The Climate Casino: Teaching Climate Change and Mitigation Through Play

Climate change is a complex problem that spans multiple disciplines, including natural science, socioeconomics, ethics, and politics. This complexity makes it challenging to make well-informed decisions about climate change. We therefore introduce The Climate Casino, an educational game that offers a fun and engaging way to learn about climate change and mitigation.

At the start of the game, participants are divided into groups representing different geographic regions. They are given two goals: a primary, shared goal to keep global warming below 1.5°C and a secondary, competitive goal to maximise their own region’s economic development. These competing goals create a tricky balance between cooperation and self-interest, introducing challenges such as the free-riding problem.

The groups’ assigned regions differ in economic and climatic conditions, and are responsible for various amounts of greenhouse gas emissions—reflecting real-world inequalities. Each group makes decisions for its region by setting a carbon tax. Higher carbon taxes increase production costs, leading to reduced economic output and, consequently, lower emissions. Thus, the carbon tax influences the economy through two competing mechanisms: reduced productivity, which negatively impacts economic output, and reduced climate change, which can have positive or negative economic effects depending on the region.

The consequences of the participants’ decisions are calculated using the coupled climate–economy model NorESM2-DIAM, which provides both climatic and economic outcomes. While necessarily simplified, this approach introduces participants to key concepts in climate modelling and highlights the role of uncertainty and regional differences in climate–economy interactions.

Through surveys before and after playing the game, we see that participants change how they think about climate change and mitigation. This demonstrates the potential of The Climate Casino as an engaging educational tool that can promote greater climate literacy.