When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt concerned about if dramatic change will actually happen. Each nation had their own interests to pursue, and this made it difficult to negotiate. Some nations were willing to work together, while others were set on their demands and didn’t want to change.
As negotiation rounds passed, I was surprised about the difficulty of lowering the temperature to 2 degrees celsius. At the start, nations were arguing over reforestation and deforestation rates, but the main factor was annual reduction rate. Even when we plugged in best case scenarios, we still failed at lowering the temperature to 2 degrees celsius.
Our group, the United States, maintained a similar goal throughout the simulation. We didn’t want to contribute that much money into the global fund, and our afforestation and deforestation rates remained the same. The most drastic change was that we moved up our peak and reduction year, and we increased our reduction rate.
Our group’s ideas were changed by the fact that a lot more progress needed to be done if we wanted to meet the global goal. We negotiated with China and India to try and meet the goal. We were able to match China with their progress and meet India’s financial need.
I think emissions can be cut, but it’s going to take cooperation from every nation. Everybody needs to realize that the blame doesn’t fall on a single nation, and everyone needs to help to make a change.
The major costs and barriers of participant proposals were the amount of funding they requested. Some nations requested more money in the global fund, but we weren’t willing to give it. We wanted to focus our money on domestic programs. It was also difficult to match the opinions of the American people. Climate change wasn’t ranked as an important concern for our citizens, so we had to factor that into our decisions.
We can catalyze change in the U.S. by educating the population about this problem. People need to understand the negative impacts of climate change. Once there is an agreement that we need to fix this problem, we must work together to propose programs and solutions that will improve the world.