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What international agreement within the UNFCCC would lead to stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere?

What would it take for the US to reduce fossil fuel emissions 80% by 2050?

How much can energy efficiency in buildings reduce a company's carbon footprint?  By when?

We think questions like these hold the keys to our future.  And that policymakers, businesses, and individuals need ways to find the answers right now.

[View a PPT slide deck on our work here.]

That’s where we come in.

Climate Interactive is building a community that creates, shares, and uses credible models, accessible simulations, and related media in order to improve the way leaders and citizens around the world think about the climate.  Our purpose is to get these sims and insights into the world as accessible products so they can be tweaked, enhanced, translated,  distributed and used to power change around the world.

We’re building sims that are easy to use by climate analysts, communicators, and leaders of many types, and that provide immediate feedback, so users can see the results of different scenarios on atmospheric carbon levels and temperature.

And we're sharing our own analysis  so that leaders have access to powerful insights. In particular, the "Climate Action Initiative" which includes policy leaders such as Dr. Robert Corell is using our simulations to make change at the highest levels of governments.

C-ROADS is being used within international climate negotiations. The United States Department of State has used the C-ROADS simulator to understand the climate impacts of various country-level proposals and to share that understanding with other parties to the UNFCCC (for example, Deputy Special Envoy Jonathan Pershing presented C-ROADS analysis at UNFCCC meetings in Bonn and Copenhagen).

Don’t simulations like this already exist?  Not really.  Most existing energy and climate models are extremely complex, take too long to run, and can’t be used by untrained people.

We’re working to change that. 

Why sims?

Responding to climate change requires us to think clearly about the future. And one of the things we know about climate is that the economic, atmospheric, and social systems that drive the climate defy most human intuition.

So we need a way to see the future without waiting for it to arrive. And it turns out that simulation models are very good at helping us do that. We have published an overview of our approach in SoL "Reflections" Journal. 

Here’s our plan.

We’ve put together a talented team to do two things:

1. Create simulations.

   Project partners, including Ventana Systems and MIT, are building a set of simulators with engaging interfaces and compelling output displays. These sims will allow learners, step by step, to deepen their understanding of climate dynamics, from the most rudimentary “carbon accounting” to progressively more complex explorations of strategic options for reducing emissions and their likely effects.

   C-ROADS is our best example.

2. Enable a Broader Community to Create, Extend, and Share Simulations.

   Climate Interactive is being built as a Web 2.0 platform to enable climate-related simulation use and sharing.

   We will be gathering, documenting, posting, and promoting various climate models and pieces of climate models for use by other modelers. For example, another model builder might download a model of the carbon footprint of an electrical utility in order to learn from it and adapt it.

   We will also be posting climate-related models as web services that other programs can call, similar to how programmers have extended Google Earth to include maps of sea level rise and other impacts of climate change. In addition, we’ll post the HTML code for user interfaces and document the connection to the model that sits beneath it, so others can customize their own simulations to reach their desired audiences while using our suite of simulation models.

What does this all mean? 

It means that our work can be adapted for use by corporate leaders, green investors, UN negotiators, or high school science classes in multiple languages and levels of scientific complexity.   We hope to tap into the creativity and collective intelligence of many people around the world to improve and extend our simulation interfaces — and extend their impact through videos, podcasts, essays, and other media.

What is the organizational structure? 

Climate Interactive is a project of the New Venture Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization registered in the United States.