Interview with Miqdad Asaria: “Board games can help us think differently about climate change”

In an interview with Sophie Mallett, Miqdad Asaria discusses why we need to fix society to protect the environment and how board games can help us think big about climate change. How can board games help us think about climate change? Climate change involves complex questions about how the carbon cycle interacts with social systems across the world. You can approach this using complicated mathematical models, but you can also do this using games. Games are an accessible way to start engaging with these ideas and they give you a licence to think big about how things can change. Some of the most famous board games like Monopoly are games where one person wins and everybody else loses. These are games where you benefit from other people’s misfortune. They encourage hoarding of resources. They encourage resource extraction and destruction of the commons. They’re almost a training ground for how to destroy the world. But Monopoly was actually invented by a woman, Lizzie Magie, who wanted to teach people why they shouldn’t live in that kind of world. The original version of Monopoly was a game people played to learn how not to live. And if you flip the rules of Monopoly, you have a way to think about how to live in a better world. What can games do that other ways of thinking about climate change can’t? A lot of what we see with climate change is a crisis of imagination. We’ve been taught to think in certain ways and we need some tools to help us think differently. Board games can help us think differently about climate change. Often when you talk about problems like climate change, people lose hope. They think that it’s inevitable. But I think one of the important things to realise is that none of this is inevitable. A lot of it will be decided by societies and our social values. We’ve decided that some people will be poor and some people will be rich. We’ve decided that this is how we organise our economy and that this is how we value production. But we can decide differently. And I think letting people play that out and consider if there are better ways to decide is quite powerful. This is particularly true when we don’t just play games but are given the power to change games. This might mean thinking about what rules we like and what winning and losing means. I found with my students that when they had that opportunity it really sparked something in them. It showed that there are other ways of being and I think that’s quite exciting. How did you come to use games within your teaching? In my research, I do a lot of complex modelling of how policies change people’s lives. There’s a lot of maths and computer programming involved. I wanted to share some of those ideas with my students, but I didn’t want to spend the whole time teaching them about computer programming and mathematical equations. I found board games to be a really useful tool to bypass a lot of that and just jump straight into the ideas. When I get my students to design games, it’s really interesting to see how engaged they get with the process. They really bring out the issues that matter to them. People are often told that they’re not important, but if you imagine you’re the person in power and you’re asked to fix things, you can start to think about what you want and how you get there. What impact can these new ways of thinking have? A lot of people try and engage with small actions around climate change, like recycling more, becoming vegetarian or cycling to work. These are all very noble actions and on an individual level they probably make you feel better, but these things on their own aren’t enough to fix the problem. When you map out the problem you realise we really need to think big. We need to reorganise the way we live. Sometimes those who try to tackle climate change are accused of being “watermelons” in the sense that they are green on the outside but are pushing a socialist agenda. The argument is these people want to change society and are just using the environment as an excuse. I think we need to flip that around and say we need to fix society to protect the environment. Climate change isn’t a technological problem, it’s a social problem. It’s a problem of how we organise our economies and societies. One aspect of this is that climate change happens in a place, but climate change happens differently to people in that place. I might be sitting in a heat wave in my office with air conditioning while somebody is washing my window outside in the heat. That person may be unable to take the day off without losing pay and they can’t work from home. I might go back to a leafy home in the suburbs, while the person who has washed my window goes to an overcrowded inner-city area that’s sucked into an urban heat island effect. These are very different experiences of the same climate depending on your social position. You have described climate change as a social problem, but could new technology prevent global warming? Many governments are currently toying with the idea of geoengineering. This is the idea that instead of changing society we could use a technological fix to change the planet. One of the things that people in the climate space have been very interested in is this idea of pumping chemicals into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and thereby dim the sun. This is a very cheap thing to do. We already have the technology to do this and it’s something that could work very quickly to cool the planet. This is sometimes called the “Pinatubo option” because when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in the 1990s, it threw up a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that cooled the Earth. Doing this today would obviously interfere in all sorts of Earth systems. It could mess up rainfall and change harvests. It could disrupt the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. There’s a whole host of risks here that we haven’t really digested, but we’re very quickly putting ourselves into a position where we have to start thinking about these technologies because we refuse to engage with changing the world as it is. There’s a famous saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We’re unwilling to even think about how we might reorganise our economies and would instead rather adopt these high-risk strategies that could end the world as we know it. I find that deeply uncomfortable. Why do we trust billionaires to act responsibly with those technological fixes? It’s a very dangerous thing to hope that large, untested technologies can be rolled out on a massive scale without fundamentally disrupting the Earth’s ecosystem. This interview features extracts from The hidden health crisis behind climate change, an LSE Future Proof episode. Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics. Image credit: AUTHOR provided by Shutterstock.