Winning Support for Addressing Climate Change

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Lawrence Susskind and Evan Paul.
The Solutions Journal, March, 2010

With 4,300 miles of coastline, most of Maryland sits within miles of the Atlantic Ocean or the Chesapeake Bay—and a third of the state lies between the two bodies of water. With sea levels rising, storms growing in power, and patterns of rainfall and summer temperatures changing, residents have already seen the resulting ill effects: coastal areas are losing large chunks of land to erosion, endangered species and habitats are threatened, and farmers fear that saltwater intrusion into agricultural land along the coast will ruin productivity. Each year, the edge of the water creeps closer to homes and businesses.

While many people around the world are grappling with how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 50 years, those living in coastal areas like Maryland are pushing hard now to find immediate ways to cope with the current effects of climate change before their communities are destroyed.

CBI has experimented with using gaming to help coastal communities address the risks of climate change and broker local agreements. This article details the events of April 27, 2009, when, in Annapolis, more than 170 mayors, county commissions, environmentalists, business leaders and Maryland state officials came together for an interactive summit about community-level responses to climate risks such as sea-level rise and storm surge that threaten the state’s coast. The summit’s centerpiece was an innovative negotiation role-play that demonstrated the key challenges and policy options coastal communities face.

To view television coverage of the event, visit: http://wjz.com/local/sea.level.2.995688.html.

To read the rest of the article as it appeared in The Solutions Journal, download the PDF. 

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