Giving Compass' Take:

• Janette Kim created board games that all focus on climate change and resilience. These games help individuals engage with the issue and look for solutions. 

• How will this game make an impact on people's views on climate change? 

• Read about other games that could potentially ignite climate action. 

Janette Kim started designing board games about climate change after working on scenario planning with her architecture students at Colombia University–and seeing that the typical process, which architects and many cities use to make decisions, was fairly boring. Board games brought the scenarios to life.

“They’re great at mixing together a lot of complexity and making that visible,” says Kim, who now teaches at California College of the Arts and leads the Urban Works Agency, a research lab at the school that looks at the use of architectural design on social justice issues, sustainability, and economic resilience in cities. A series of the games developed by Kim and her students, called Win-Win, is now in an exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

In a Monopoly-like game called The Other 99%, each player is a real estate developer, but one player starts with three times more money than the others–and as sea level rises, they can afford to build on higher ground. The other players have more votes; every other round, everyone discusses whether to build a levy and who will pay for it. “You basically see how risk associated with your properties influences your decision-making and your tendency to either seek short-term profit or long-term profit,” she says.

“What I really enjoy about the both the competitive and cooperative nature of games is that it recognizes that people just come from different perspectives and they have many different reasons for either thinking short-term or long-term, or valuing landscape or profit or property or equity–there are so many different value systems that are really enmeshed within climate change.”

Read the full article about climate change board games by Adele Peters at Fast Company.