The Copenhagen Climate Exercise is a role-playing climate simulation designed by MIT and Sustainability Institute that gives groups from 10-60 an experience of reaching a global agreement to mitigate climate change.
Set up as a highly simplified “Copenhagen-2009-like” U.N. meeting, participants play the role of delegates from three regions of the world and work together to reach a global accord that meets the group’s goal for CO2 levels. A ”UN Secretary General” receives pledges from three different “blocs”, asks her or his technical staff to simulate them in the “C-ROADS” climate simulation (or its simpler version, “C-Learn”), and informs delegates of results, often sending them back for another round of debate, strategizing, and collaboration.
Exercises run from 1.5-3 hours.
Over the past year, Drew Jones of Sustainability Institute and John Sterman of MIT have run the policy exercise for European business leaders in Greenland, European Union government policymakers, oil executives, the US Forest Service, members of The Climate Group, and students at MIT and the University of North Carolina. The simulation debrief tends to cover multiple areas: international geo-political dynamics, the biogeochemistry of climate (oceans, plants, the carbon cycle, tipping points), cultural barriers to global agreements, managing hope and fear amidst an uncertain future, a “systems” perspective on complex issues, and the technological, legal, and behavioral changes that will help stabilize the climate.
Overall, we’ve seen the Copenhagen Climate Exercise help people quickly learn the policy-relevant science of climate change, viscerally experience the international dynamics, and succeed at crafting a solution to the challenges, while taking a realistic look at the scale of changes ahead as we shift to a low-carbon global economy.
We are running this and other policy exercises in the areas of the UN negotiations and related executive-level strategy development exclusively via SI’s and MIT’s partnership with the Heinz Center and others as part of the Climate Action Initiative.
For more information on the policy exercise, see the article on the CCE in MIT’s Technology Review. Or read our blog entry on the exercise and its latest appearances.
The simulation model at the core of the CCE is called C-ROADS and has been created by Ventana Systems, Sustainability Institute, and MIT’s System Dynamics Group. More information may be found here.
The project blog has a recent explanation of the broader initiative (with MIT, The Heinz Center and others) of which CCE is a part.
Building on the example of the 1994 simulation-based, two party negotiation game Susclime, by Bert de Vries and Tom Fiddaman, this exercise emerged from the classrooms of Andrew Jones at UNC’s Kenan Flagler Business School and John Sterman at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2006. Its approach was then influenced by the Center for a New American Security’s 2.5 day “Clout and Climate Change” War Game, by another negotiation exercise — Climate Diplomat, by Craig Hart (whose materials are often used with CCE), and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game. The policy exercise has been adapted to meet different purposes and groups by Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Chris Soderquist, and Kris Wile.
