Playing seriously with mitigation strategies for climate change: the PolyGame

Renato Casagrandi1, Giulia Fiorese1,2, Martina Gallia3, Matteo Giuliani3, Marko Radeta3,
Mario Sangiorgio3, Marco Triverio3, Emanuele Martelli4, Stefano Consonni4, Stefano
Caserini5

1
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da
Vinci 32, 20133 Milano (casagran@elet.polimi.it)
2
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Corso Magenta 63, 20123 Milano
3
ASP Alta Scuola Politecnica, Politecnico di Milano e Politecnico di Torino,
http://www.asp­poli.it
4
Dipartimento di Energia, Politecnico di Milano, Via Lambruschini 4, 20156 Milano
5
Dipartimento DIIAR - Sez. Ambientale, Politecnico di Milano, Via Golgi 39, 20133 Milano

To avoid dramatic climate change, we need to significantly curb current emissions by using a
set of mitigation actions. Many of such actions are already available and span from
technological improvements (e.g. car efficiency), to natural sinks (forest preservation) or
changes in individual and social behaviour (diet and transport). Unfortunately, none of these
actions alone can reduce carbon emissions to reasonable targets. However, a mix of
mitigation actions can do the job fairly well, thus the main issue becomes of decisional type,
i.e. a technically feasible and socio-environmentally acceptable mix of actions (mitigation
strategy) must be proposed. Inspired by the work on the Stabilization Wedges by Pacala and
Socolow (Carbon Mitigation Initiative, Princeton University), we developed the PolyGame,
an educational game where participants study the available mitigation actions and propose
their own mitigation strategy combining in a creative, yet scientifically sound way, different
actions. We prepared a database with tens of actions (with data, references and links) that can
be explored with a web user interface; the purpose is to assist both game organizers (teachers)
and players. The whole application will be soon available on the Internet, to allow playing the
game from everywhere. PolyGame is a simple framework for understanding both the carbon
emissions cuts needed to mitigate climate change and the tools that are already available to do
so.