Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Resource Economics

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Polluters learn more. With a new empirical study ...



Polluters learn more. With a new empirical study, Jasper Meya and Klaus Eisenack show for the first time that a board game on climate change successfully teaches and communicates international climate policy.

For the study, more than 200 young people aged 13 to 16 from Germany took part in game sessions with the climate game KEEP COOL. They were asked beforehand and afterwards about their believes on international climate policy, and their playing behaviour was observed. It turns out that players change their attitudes statistically significantly. For example, they believe they have a greater personal responsibility to tackle climate change. They are also becoming more optimistic about effective international climate policy in the future. Surprisingly, the effects found are stronger among young people who play a climate-damaging role in the game. From this the authors deduce that effective climate games should leave the decision to the participants whether they try to win the game with climate-friendly or climate-damaging strategies. This trains a critical perspective on the real events.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Resource Economics Group at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), was published in Climatic Change, the leading international and multidisciplinary journal on climate change.

 

News of HU Berlin

Press release

Link to the Study

Pre-version of the article