climate
change policy simulator that tests countries’ emissions
reduction pledges to determine whether they are sufficient to
stay within the planetary limitations scientists agree on.
Ellie Johnston, climate and energy program coordinator for
Climate Interactive, shares more about Climate Interactive’s
goals and the science behind these simulation models:
“Our goal is to help people understand the vast scope of
possible actions we might take on climate,” Johnston says. “We
synthesized the best available science from reports and
institutions like the IEA (International Energy Agency), IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and the World Bank
to create a free and easy-to-use model so people can quickly
distill insights that would be incredibly difficult to glean
from reading the reports.”
“En-ROADS and C-ROADS are tools to test out our mental
models—does planting trees or implementing a carbon tax have as
much impact as I think it will? I can plug in various scenarios
and see which actions make a difference in temperature or
sea-level rise, or species loss, or ocean acidification. They
are like flight simulators,” Johnston explains.
“Just as pilots use a simulator when training to fly
an airplane, we can simulate different climate and policy
actions, get feedback, and explore why some actions are more
impactful than others. We only have one planet. We need to test
theories to see what has the highest impacts.”
En-ROADS is fun (and depressing) to explore. Spoiler alert: The
massive scale of combined actions needed to keep warming below
1.5 degrees Celsius quickly becomes obvious. There is no single
solution. Users can input any combination of scenarios, from
carbon pricing to reducing deforestation to electric vehicles to
ending fossil fuel subsidies, and instantly visualize how those
solutions impact outcomes like future warming and sea-level
rise.
Didn’t quite keep temperature increase below 1.5 degrees
Celsius, or even 2 degrees Celsius? Try again, except swap out
EVs for highly subsidized renewable energy, or reduce economic
or population growth. En-ROADS exposes which policies and
strategies are likely to have the biggest impact.
Run the simulation on your own, tweaking climate
strategies, or have a party and invite your friends over to
debate which strategies global leaders should prioritize while
you yell at the real-world negotiations on the news broadcasts.
With En-ROADS, you can visualize land area lost to
sea-level rise
and explore global flood risk maps. You can identify which
species are losing range due to climate change, and where. You
can calculate estimated decreases in crop yield or increased
deaths resulting from higher temperatures. This is significant
in areas that historically never needed air conditioning and are
seeing
record heat-related deaths, like the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.
Role-Play Your Own UN Climate Summit
If you’re more interested in the nuances of high-stakes
negotiations and climate justice, check out C-ROADS. Individuals
can
run the simulation online, but it’s more fun to
role-play a simulated United Nations climate summit.
Climate Interactive provides facilitator
resources and materials for hosting. Groups can represent
developed and developing countries in broad categories, or if
you have more players, you can play a six-region game and
represent the United States, the European Union, China, India,
other developed nations, and other developing nations. You can
also add representation for climate activists, fossil fuel
lobbyists, the press corps, and the United States Climate
Alliance.
My college-level students participate in mock-UN climate
negotiations to help them understand the complexities of
real-world negotiations and gain a more tangible understanding
of the impacts of possible climate actions. Student groups are
provided with guidelines of actual climate or financial impacts
their represented country or stakeholder group is facing and
what they need out of the negotiations, and tasked with
proposing climate solutions their group is willing to
take.
To make the role-play more realistic, students who represent
low-lying island nations are required to sit on the floor at the
back of the room while students representing wealthy business
groups or developed countries are given superior placement with
fancy chairs, snacks, and special treatment at the front of the
class.
It’s inspiring to see my students embrace their assigned country
or stakeholder group. They would have secret conversations in
the hallways, bribe other groups, passionately plead their case
to the entire class, do whatever they could to defend their
proposals or the urgency of their situation. Some chose to walk
out of negotiations.
I entered their proposals into
the C-ROADS climate simulator, and the tool immediately
calculated whether the proposals were sufficient to keep warming
below 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius. When cumulative
commitments failed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius
(which they always did), students representing the island
nations were covered with a tarp to represent their islands no
longer being habitable due to sea-level rise.
Sometimes, classes would renegotiate and drop all political
infighting to find a way to stay under a 1.5 degree-Celsius
rise. Mostly, students would stare at the screen, deers in the
headlights, and I would feel (moderately) guilty for crushing
their hope that my and older generations would somehow figure it
out and not saddle them with the enormous disaster we’ve
created.
There is contagious energy from getting people into a room to
geek out on the dynamics of climate change. Nobody needs to be a
scientist or a politician.
You can play negotiator,
debate who’s responsible for what, and at the end, recognize the
scale of the challenges and what’s needed to address them.
C-ROADS is awesome because it helps clarify who’s responsible
for the bulk of historical and current emissions, what we must
do globally to reduce emissions, and how to equitably determine
who should pay for what.
“People are hungry for that one silver bullet that’s going to
fix climate change, whether it’s driving an electric car or
changing their diets. But it takes more than one seed to plant a
garden,” Johnston said.
“Those things are helpful,
but En-ROADS shows the role they play and where there is
leverage. It shows the whole picture and the required suite of
actions. We can do everything to promote good actions, but above
all, we must stop extracting fossil fuels. There aren’t any
scenarios that keep us below 1.5 degrees Celsius that involve
expansion of fossil fuel use. Even the IEA is saying there is no
other option but to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
The urgency of this crisis demands that we
push our own governments
for ambitious and necessary climate action. These tools can be
used to influence decision-makers and members of Congress, to
help them understand the impacts and solutions. Climate
Interactive made these tools freely available to everyone to
build the necessary climate ambition we need to create a livable
future for all.
“We can think about how difficult and challenging this will be,
or we can look at all the amazing benefits that come with
climate action,” Johnston said. “Shutting down coal plants
reduces air pollution and saves lives. Future generations will
be able to breathe cleaner air than any of us have ever
experienced.”
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