The GC was a pioneering initiative to model greenhouse gas emissions, energy, and land use change by 2050. In addition to the national calculators, a group of international researchers published the Global Calculator 2 (GC), which was launched at the UK Royal Society in 2015. They have been used in several places, from universities and secondary schools to governments, companies, and international conferences. The calculator is a science-based model, made available online and in open access, with transparency and a relatively simple web interface. Calculators have been used by policy makers, business leaders and NGOs for discussing carbon mitigation pathways. Since then, several other nations have developed their own calculators (Appendix 1), such as, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mauritius, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Southeast Europe, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam, all of them influenced by the UK version, which was recently updated. This calculator was motivated by late Professor David MacKay from the University of Cambridge (Kiso, 2020), whilst Chief-Scientist at the former UK Department of Energy and Climate Change-DECC (currently UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy-BEIS), based on the principles of his book “Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air” (MacKay, 2008). In this context, the United Kingdom’s Government published in 2010 a whole-system model for carbon mitigation pathways by 2050, integrating several energy variables into a single operational online model, called the “UK 2050 Calculator” (Amakpah et al., 2016). The use of system dynamics to assess planetary boundaries became largely adopted in many research areas (Sverdrup & Ragnarsdottir, 2011).
#IMPACT DYNAMICS CALCULATOR SOFTWARE#
Several modelling software focused on system dynamics (Voinov, 2008) evolved from these experiences, such as Stella, Vensim, Powersim, as well as some visual tools for systems thinking, such as Loopy and iThink however, it is also possible to develop system dynamics models using more general software, such as MS Excel, Matematica, Visual Basic, R, Ruby, Knime, Phyton, C, and other languages. Since then, system dynamics has become largely used worldwide, particularly after the publication of “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome in the 1970s (Meadows et al., 1972), which used system dynamics for simulating global development scenarios and projecting potential environmental impacts over time. One of the main patrons of its use in science education was late Professor Jay Forrester from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s and 1970s (Forester, 1992 Strapasson, 2014). These dynamics can be integrated with several other variables, forming a complex system model, which can be applied for different areas, from social sciences to physics and maths. It can be used, for example, for modelling the dynamics of oil reserves and the impacts of oil exploitation on climate change over the years as well as the potential of bioenergy production in the coming decades against food security and sustainable land use, among many other possible examples. System dynamics is a modelling approach based on the variation of stocks and flows over time. The results are discussed under the epistemology of critical pedagogy, showing that the use of webtools, such as the 2050 Calculators, can significantly contribute to the students’ environmental awareness and political engagement, providing important lessons about the use of system dynamics for policy and science education. The assessments were conducted once a year during three subsequent years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. We carried out a review of the existing models worldwide and ran some of the tools with students from three different postgraduate programmes at master’s level at Imperial College London (United Kingdom) and IFP School (France), whilst also assessing their individual views afterwards. The objective of this study is to assess the available calculators and their contribution to an interdisciplinary education via systems thinking. Among the existing models, we highlight the online 2050 Calculators, which aim at simulating scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, energy planning, sustainable land use, and food consumption. The use of system dynamics as a learning tool for developing sustainable energy strategies and environmental education has advanced in recent years with the availability of new modelling software and webtools.
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