C-ROADS

MIT's John Sterman of the Climate Interactive team explains C-ROADS science and confidence building at the US State Department side event in Copenhagen.

Our team from Sustainability Institute, Ventana Systems, and MIT developed “C-ROADS”, which stands for “Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator.”

Designed for decision makers, C-ROADS is easily used by non-modelers, and runs in less than 0.1 second on a laptop.

C-ROADS has undergone a scientific review from an independent team of respected climate scientists, climate modelers, and system dynamicists. The review committee was chaired by Dr. Robert Watson, former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Click here for the summary statement.

The policy-oriented, or "Common Platform" version of C-ROADS is being used at top government, corporate, and NGO levels, and by individuals participating in or monitoring the UNFCCC negotiations.

Within the global climate treaty negotiations, individual nations are pledging reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and  land-use. These individual pledges come in a multiplicity of forms, and C-ROADS-CP allows these pledges to be quickly aggregated into a global emissions trajectory.

From that emissions trajectory C-ROADS calculates future greenhouse gas concentration, temperature, and sea level rise.

C-ROADS-CP operates at two levels of regional disaggregation — 6 or 15 global negotiating blocs. This allows users to ask questions such as: what if all countries follow their current commitments? what if the EU really reduces emissions 80% below 1990 by 2050, the US follows the Markey-Waxman legislation, Mexico drops 50% below 2002 by 2050, China continues decreasing its emissions intensity, and so on?

C-ROADS helps people quickly understand the long term implications (CO2 concentration, temperature, sea level rise) of any potential global climate agreement and also provides insight into the future cumulative or per capita emissions that would be expected under that agreement.

C-Learn, a learning-oriented, three-region version of this simulator is available online for the world to use, adapt, extend, and translate into new languages in partnership with Forio.

The origins of C-ROADS is the 1997 PHD dissertation of Dr. Thomas Fiddaman, "Feedback Complexity in Integrated Climate-Economy Models," MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Fiddaman now works with Ventana Systems, one of the creators of the current version of C-ROADS as well as other economy-energy-environment simulations.

C-ROADS is copyright 2009, Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems.

Resources:

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• a five page overview of the simulator
• a pdf of a slide show overview of C-ROADS
• the one-page summary from the Scientific Review
• our 77 page technical reference guide on the simulator, including simulation purpose, structure, parameters, test results, and bibliography
• our white paper on one key finding from C-ROADS, presented by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin at a March 2009 scientific conference in Copenhagen, Denmark -- an analysis of emissions reduction proposals for COP-15
• more information on how it has been adapted and used
• a pdf of the slide deck presented by Dr. John Sterman and Dr. Bob Corell on 18 March 2009 at an event of the AMS on Capitol Hill