Oikos Vienna – a local Austrian chapter of oikos International, with its on-campus presence at WU STaR – marked the start of their 2022 engagements by organizing a Climate Action Simulation workshop En-ROADS. The workshop attendees’ “became” participants at a UN climate summit and had to negotiate an emergency plan for the Paris climate goals. The workshop was led by Florian Kaltseis (in the role of the UN Secretary General) from Teachers for Future.

Workshop scenario: We are racing toward a disaster. If we continue using our planetary resources as we are currently, we will end up destroying our civilization. For this reason, the UN Secretary General called a Climate Emergency Summit, with representatives from commerce and industry, clean tech, conventional energy, agriculture & forestry, world governments, and climate activists.

Taking on different roles, the workshop participants developed global intervention measures, negotiated them with the "other delegations," and finally, tested their effectiveness with the En-ROADS climate simulation model. The results? The workshop attendees were "successful in limiting global warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2100". This gave participants as well as the organizers hope that was still possible to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, although we are well-aware that it is much easier to do so in a virtual simulation workshop than in reality.

The En-ROADS simulation model was developed by Climate Interactive in collaboration with MIT Sloan.

More details here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=22.1.0

Once again, we would like to thank Florian Kaltseis from Teachers for Future for the great implementation!

To learn more about oikos Vienna, visit STaR page: Student Organizations.

[STaR thanks Lucia Mack, BSc | oikos Knowing for contributing this description]