19 June 2012, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

“One more minute, please!”

Students who participated in the launch of “Settlers of a Green Future” never had enough time to enjoy the last bit of the game. They cooperated to build eco-cooperatives; received eco-points for building sustainably; and they got frustrated when “fossil” thwarted their attempts to build towards a green future. Everyone was a winner.

At the campus of Fundaçao Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Rio de Janeiro, students from Yale University, Fundaçaõ Getulio Vargas, Catholic University of Rio, and UMass Boston gathered to play the brand new game that was developed by students of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The gaming workshop began with the introduction of the game followed by videos, “how to play the game” and “meet the settlers,” to enhance understanding of different world views of environmental negotiations and to facilitate the game workshop.

As an icebreaker, each player got to pick their favorite green policy cards and read them out loud to learn about the policy options based on the suggestions made at “United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development“, aka “Rio+20″, covering ecosystems, society, energy, food, and economy.

The game, “Settlers of a Green Future“, inspired by the popular board game, ‘The Settlers of Catan,’ introduces the trade-offs between individual goals and the greater good. Using real-world sustainable development policy and action proposals that will be discussed at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012, this game helps participants understand the diversity and range of options available that can help nations achieve a green future. Additionally, it exposes individuals to the inherent trade-offs between individual goals and collective actions in multilateral environmental negotiations.

To learn more about the game, please visit the website.

If you are in Rio, we will host another encore another gaming session at the RioCentro Convention Center this week. Please let us know if you are interested in participating email to “greenfuturesettlers@gmail.com.”

As 20 students of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies arrive in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they will join over 50,000 delegates and more than 130 heads of state and government that will participate in what is already being deemed as the “largest U.N. conference” ever.

Historically, F&ES has a long tradition of participating in international environmental conferences as a way of bringing to life the challenge of developing institutions and treaties to deal with pressing environmental issues.  Twenty years ago, the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was a landmark event in that sustainable development came to the fore of the political agenda.  Several important treaties emerged to address from the original 1992 Earth Summit, including the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Agenda 21, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Forest Principles. Rio in 1992 also launched the following two decades of “conference diplomacy” in which conferences have become an important mechanism to negotiate global environmental cooperation.

Twenty years later, participants at the Rio+20 Earth Summit (the conference’s short name) are faced with a much starker reality – 1.3 billion people still on less than $1.25 per day and an estimated 900 million people face hunger.  Therefore, discussion of environmental sustainability cannot be divorced from considerations of economic development and poverty eradication, which is why one of the major themes of the conference is focused on “green economy”.  Green economic growth is vaguely defined as growth that incorporates social, economic, and environmental aspects.

Negotiators here in Rio have been negotiating a document called “The Future We Want”  for the last few months that will hopefully serve as the outcome of the Rio+20 summit.  It aims to establish a process that will establish a set of Sustainable Development Goals that will help countries achieve the Millenium Development Goals by 2015.  While this document started at 19 pages this past January, it quickly ballooned to over 200 pages, and now sits at around 50 pages.  Quite contentious, only 20 percent of the negotiation text so far as achieved consensus. So there is still much work left to be done before heads of state and government arrive for the high-level talks starting on June 20.

Who comprises the Yale delegation and what role are they playing in Rio? Students represent three courses at F&ES:  International Organizations and Conferences, Environmental Diplomacy Practicum, and International Environmental Governance and Policy.  During the semester, they have been working with various stakeholders to understand a particular country or organization’s position in the negotiations.  These include: the Natural Resources Defense Council, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Marshall Islands, Seychelles, Nepal, and Vanuatu. In most cases, students have been directly involved in assisting these countries and organizations in developing a strategy for engagement and advancing a particular goal in the talks.  On the ground, they are working closely with their stakeholders to follow issues, reach out to key representatives, provide valuable on-the-ground support, and, of course, write and analyze what they’re observing and learning from this rare opportunity.

We hope that you’ll stay tuned to this blog to read about all of the exciting updates live from the ground n Rio. Leave us comments or questions you’d like us to ask the participants here, and follow me on Twitter (@ecoangelhsu)!

