C-ROADS-CP

Overview of the "Common Platform" version of C-ROADS

Overview

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.

C-ROADS "Common Platform" (C-ROADS-CP) is a decision-maker oriented version of C-ROADS intended to support real-time analysis of climate policy.

C-ROADs enables negotiators and others to simulate mitigation scenarios in real time on their lap-top

The simulation has been scientifically peer reviewed and calibrated against major IPCCC climate models

A simple graphical user interface enables fast running of "what if scenarios"

C-ROADs translates mitigation scenarios into emissions, concentrations, temperature, per-capita emissions outcomes

The Role of C-ROADS-CP

Trevor Houser of the US State Department discusses his experiences as a C-ROADS-CP user.

Individual nations are making proposals and pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, creating the next global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These proposals take different forms, with different reference years, reference scenarios, target years, and types of proposals.

Determining whether or not these proposals together are enough to achieve climate stabilization is possible with complex disaggregated climate simulations. However, such models can be slow to run and inaccessible to non-modelers.

We believe that the people charged with bringing the world a strong global climate deal will find their job easier to accomplish with access to real-time decision support tools, whose results give them a rapid overview of the long-term impacts of proposals ‘on the table.’

We’ve designed and tested C-ROADS–CP to provide this type of rapid overview, in a form that can give negotiators around the world a common platform to support their discussions. The goal is to complement, not supplant, the larger disaggregated models such as MAGICC, MINICAM, AIM, and others. Indeed, output from C-ROADS-CP can be saved as .xls or .gas files to be further tested in other models.

C-ROADS-CP Structure

Features of C-ROADS-CP

C-ROADS-CP is a system dynamics computer simulation that consolidates the insights from the suite of models used in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Output from C-ROADS-CP is consistent with the output of the larger, more disaggregated models used in AR4.

C-ROADS-CP is disaggregated into 15 negotiating blocs. The simulation outputs include: Global and regional greenhouse gas emissions, per capita and cumulative CO2 emissions, greenhouse gas concentrations, temperature, sea level rise.

Click here to view a larger version of the video