Time to play Climate Fresk?

Fresk converts the latest climate science into a hands-on card game, helping players understand the causes, effects and feedback loops of climate change. Katharine Houreld discusses this latest game in an article on the Washington Post website.

 

Climate-curious but confused? Grab a beer and some cards.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: A reggae promoter, two schoolgirls and a poet walk into a Nairobi garden. Or a college student, a tango instructor and a pastor walk into a cafe in Cleveland.

All gathered recently to play Climate Fresk, a card game based on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a 3,000-page tome of graphs and jargon heavy enough to knock out a hungry polar bear.

For scientists, the IPCC report is the gold standard, synthesizing tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers — but it can be a bit much for the merely climate-curious.

Fresk converts it into a multiplayer game involving marker pens, paper and 42 index-size cards showing the causes, effects and feedback loops of climate change. Pizza and beer are popular — but optional — additions. The aim, said creator Cédric Ringenbach, is to help people understand the connections between climate science and the disasters ravaging their world. Floods, wildfires and droughts. Atlantic hurricanes and exploding craters in the Arctic.

“I used to give lectures, and people were falling asleep,” said Ringenbach, a 53-year-old French scientist who headed a climate change think tank for six years. “So I printed off my slides and let people arrange the slides themselves.” Suddenly, he said, they were “arguing, making mistakes and correcting each other — and really learning.”

More than 2 million people have played Fresk, according to its registration records, since its debut in 2015 — although only 33,000 have been Americans. It’s been played in prisons, bars, schools and restaurants. In the French cabinet and Croatian ministries.

The only requirement, Ringenbach said, is an open mind.

‘We want to tell a story’

Hosting a Fresk takes three hours of training, but anyone can play. In Kenya’s capital last month, two dozen players gathered in the shade of acacia trees. There were mid-level sports store managers, two young sisters from a local Catholic school, a sprinkling of university students, an artist, an engineer and a swim instructor. A few folks grumbled about U.S. President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations the day before, in which he called climate change a “con job.”

The hosts dealt the first hand. Participants shuffled the cards to lay out the basics: Increased carbon dioxide levels cause warming. Okay. Does melting sea ice cause sea levels to rise, one card asks? (Spoiler: Nope. That’s due to melting land-based ice sheets and the expansion of warming waters.) There are cards for the human activities that create carbon dioxide: building use, transport, industry and agriculture. Agriculture also fuels deforestation and creates other gases — “cow farts,” someone explains, to snickers.

“We want to tell a story,” said Brian Seroney, one of the hosts, coaxing along the shier players. “What is climate change and what does it cause?”

Trickier cards are next. Is melting permafrost a cause or effect of climate change? How about wildfires? In both cases, actually, it’s both — welcome to the feedback loops. The next cards are hellacious: Oceans absorb 91 percent of the heat generated by excess greenhouse gases, killing off coral, disrupting currents and turning waters increasingly acidic. Shellfish and coccolithophores struggle to form their calcium-based shells. What’s a coccolithophore? Do we need them? Yes, the card says, they are at the base of the marine food chain.

On land, meanwhile, flooding, droughts and cyclones intensify. The cards don’t fully spell it out, so a university student explains: Hot air holds more water, making cyclones stronger and wetter. Heat also increases evaporation and bakes the soil, making it harder to absorb rain.

People around the table swap stories. Student Sahibu Batso talks about how far people in his home of Shimba Hills had to walk to get water during the last drought. Artist Sankara Nyagaya said river flooding in Nairobi last year killed his friend, justice activist Benna Buluma. Sports executive Vivian Cherotich says farmers in her native Eldoret complain about falling crop yields because rains have become so unpredictable.

“That’s why I want my company to do this training,” she tells the schoolgirl next to her.

Farajo and Pendo Lunani, ages 8 and 12, would normally do the children’s version of this game, which lasts one hour instead of three. But they came with their father, a civil servant, and are determined to kick-start their school’s moribund environmental club.

“We are the ones who are going to be affected when we grow up,” Farajo said.

The last cards are the most harrowing. Their titles: Famine. Disease. Growing inequality. Deadly heat waves. Climate refugees. Armed conflict. More than 800,000 people fled extreme weather disasters last year, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The World Bank says 216 million could face the same fate by 2050.

Kenyans already understand what that means. Refugees poured in from neighboring Somalia after the country experienced its worst drought in 40 years, immediately followed by the worst flooding in a century.

The game is not perfect: The card on aerosol emissions feels like a distraction, and the group loses focus on the concept of radiative forcing. “This could use some music,” mutters Naomi Mwangi, the reggae publicist, throwing her long dreads behind her.

There are no winners and losers in the game. At the end, Ringenbach said, the hope is to prod each group to come up with solutions. But no one here was sure what would really make a difference. Recycling more plastic? Carpooling? Eating less meat? “But we’re Kenyan!” came the chorus of disapproval.

Everyone would like the state to do more, but few expect much from a government that has violently cracked down on protesters and kidnapped dissidents from their homes. The crowd eventually disperses, energized but directionless.

Global reach

Climate Fresks started in France, but spread quickly, and there are cards now in 50 languages. Novelist Eugenia O’Neal recently attended a game in London. She had been interested in climate change since Al Gore first championed the topic. Then, in 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed her home in the British Virgin Islands.

“The pressure was dropping, my ears were popping, the front door was shaking … the roof came off,” she remembered. “The wind was like a living thing.”

For her, Fresk was a chance to share her story with others, as a lesson and a warning. “I think we need shock,” she said. “I don’t think people are getting it.”

Megan Yousef, 38, a former pharmacist in Cleveland, has hosted about 60 Fresks. She was doing it full time until recently, mostly with corporate executives.

“People often feel stuck, like there’s nothing they can do,” she said. “But even with so much distrust it’s still powerful to bring people from different backgrounds together in the same room to talk about things that everyone cares about.”

In her first year of playing, she trained 17 other people, she said, and they are now hosting events with schools, farming groups and universities — even in communities where climate change is viewed with suspicion.

“We don’t always have those conversations in the Midwest,” she laughed. But “it starts conversations,” she added, “and that’s how you drive a society towards change.”

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