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For decades, military leaders have used wargames to think through everything from nuclear escalation to pandemics. Climate change has historically not been a focus of these exercises, but that’s starting to change.
RAND researchers now routinely work climate disasters into their game scenarios. For example, a recent RAND card game looked at how climate change might affect people, infrastructure, and military operations in South Asia around the year 2040. The game has 31 event cards, each describing a climate hazard that could strike the region: withering crops, devastating blackouts, or even a city lost at sea. Players draw one card to represent one year and then discuss the consequences.
This approach is particularly helpful to defense planners because it considers the real social, political, and military impacts of climate change. “People sometimes think climate change is going to progress in a natural order,” says RAND's Bryan Rooney, part of the team that developed the game. “That's not right. It's going to be different levels of bad, in different places, at different times.”
RAND researchers are working on more games that communicate the science of climate change, including games that examine scenarios in the Indo-Pacific and Africa. Rooney sees these as essential: “Without climate-informed games, you're not really understanding the physical environment. And you're going to miss a lot of what's coming.”
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