Thanks to everyone who joined us for our interactive Lunch & Learn on Climate Change Solutions facilitated by Allison Bender and Scott Williams from the Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI). Working together, our group was able to create a climate mitigation scenario that keeps the global community under 2 °C warming.
The En-ROADS Simulator is an online policy simulation model that lets you explore how changes in energy use, economic growth, land use, and more alter the climate. It can be used as an educational tool to inform climate action, and inspire hope for the future of the climate. The simulator is developed by Climate Interactive, Ventana Systems, and MIT Sloan using leading climate data.
You can see the control panel and outcomes from our workshop’s specific scenario (pictured above) here. The control panel distills all the complex science and data into a more accessible and interactive form. As you add actions like energy efficiency and renewables to your scenario, the amount the global temperature increases by year 2100 changes. For example, decreasing the coal energy supply slider makes coal highly taxed globally, which lowers the global increase in temperature from 4.1 to 3.9 °C.
As we know from The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), limiting global warming to 1.5 °C helps us avoid impacts of climate change like extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, coral bleaching, loss of ecosystems, and more. So the goal of our workshop was to get as close to 1.5 °C as possible while learning together. We made it to 1.8 °C with our combination of actions. Try out the simulator yourself here to see if you can make it below 1.5 °C.
The workshop encouraged thoughtful engagement and conversation among participants. It’s a great way to talk about the many actions we need to take globally to mitigate climate change, and visualize the various impacts of those actions. Allison and Scott from WEI are available to facilitate an En-ROADS Climate Solutions Workshop for your organization. Reach out to them here to set one up.
