Climate Interactive Exercise

Today, the students experience the Climate Interactive  Exercise as a joint activity with the Energy Policy Design students. This exercise is based on an interactive tool developed at MIT and available at www.climateinteractive.org.

The students assumed the role of a negotiating party in the UNFCCC process (e.g. European Union, United States of America, Brazil, China, India, Japan and the Association Of Small Island States (AOSIS)) and negotiated commitments with each other.

After the exercise, the students understood the complexities of multilateral negotiations involving national agents attempting to cooperate for climate change mitigation, and they are ready to deliver a handout answering questions and reasoning about what was experienced in this interactive exercise.

The final agreement in the end of the session was:

• The European Union and Japan commit to emission reductions of 25% compared to the levels of 1990 by 2020. The U.S.A commit to a differentiated target of 20% emission reductions compared to the levels of 1990 by the same period.
• The US further commit to finance mitigation and adaptation funds for developing countries, which corresponds to 0,4% of the country’s GDP. The contributions from the European Union and Japan correspond to 0,5% of their GDP.
• China, India and Brazil commit to emissions reductions of 10% compared to Business as Usual by 2020.

Thank you all for a great experience and special thanks for Prof. Semida Silveira for her role as President of the session.