We will be holding a workshop on Settlers of a Green Future in conjunction with our partner, Fundação Getulio Vargas, at the Rio plus 20 Earth Summit. If you’re going to be in Rio and would like to attend the workshop, please contact us.

SOCIAL GAMING: ‘SETTLERS OF A GREEN FUTURE’ – NEGOTIATING FUTURES WE WANT
An interactive game to facilitate understanding of policy choices and trade-offs in multilateral environmental negotiations
10:00 am – 12:00 pm June 19, 2012
Fundação Getulio Vargas, 60 R. Barão de Itambi

How can we better understand the social, economic, and political trade-offs in multilateral environmental negotiations? How do we balance national goals and interests versus multilateral, collaborative outcomes? How can we work together or individually to invest in solutions that will bring us closer to a green future and sustainable development? Inspired by the popular board game, “Settlers of Catan,” a group of students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies have adapted and designed a board game to examine these questions and better understand what negotiators will face at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012. Using real-world sustainable development policy and action proposals that will be discussed in Rio, this game helps participants understand the diversity and range of options available that can help nations achieve a green future. Players win by achieving 10 green points, which can either be earned individually or through collective actions that build sustainable settlements, eco-cities, and eco-cooperatives based on green policy actions from one of five critical issue areas: energy, ecosystems, society, economy, and food. Through playing this game, players will be able to learn about the specifics of the Rio+20 Earth Summit negotiations, begin to understand what is needed for multilateral action and sustainable outcomes, and, ultimately, unlock potential solutions to difficult environmental challenges.

Meet the Settlers:

How to Play:

Games are a way to simulate complex, real-life situations in a simplified manner that anyone can understand. The interactive and engaging nature of the role-play experience is a model for experiential learning that is concentrated, but informative and engaging.

When applied to policy problems, games are able to simulate institutional mechanisms and complex policy frameworks to translate abstract theoretic concepts into concrete reality. While policy choices can often take years and decades to reap outcomes in the real world, games and simulations can help provide more immediate insight as to the consequences of specific policy choices. Gameplay provides an instant feedback loop for understanding how individuals make decisions based on the problem-definition of a policy problem. It also creates a space for the layering of otherwise discreet policy problems to simulate how different policies interact.

Games are useful in their ability to simulate:

• Decision processes based on the asymmetry of information
• Randomness
• Changes in norms and values over time
• Information overload and impaired decision-making capacity
• Policy incentives for cooperation versus fragmentation
• Consequences of the tradeoff between policy choices
• The balance of short-term self interest with long-term collective gain
• Challenges to fixed preferences
• Decision-making under conditions of scarcity
• Power dynamics and structures
• The influence of institutions in shaping behavior

For understanding complicated environmental policy problems, social and participatory games have recently emerged as a tool of understanding the multifaceted forces complicating effective policy solutions (Franklin, et. al., 2003; Klopfer, 2008; and Petranek, 1992). The Department of Defense created simulation training software for combat exercises and in military operation planning (NRC, 1997). In the healthcare arena, the Markle Foundation partnered with popular SimCity developer Maxis to create a simulation game called SimHealth, which created an interactive, virtual model of the U.S. healthcare system (WWICS, 2001). The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2000 released Virtual U, which is being used as a training module for higher-education administrators and managers to understand the economic impacts of university management decisions. A few years ago, the United Nations World Food Program developed “Food Force” – the first humanitarian video game to teach children about the logistical challenge of delivering aid during humanitarian crises (UNWFP, 2005).”

References:

1. Kolpfer, E. (2008) “Augmented learning: research and design of mobile educational games”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
2. National Research Council (1997) “Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense”, Committee on Modeling and Simulation, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications.
3. Franklin, S., Peat, M., and Lewis, A., (2003) “Non traditional interventions to stimulate discussion: the use of games and puzzles”, Journal of Biological Education, Volume 37 (2): 79-84
4. Petranek, C., et al (1992) “Three levels of learning in simulations: participating, debriefing and journal writing”, Simulation and gaming, Vol 23 No 2:172-185
5. World Food Program WFP (2005) “Food Force: The First Humanitarian Video Game”, http://www.wfp.org/how-to-help/individuals/food-force
6. North American Simulation and Gaming Association http://www.nasaga.org/