New Pardee Task Force Report On Gaming and Climate Change

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University has released a new Task Force Report titled Games for a New Climate: Experiencing the Complexity of Future Risks. The report is a collaborative effort of the 12-member Task Force, which was convened on behalf of the Pardee Center by Visiting Research Fellow Pablo Suarez in collaboration with Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre.

The report was compiled and edited by Janot Mendler de Suarez, Pablo Suarez and Carina Bachofen, includes contributions from all of the Task Force members, and provides a detailed exploration of the current and potential ways in which games can be used to help a variety of stakeholders – including subsistence farmers, humanitarian workers, scientists, policymakers, and donors. The report discusses how games can help stakeholders both understand and experience the difficulty and risks related to decision-making in a complex and uncertain future

The dozen Task Force experts represent academic institutions, humanitarian organization, other non-governmental organizations, and game design firms with backgrounds ranging from climate modeling and anthropology to community-level disaster management and national and global policymaking as well as game design. The group met at Pardee House in March 2012 to begin development of the report and participate in a day-long gaming session organized by Suarez.

An electronic version of the paper can be downloaded from the publications library on the Pardee web site. Hard copies are free and may be requested by sending an email to pardee@bu.edu.

More details about the Pardee Center’s activities related to games, including links to videos of gaming sessions, can be found in the Research section of this web site.