In the past year, the World Bank has turned to serious games as a way to enable stakeholders to experience and come to grips with the challenges of climate change uncertainty. With generous funding from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the World Bank invited the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre to collaborate with the World Bank Climate Change Group's Chief Economist team to develop a game for achieving three objectives:
1. Demonstrate to players the necessity of balancing the value of knowledge with the risks arising from overconfidence in knowledge,2. Introduce players to alternative decision-making approaches in a context of uncertainty and demonstrate that these approaches are both common in everyday life and no more complex than standard probabilistic/optimization approaches, and3. Demonstrate that the robustness of a policy or intervention portfolio depends on assessing the level of uncertainty (including the appropriate degree of confidence in knowledge).
Ideally, climate models would be able to produce climate statistics for the far future. Engineers need such data to optimize future investments. Unfortunately, two problems make it impossible to provide the equivalent of historical climate data for future climates: (i) there is a scale misfit between what can be provided by climate models and what is needed by decision-makers; (ii) there is a large uncertainty on future climate change, especially at a local scale.
Since climate models and observations cannot provide what current decision-making frameworks need, the only solution is to amend our frameworks to take this uncertainty into account. To do so, infrastructure should be designed acknowledging (i) that it will need to cope with a larger range of climate conditions than before; and (ii) that this range is and will remain highly uncertain. In such a context, optimizing infrastructure design for a given climate may not be the best strategy.
A more suitable approach is to develop new strategies, especially those created to cope with the inherent uncertainties of climate change. For instance, it is possible to base decisions on scenario analysis and to choose the robust solution, that is the most insensitive to future climate conditions, instead of looking for the “best” choice under one scenario.
In the past, researchers and practitioners have relied largely on lectures and publications to communicate to decision makers both the problem of deep uncertainty and the concept of robustness as a way to manage it. This unidirectional format has the shortcomings of most prevalent forms of engagement. Governments and institutions around the world commit to spend billions of dollars annually in long-term investments for which managing deep uncertainty is essential. Climate change looms large as a new kind of emergent threat that cannot be managed with traditional approaches to risk management based on refining probabilities and projections.
The "Decisions for the Decade" game is an interactive training tool designed to support learning and dialogue about key aspects of long-term investments under uncertainty. Below are all of the instructions and materials needed for interested parties to learn more about this instrument and how to use the game in their own workshops.
Explanation of game objective, origin, rules and format
Presentations - Provided in English, French and Russian
National Boards - Provided in English, French and Russian
Provincial Boards - Provided in English, French and Russian
Robust Option - Provided in English, French and Russian
Uncertainty Cone