My name is Travis Frank.
I am a program director at a nonprofit called Climate
Interactive.
And we do a lot of work to reach government leaders, citizens,
and businesses to communicate and have them experience
climate change policies.
My background is in engineering systems and complex system
modeling.
And I've taken those skills into the policy world
and applied them in this NGO climate interactive
to build complex but real-time interactive models of climate
policy and climate action
You get a lot more credibility when
you walk into a room, even a policy room,
with an MIT technical background than you do, possibly,
coming from a policy world into a technical room.
So I think coming in that direction--
I'm going from a technical background
and trying to apply it to policy--
is actually maybe an easier and more credible way.
We at Climate Interactive started engaging with
policymakers prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference--
so this was around 2007--
and started talking with lead negotiators
from around the world, delegates to the UNFCCC, and asked them,
well, what would it take to achieve 2 degrees,
their agreed-upon goal.
And many of them didn't know.
And so what we decided-- and we saw a need
to create a policy tool, a climate model,
that would be relevant for them.
Climate Interactive developed the C-ROADS climate simulator--
stands for climate rapid overview and decision support
simulator--
and this model added up the pledges in the language
of the negotiators-- so we could take the text of their document
and type it into the computer, effectively--
and tell them whether or not they could achieve 2 degrees.
We've had a lot of articles in the Washington Post
and the Associated Press and the New York Times around,
what does it mean to have a Trump presidency?
What are the effects on climate change?
And because we can run our climate scenarios very quickly,
a lot of what-ifs--
What if the United States simply pulled back its Clean Power
Plan initiatives?
What if the United States turned out
to be sort of a leader in the rollback of climate pledges?
And what if the rest of the world
ended up following sort of a--
less of a 2-degree pathway?
And so we were able to really quickly run
those what-if scenarios.
And we framed them very carefully
as these different possibles, extremes.
You know, what if the rest of the world started rolling back?
What if this happened, what if that?
We don't know.
But because we were able to do a rigorous analysis,
qualify but rigorous analysis stating our assumptions up
front, rapidly, we were able to work with journalists
to help frame the discussion around all
of the important kind of reactions that were happening
in December-- or in November and December after the election.
Our Climate Smart Agriculture modeling project in Africa
is really important because Africans
are the most vulnerable to climate change, and yet--
so will feel the impacts of all the change.
And so much of their economies in Africa
are based on agricultural production.
So we have a lot of smallholder farmers.
So we're doing the modeling project
in which we're looking at the impacts of climate change
and how agricultural policies could change
to improve production, reduce carbon emissions,
and also improve the resilience of farmers
in 2050 in a warmer world.
One of the ways we really do make an impact in the world
is actually by having people experience
climate change and the climate negotiations for themselves.
And we think this is really important.
And one of the reasons we do real-time modeling at Climate
Interactive is because people need
to experience the system in order to understand it better
and to learn and make better decisions.
One way that people can experience
climate change and the climate negotiations
is by running through a role-play simulation
that we call World Climate.
And World Climate is freely available on Climate
Interactive's website.
And what happens is, people walk into a room with no knowledge
of climate change.
They can be experts, they can not be experts.
We've run this from K through 12 up to CEOs and government
leaders.
And the room is divided into country groups.
You-- this table, become China.
This table, become Africa.
This table, become the EU.
And we give them briefings, tell them to read,
and all of a sudden they become UN negotiators,
just like you would have at the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change.
And they negotiate a global treaty.
We give them the charge of staying below 2 degrees
Celsius, or even better, closer to 1.5.
And they'd do their hardest to negotiate a global treaty.
At the end of a round of negotiations,
we take their negotiated positions
and enter them into our climate model.
And we take the discussion that's happened
and all the horse trading that's going on
in the room and the passionate speeches and people
getting really excited and angry at one another,
and we ground it back into the science, the scientifically
reviewed model.
And we say, you know, for all of that discussion,
you only achieved 3.3 degrees.
You only lowered temperatures about 1 degree Celsius.
That's not good enough.
Go back and do it again.
And then people start negotiating and trading.
And we've had people being excited, and some really good
moments and when groups do it, but there's
often a lot of frustration.
And sometimes, people cry.
And it's just kind of all over the board.
But you get people engaged with the scientific materials,
because we talk about why action now is important
as opposed to waiting.
You get people emotionally engaged.
They understand a little bit about the international climate
geopolitics of the situation.
And it's just a really rich experience.
I'm particularly excited and I feel
I've had a really good day when I've had conversations
with people where I know they've had aha moments, where I know
they walked into the room and had
a mental model in which they thought,
the climate system works like this.
By talking with them, really listening to them,
having them engage with me, but also with our simulators,
with our computer models, in which
we test their ideas in front of them,
and then they challenge our models
because the results aren't what they expected.
And then they ask about our assumptions.
And then we talk about the underlying view of the world.
And I can see their mental model shift.