Pershing in Barcelona: "We Use C-ROADS" And Now Others Can Too

By Andrew P. Jones
November 7, 2009

The U.S. State Department is using our interactive climate simulator, C-ROADS.

At the “NGO Briefing” of the UNFCCC meeting in Barcelona last week, someone asked the U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, “What analytical tools do you use to make your climate impact calculations?”  Mr. Pershing answered: “We use a simulation called C-ROADS out of MIT, which is based on sound science.”

For those who would like to learn more about this simulation (including the other groups behind it, including Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems), please explore our online materials, including scientific review, and simplified online version accessible to anyone on web.

And, UNFCCC negotiation parties other than the US can now get their own copies of the simulation. Grants to Sustainability Institute from ClimateWorks, the Morgan Family Foundation, Rockefeller Brother Fund, and Zennstrom Philanthropies have made such access possible.

Interested parties can contact climateinteractive@sustainer.org

For more on why the U.S. State Department uses C-ROADS, here is a quote from a staffer:

“It’s quite important for us to discuss emissions reduction goals in terms of climate response; policy makers and negotiators need to have a reasonable sense of what a particular action will mean for global climate, when considered in the context of other actions and policies around the world.

“Previously, we would make these calculations offline.  We’d download emissions projections from a reliable modeling source, input them to an excel spreadsheet to adjust for various policy options, and then enter each proposed global emissions path into a model like MAGICC to estimate the climate response.  This method worked, but it was time consuming and opaque: in the end we had a set of static graphs that we could bring into a meeting, but we couldn’t make quick adjustments on the fly.

“With C-ROADS, we can adjust policy assumptions in real-time, through an intuitive interface.  This makes it much easier to assess the environmental integrity of various proposed emissions targets and to discuss how complementary emissions targets might achieve a climate goal, or to evaluate how changes in an emissions targets might affect global temperature through the 21st century.”