For more details about the simulation, see “Climate Action Gaming Experiment: Methods and Example Results” by Clifford Singer and Leah Matchett.
Set up: Participants (students) represent six regions that together make up the world.
Simulation actions: Participants make periodic policy decisions in ten-year increments. Their policy choices include reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and solar radiation management.
Simulation objectives: Participants aim to decrease global temperature, sea level rise, and carbon dioxide emissions, while maximizing the utility of their regions.
Scenarios: Throughout the simulation and/or during different iterations of the simulation, new constraints that reflect the more complex nature of international policymaking will be imposed for the participants.
- Economic recession: certain regions will see declines in GDP from economic recession caused by intrinsic financial instability or by catastrophic events.
- Political considerations: constraints on policy transfers from one round to the next will occur due to changes in domestic political regimes or parties in power.
- Uncertainty: parameters in the simulation model will be chosen from Markov chain probability distributions with variance at each step that decreases with time (i.e. the long-term consequences of policy decisions only gradually become more predictable as knowledge about climate change and its effects accumulate).