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The BBC's Climate Challenge game places you in the role of President of the Europe. You have choices to make about national, trade, agricultural-industrial, local and household policies. Will your economy focus on nuclear power or coal, organic or intensive farming, the olympics or green house gas education programs? Each choice has to balance costs and benefits across variables of economic growth, power, food and water supplies, emissions and political popularity.
Read on to learn about the science behind the game...
The BBC provides a backgrounder on the science behind the game and the range of scenarios that could play out in the climate change debate:
Climate Challenge uses the most commonly cited and accepted carbon
dioxide emission forecasts, which are produced by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC is open to all United Nations members and World
Meteorological Organization and aims to openly and objectively assess
"the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to
understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate
change," according to the IPCC website.
Strategy and making of the game
The play consists of choosing policy cards that have different costs and benefits. From an activist perspective, some of the options presented may be frustrating: how can you quantify political support as easily as financial variables? Nonetheless, the game is fun and shows the complexity of the climate change discussion.
Sources of cards
All policies are taken from actual government policy documents,
except those near the end of the game, which are deliberately
futuristic, such as Mining the Moon. The UK government's Climate Change
Programme 2006 was a major source of policies, and the anticipated
carbon dioxide reductions from each were transferred directly from the
report into the game. The Potential for Microgeneration: Study and
Analysis, carried out by the Energy Saving Trust for the Department for
Trade and Industry (DTI), was also very useful in determining emissions
reductions in many household-level policies.
Card duration
In testing, it was found that having policy cards lasting for
several turns was too complex for the scale of the game. Therefore the
duration of all the cards has been artificially compressed to give all
their modifiers in one single turn. This means that a card's effects
are much higher in the short term than would be the case in real life.
Behind this there is also a necessary assumption about how many turns a
card is in play. We have assumed that power and carbon dioxide effects
are in play for five turns (50 years), and food and water effects for
10 turns (100 years).
Other resources in the game
Energy, food and water are the secondary resources that must be
managed throughout the game. Data for these were taken from various
sources, including the UNEP model mentioned above and the DTI website.
Spending money is set at 0.5% of the GDP of the economies, and the
figures for power, water and food consumption and carbon dioxide
emissions are also derived from data from the UNEP Java climate model.
Food and water statistics were hard to quantify, as the values
needed for the game are not typically published by water companies and
the food industry. In these instances, the producers used estimates
derived in respect to other cards.
For areas where information was unavailable, the producers made use
of secondary sources such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an excellent
source of information, but much of the data is unverified, so must be
used with caution. In these cases, only descriptive information was
used, such as the description of fusion power on the fusion policy card.
PLAY THE GAME ALREADY !!
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