C-ROADS Technical Reference🔗

Last updated April 2024

Lori S. Siegel¹, Chris Campbell¹, Tom Fiddaman², Andrew P. Jones¹, Charles Jones¹, John Sterman³

¹ Climate Interactive
² Ventana Systems
³ Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The C-ROADS Climate Change Policy Simulator is a climate simulation tool for understanding how we can achieve our climate goals through national and regional commitments. C-ROADS is a globally aggregated model of climate systems linked to regional sectors of emissions and land use. The level of aggregation and several simplifying assumptions allow the model to return results in seconds and be accessible to policy makers and general audiences. C-ROADS is a simple climate model and complements the other, more disaggregated models addressing similar questions, such as integrated assessment models or general circulation climate models. Those larger disaggregated models are used for calibrating results in C-ROADS.

C-ROADS is being developed by Climate Interactive, Ventana Systems, UML Climate Change Initiative, and MIT Sloan.

This C-ROADS Technical Reference documents the C-ROADS model structure, equations, assumptions, and data sources. In addition, there is a C-ROADS User Guide more suited to general audiences. For a list of articles about the simulators see our Peer-reviewed Research page. See our training plan for advice on how to use C-ROADS and the World Climate exercise.

Please visit support.climateinteractive.org for additional inquiries and support.