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Climate Change Game

A cooperation game that lets students experience some of the challenges of cooperation in addressing global climate change

In a classroom game with changing conditions students have to work together to mitigate an outcome that is disastrous for everyone. Different versions of this game can be played to help students experience and reflect on their behaviors, strategies and outcomes under different conditions.

The game is based on Milinski et al. (2008) to simulate the dilemma inherent in addressing global climate change.

Link to teaching material

Teaching material type Analogy mapping, data, Full lesson plan, Game, Payoff Matrix

Subject Areas ESD, Ethics, Geography, Politics, Social Studies

Learning Goals Cooperation Competency, Self-Regulation Competency, Systems Thinking

Suitable Grade Levels 9-12, Undergraduate

Concepts Cooperation, Fairness, Moral cognition, Social dilemma, Sustainable resource use

Content Anchors Common-Pool Resource management, Games, Sustainable Development Goals

Author: Susan Hanisch

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike [CC BY-NC-SA]

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Related Literature

The collective-risk social dilemma and the prevention of simulated dangerous climate change

Read now

Milinski, M., Sommerfeld, R. D., Krambeck, H.-J., Reed, F. A., & Marotzke, J. (2008). The collective-risk social dilemma and the prevention of simulated dangerous climate change. PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(7), 2291–2294. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0709546105

Will a group of people reach a collective target through individual contributions when everyone suffers individually if the target is missed? This “collective-risk social dilemma” exists in various social scenarios, the globally most challenging one being the prevention of dangerous climate change. Reaching the collective target requires individual sacrifice, with benefits to all but no guarantee that others will also contribute. It even seems tempting to contribute less and save money to induce others to contribute more, hence the dilemma and the risk of failure. Here, we introduce the collective-risk social dilemma and simulate it in a controlled experiment: Will a group of people reach a fixed target sum through successive monetary contributions, when they know they will lose all their remaining money with a certain probability if they fail to reach the target sum? We find that, under high risk of simulated dangerous climate change, half of the groups succeed in reaching the target sum, whereas the others only marginally fail. When the risk of loss is only as high as the necessary average investment or even lower, the groups generally fail to reach the target sum. We conclude that one possible strategy to relieve the collective-risk dilemma in high-risk situations is to convince people that failure to invest enough is very likely to cause grave financial loss to the individual. Our analysis describes the social window humankind has to prevent dangerous climate change. © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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