Wargaming the Future of Climate Change
Bryan Rooney needed some way to convey the enormous risks and uncertainties of climate change.
His audience was military: planners and leaders trying to anticipate how dangerous the world will be 20 years from now. His choice was clear. He went with a card game.
Rooney is part of a legacy at RAND that reaches back almost to its founding. He designs and directs wargames. Military leaders have used games like his to think through everything from nuclear escalation to pandemic disease to the dangers of artificial intelligence. Players in these games might face any number of calamities with every turn—but, until recently, climate change was not one of them.
That has changed. The Pentagon has freed up millions of dollars to better incorporate climate change into its wargames. Researchers at RAND now routinely work climate disasters into their game scenarios, from rising sea levels that put bases underwater to blistering heat waves that make it dangerous to operate outside. The card game that Rooney developed shows just how serious games can be for communicating the science of climate change.
“People sometimes think climate change is going to progress in a natural order,” Rooney said. “That's not right. It's going to be different levels of bad, in different places, at different times. That is going to have real social, political, and military impacts. If you don't have climate-informed games, then you're not really understanding the physical environment. And you're going to miss a lot of what's coming.”
The U.S. Department of Defense describes climate change as a “critical national security issue,” a “threat multiplier.” It has established a sub–working group to model and wargame what the climate future might look like. But these are still the early days of that effort. The department hosted its first major climate game—set in a future East Africa battered by drought, floods, and cyclones—just over three years ago.
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