Version gamma

Workshop: Beyond Climate Wedges

Try out the prototype of our game, for showing what getting to zero emissions globally looks like

(If it isn't clear - German speakers are welcome to this session too)

We are environmentally focussed technologists and game designers, building a game to help players understand the options available to us using technology we have now, to get to zero carbon emissions in the coming decade. By creating a portfolio of these options to get to zero emissions, players learn how effective each option is, what the trade-offs are in each case

The Stabilisation Wedges game is an educational game used in classrooms, universities and business seminars since 2007, to aid discussion about what kind of measures are available now with existing technology, to stop the growth of annual global CO2 emissions each year.

Players work in teams to put together a portfolio of different policy decisions, and different technologies, which when combined to form a ‘wedge’ to stabilise the year on year growth in emissions, so emissions stay level each year.

However, in 2015, at the COP21 conference, almost every country on Earth agreed to a resolution to limit global warming to two degrees celsius. To make this possible, we now need to reduce emissions to zero by 2100, with most of these reductions delivered by 2050.

In this session, we'll be testing a prototype of a ‘Beyond Wedges’, an educational game based on the 'wedges' approach., where players work in teams to create a similar portfolio of measures, but updated with information from IPCC scenarios and publications like the recently published sources like Drawdown (http://drawdown.com/).

The aim of the game to act as a discussion tool, to better understand what getting zero carbon emissions would look like.

The aim of this workshop is to gain feedback about the prototype - how ‘playable’ it is, how well it helps players have an informed discussion about the changes ahead of us, and where possible incorporate the latest science from specialists with domain expertise - there may be ‘wedges‘ available that we haven’t considered which are worth incorporating into future versions of the game.

This feedback will go into refining the game, which we intend make freely available under similar terms as the original climate wedges game (essentially free to use in educational contexts), and to help with building an online version of the game.