WarmGame: A Game For All Seasons

By Mark Yeandle, Mike Young and Ian Harris
Published by The London Accord: Making Investment Work For The Climate, City of London Corporation (2007).

Research organisation

Z/Yen

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WarmGame: A Game for all Seasons

Document summary

A great deal is written about the political aspect of climate change negotiations. Developed by Z/Yen, WarmGame is a role playing game where six major carbon producing countries try to reach multi-lateral agreement to tackle climate change.

It illustrates that games where collaboration is poor, result in higher predicted temperature rises and in countries investing more heavily in defences rather than in reducing carbon emissions.

WarmGame gives some indication of the difficulties involved in forging a multilateral agreement between the big carbon producers. WarmGame demonstrates how these difficulties occur, why different countries have different viewpoints, and why these difficulties need to be overcome. This paper argues that as hard as they are to accomplish, multilateral agreements to address climate change will be the only way to make a meaningful difference.