In conjunction with: Cassandra Xia and John Sanchez, Work on Climate & Carbon Visions

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that we will need deploy both CO2 emissions reductions and CO2 emissions removals in order to meet our climate goals of keeping global average temperature rise below 2ºC of that in the pre-industrial era. It has been estimated that CO2 emissions removals will need to be done at the scale of 10 billion tons (or gigatons) by 2050. But how do we get there?

Our goal in building this game is to help people develop an intuition for what it actually means to scale up different carbon removal solutions to gigaton scale by tracking their effects along a number of quantitative (the progress bars at the top) and more qualitative (the Scale-Up Consequences panel) dimensions. We often talk about reaching 10 gigatons of carbon removal in the abstract, but it’s important to keep in mind the massive undertaking that this represents and the many land, energy, and other resources that will need to be consumed in the process.

A lot of times in carbon removal discussions people throw around claims such as “why not just plant a lot of trees” or “we just need lots of Direct Air Capture”, and our hope is that the game will illustrate many of the implicit assumptions baked into such massive scale-ups of any single solution. We hope that people will play around with different combinations of CDR approaches and compare the vastly different consequences possible depending on the portfolio of solutions selected.

Since the goal of the game is education and science communication, we want to emphasize that the game and its underlying model, while derived from scientific literature (see analysis below), are rough approximations with many assumptions baked in. It should be used to help build understanding of the broad challenges involved with scaling CDR solutions, but not for scientific or academic modeling purposes.

Play to Road to 10Gt Here: https://roadto10gigatons.com

The resources, assumptions, and figures used to develop this game can be found here.