BUILD A CATASTROPHE: USING DIGITAL WORLD AND POLICY MODELS TO ENGAGE POLITICAL SCIENCE STUDENTS WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change is a problem that involves science, economics, and politics. In the US, political resistance to addressing climate change has been exacerbated by a concerted misinformation campaign against the basic science, a negative response to how the proposed solutions intersect with values. Scientists often propose more climate science education as a solution to the problem, but preliminary studies indicate that more science education does not necessarily reduce polarization on the topic (Kahan et al. 2012).

To address this problem, we tested a new digital world-building model based on resource development and environmental and societal impacts in an existing political science course, “Do You Want to Build a Nation?” Students spend half the class building their nations based on their assigned ideology (i.e., socialist, oligarchy, libertarian) and the second half negotiating with other nations to resolve global issues while remaining true to their ideologies. We have designed a digital world model based on resources linked to an adaptive decision-making environment that translates student policies into modifications of the digital world. The model tracks students’ exploration and justification of their nation’s policy choices. In response to their collective policy choices, students see impacts of climate change on their nations’ resources and are given an opportunity to adjust their policies.

The scenario has been offered three times since Fall 2017. Students report knowing “something” or “a great deal” about climate change, prefer maximum global efforts to address it, feel confident that we can solve the problem, and propose green energy options when developing their internal country policies. However, when confronted with the political realities of their countries, collectively, the students make decisions that increase greenhouse gas emissions and consistently fail to make significant inroads on reducing global emissions. Despite the diplomatic failures, students show improved utilization of data to make decisions and an increased awareness of the impact of climate change on human food production and migration patterns, not just sea levels.

We will report on the technical details of how the digital world model and scenarios are constructed as well as a complete analysis of student results.