Florian Kapmeier

System dynamics models offer powerful tools for understanding complex systems and informing policy. Yet, their impact often falls short due to limited stakeholder engagement and poor implementation. Here, we explore how system dynamics models can be designed for real‐world impact by integrating analytical rigor, transparent modeling, and interactive stakeholder engagement. We build on the literature on engaging stakeholders through management flight simulators, gamification and storytelling, and utilize the C‐ROADS and En‐ROADS climate simulators and insights from the MIT Climate Pathways Project. To date, more than 492,000 people in 185 countries, including more than 23,000 leaders in government, business, investing, and civil society, have participated in interactive sessions with these simulators. We present three key design principles: (1) rigorous modeling and model transparency, (2) intuitive model interfaces, and (3) facilitated, interactive simulation‐based experiences. These principles enable users—from students to senior policymakers—to challenge mental models, explore trade‐offs in a safe, engaging environment, and learn for themselves. We discuss limitations and directions for refinement of these principles. The paper contributes to the system dynamics and broader practice literature by offering actionable insights for designing models and protocols for their use that catalyze learning and informed decision‐making in complex policy environments.

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.

Policy design in climate and sustainability is hindered by nonlinear feedbacks, long delays, and uncertainty that limit the effectiveness of traditional information‑centric communication. The manuscript examines how simulation models can be designed and deployed to support learning and decision‑making by integrating analytical rigor, model transparency, and structured stakeholder engagement. Using the C‑ROADS and En‑ROADS climate policy simulators and insights from the MIT Climate Pathways Project (CPP), the paper distills three design principles for impactful simulation‑based learning environments:(1) rigorous, empirically grounded modeling with comprehensive simulator transparency;(2) user‑centered interface design that scaffolds discovery while preserving access to underlying structure and assumptions; and(3) facilitated, interactive engagements that enable participants to test mental models through experimentation and social learning.First, rigorous modeling emphasizes the necessity of formal testing and documentation to build confidence in policy insights. En‑ROADS and C‑ROADS are developed iteratively, grounded in the scientific literature, are calibrated to historic data, and their future behavior is tested against the climate scenarios in the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) and other widely-used Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), GCAM, MESSAGE-GLOBIUM, and REMIND-MAgPIE. Multi‑layered documentation—including an online technical reference guide, simulator behavior comparisons, and easily accessible explanations—enables scrutiny of model mechanisms, parameters, and simulator behavior. Users can interrogate and vary assumptions to explore robustness and uncertainty.Second, user-centered interface design concerns design for “guided discovery.” The simulator’s layered interface presents key outcomes and policy levers in an intuitive top layer while offering advanced controls (≈250 parameters) and extensive visualization (≈180 graphs). Real‑time, browser‑based computation supports rapid scenario exploration across devices and languages, enabling both individual and group use cases. Iterative usability testing ensures that the interface reduces cognitive load while preserving analytical depth.Third, facilitated, interactive engagements include the design of engagement protocols that combine analytic reasoning with experiential, collaborative learning. We highlight three formats:the World Climate Simulation with C‑ROADS;the Climate Action Simulation with En‑ROADS; andthe En‑ROADS Climate Workshop for policy briefings.These interactive engagements prompt participants to articulate expectations before running scenarios, confront divergences between expectations and simulated outcomes, and engage in structured discussion and reflection. Such practices surface misconceptions about leverage points (e.g., relative effects of pricing emissions, efficiency improvements, carbon dioxide removal, afforestation, or bioenergy), foster systems thinking, and support informed action.The CPP and the broader community infrastructure amplify reach and consistency. As of December 2025, more than 472,000 participants in 183 countries—including over 23,000 leaders in government, business, and civil society—have engaged with the simulators. A global network of En‑ROADS Climate Ambassadors (over 940 in 90+ countries) has collectively engaged upwards of 354,000 people through a structured training and certification program, extending the implementation of the design principles in diverse contexts.The paper concludes with a conceptual model for future empirical research that hypothesizes how model rigor and transparency and interface usability affect learning and action via the mediating mechanism of facilitated, interactive simulation‑based experience. This framework supports systematic evaluation of simulator design and engagement quality, informing the development of SD‑based tools and protocols that can strengthen climate literacy, improve policy reasoning, and support evidence‑based action.

The EAT–Lancet planetary health diet (PHD) provides guidelines on a global scale and calls for red meat consumption to be halved. Operational PHD guidelines at country level have yet to be determined. Here we argue that the biological link between milk and bovine-meat production must be considered when operationalizing the globally calculated PHD to national contexts. Using a stylized computer simulation model rooted in a food system approach, we explore the impact of dietary scenarios on milk and bovine-meat production and show that ignoring this biological link can lead to substantial imbalances between national dietary guidelines and production outcomes and potentially lead to food waste. Furthermore, we assess current national dietary guidelines in Europe and find that most disregard this biological link and are incompatible with the PHD, with implications for policymakers and consumers to consider when adapting the PHD in national contexts.

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.

Why are organizations and markets slow to transform toward sustainability despite the abundant well‐recognized opportunities it provides? An important subset of the phenomena this question addresses involves decision‐makers recognizing the existence of opportunities but failing to undertake ambitious, effective, sufficient, or timely action. Building on existing research on capability traps, market formation, and managing sustainability, we focus on the forces constraining organizations from developing the capabilities and market infrastructures required for sustainability transformations. We characterize types of sustainability initiatives and, using causal loop diagramming, visualize structures that enable and constrain how organizations can navigate individually and collectively worse‐before‐better dynamics resulting from uncertain, nonlinear, and delayed returns. Being under day‐to‐day pressures and deeply intertwined within their environment, organizational actors find it difficult to recognize, undertake, maintain, and coordinate necessary efforts internally and externally. We discuss research implications and directions for future research on avoiding these traps and accelerating sustainability transformations. © 2023 The Authors. System Dynamics Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of System Dynamics Society.

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.