Juliette N. Rooney-Varga

Effective climate mitigation requires rapid, evidence‑based decisions across government, business, and civil society. Yet widespread misconceptions, disinformation, and insufficient understanding of high‑impact climate solutions continue to impede meaningful action among leaders. Traditional risk communication approaches often fail to overcome these barriers, particularly where climate change is politically polarized or socially contested. Here, we investigate whether interactive climate policy simulations with the En‑ROADS model can strengthen leaders’ knowledge, affective engagement, and motivation to take climate action.Using a mixed‑methods design, we engaged 949 participants in 37 En‑ROADS workshops and Climate Action Simulations, an interactive role-play designed around the En-ROADS simulator. Participants in the role-play are assigned to different delegations at a mock UN climate conference, including governments, representatives from conventional energy, clean tech, industry and finance, and forest and agriculture. Pre‑/post‑survey responses (N≈290 matched) and semi‑structured interviews (N=42) were used to evaluate changes in knowledge, affect, and intended actions.Survey‑based results show that interactive engagements significantly improved participants’ understanding of which climate policies have high versus low mitigation impact. Participants made substantial gains in identifying high‑impact solutions such as carbon pricing, cutting methane and non‑CO₂ greenhouse gases, and improving building energy efficiency. Participants also improved their ability to identify which solutions have little impact, even when those solutions are commonly favored. Such low-impact solutions do little to reduce near-term emissions and include afforestation, soil carbon sequestration, and technological carbon removal.Engagement with En‑ROADS also increased participants’ affective engagement with climate change. Participants reported statistically significant increases in both the personal importance they attach to the issue and their sense of empowerment to contribute to climate solutions. These effects were similar across virtual and in‑person workshops, indicating a potential to scale across formats.Interview‑based analyses confirm the survey results. Interviewees described the simulation experience as improving their understanding of the urgency, scale, and systemic nature of the climate challenge. Many emphasized that En‑ROADS’s interactive features made complex dynamics of the climate and energy systems easier to grasp than other modes of learning. The workshops generated strong emotional responses, including a sense of urgency and hope, which, in turn, motivated participants to act. Social interactions during the sessions played a critical role: collaborative scenario development fostered a sense of collective efficacy, reinforcing participants’ willingness to advocate for organizational or policy change.Most interviewees reported taking or planning climate‑related actions after to the workshop. These actions include reducing their personal emissions, strategic organizational changes (e.g., establishing an internal carbon price or shifting investment strategies), and advocating for governmental or corporate policy change. Participants who were focused on sustainability prior to En-ROADS simulations also made gains, reporting improved clarity on high‑impact solutions and a strengthened sense of collective efficacy for climate action.Overall, the results demonstrate that interactive En‑ROADS workshops can improve leaders’ understanding of effective climate mitigation strategies, activate emotional engagement, and motivate both individual and institutional climate action. This suggests that simulation‑based approaches can help bridge the persistent gap between climate knowledge and climate action among key societal actors.

Research shows that community-based propagation is the most effective strategy for scaling innovations in sustainability education in formal settings like universities. It builds a community of “ambassadors” who share the innovation with their social networks, for whom they serve as trusted messengers. A backbone organization facilitates and elevates ambassadors’ work, spurring interest in joining the community and thereby creating a reinforcing feedback loop that spreads the innovation.Systems analysis shows that community-based propagation can generate exponential scaling of adoption when word-of-mouth diffusion and direct outreach have little impact. Like educational innovations, efforts to scale climate action via word-of-mouth and direct outreach often fail, even if those actions carry economic and health benefits.Here, we share initial findings from an ongoing community-based propagation effort to accelerate participation in residential decarbonization among an immigrant community in the US. Working in partnership with a local civil society organization (CSO), we built a program that supports community members who learn about energy efficiency and decarbonization incentives, participate in them, and share their experiences with their own social networks in culturally and in the community’s primary language (here, Khmer). Ambassadors’ work is celebrated by their peers and the CSO, creating a reinforcing feedback loop that amplifies their efforts as more community members become interested in the ambassador program and its work.We are currently assessing how this approach can be replicated and scaled to other communities and contexts. This largely bottom-up strategy builds trust and participation in climate solutions, which is critically important in a democracy. Perhaps equally importantly, it also strengthens social fabric and civic engagement, which, in turn, strengthen democracy.

Society faces a ‘critical decade’ to accelerate climate action and transition towards a sustainable future. Doing so demands rapid scaling of innovations in higher education to build capacity. Many high-quality educational tools are freely available and some are known to motivate evidence-based climate and sustainability action. Most efforts to propagate these tools rely on outreach and word-of-mouth diffusion. But these approaches typically achieve little. We develop and analyze a dynamic computational model to understand why and to test other propagation strategies. Our analysis reveals that outreach has limited impact and does little to accelerate word-of-mouth adoption under conditions typical in higher education. Instead, we find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption, as is also shown by a small number of successful real-world scaling efforts. Without coordinated, community-based propagation, it is unlikely that we will meet build the capacity needed to address climate and sustainability challenges.

In order to successfully address climate change, society needs education that scales rapidly, transmits scientific information about its causes and effects, and motivates sustained commitment to the problem and science-based action to address it. For decades, government agencies in the US and elsewhere have funded the development of innovative, evidence-based pedagogies and curricula to teach STEM fields, including climate change and sustainability. Research shows that many of these innovations deliver strong gains in learners’ knowledge, sense of urgency, and desire to learn more about climate change and sustainability. To build capacity needed to meet the climate and related grand challenges, rapid scaling of educational innovations is needed in higher education. However, current practices of outreach and word-of-mouth propagation mostly fall short. We develop and analyze a simple computational model to understand why and, using the model and conducting sensitivity analyses, test other, more promising strategies. Our dynamic analysis reveals that outreach has limited impact and does little to accelerate word-of-mouth adoption under conditions typical in higher education. Instead, we find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption, as is also shown by successful real-world scaling efforts.

The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change.

Sociopolitical values are an important driver of climate change beliefs, attitudes, and policy preferences. People with “individualist‐hierarchical” values favor individual freedom, competition, and clearly defined social hierarchies, while “communitarian‐egalitarians” value interdependence and equality across gender, age, heritage, and ethnicity. In the US, individualist‐hierarchs generally perceive less risk from climate change and express lower support for actions to mitigate it than communitarian‐egalitarians. Exposure to scientific information does little to change these views. Here, we ask if a widely used experiential simulation, World Climate, can help overcome these barriers. World Climate combines an engaging role‐play with an interactive computer model of the climate system. We examine pre‐ and post‐ World Climate survey responses from 2,080 participants in the US and use a general linear mixed model approach to analyze interactions among participants' sociopolitical values and gains in climate change knowledge, affect, and intent to take action. As expected, prior to the simulation, participants holding individualist‐hierarchical values had lower levels of climate change knowledge, felt less urgency, and expressed lower intent to act than those holding communitarian‐egalitarian values. However, individualist‐hierarchs made significantly larger gains across all constructs, particularly urgency, than communitarian‐egalitarians. Participants' sociopolitical values also shifted: those with individualistic‐hierarchical values before the simulation showed a substantial, statistically significant shift toward a communitarian‐egalitarian worldview. Simulation‐based experiences like World Climate may help reduce polarization and build consensus towards science‐based climate action.