South and Latin American Leaders Engage in Climate Policy Exercise

By Stephanie McCauley
August 7, 2009

Today’s guest blogger is our longtime friend and colleague, the system dynamics modeler and facilitator Chris Soderquist of Pontifex Consulting.

On July 30, I delivered a systems thinking session at George Washington University’s Workshop of Political Management of Change (V Taller de Gerencia Poliítica de Proyectos de Cambio). The attendees (over 100) were from South and Latin America and were all either politicians or representatives of political parties. During the session, when asked what important stock they were concerned about, one participant volunteered CO2 in the atmosphere. After simulating a simple “bathtub” model, I presented C-Learn as a proxy for C-ROADS. There was interest in getting access to C-ROADS for the upcoming Copenhagen summit; in particular, the Brazilian representatives were quite enthusiastic. One area of particular interest that generated discussion…not surprisingly…was the concept of economic and social equity between the developed world and developing worlds. Participants got the message about early and substantial interventions being necessary to achieve suggested targets.