Introduction

This Climate Chess ebook is not a step-by-step game plan for accelerating climate change progress. Instead it introduces the idea of Climate Chess, the two teams playing Climate Chess, and how Team Urgency could significantly "up its game.”

There's good news and bad news when it comes to playing Climate Chess. The good news is that Team Urgency, at least in principle, has a lot of players and pieces on its side of the board, certainly enough to put in a credible showing in attempting to tackle climate change. The bad news is Team No-Urgency has been winning at Climate Chess for decades now, and it’s not obvious that will change. In large part, unfortunately, because it’s not clear that the players who would naturally make up Team Urgency realize they’re even engaged in playing “the ultimate planetary board game,” Climate Chess.

The goal of this Climate Chess ebook is to explain how re-framing climate change mitigation in Climate Chess terms could be a much more effective strategy than we’ve seen to date, in part because it offers a way to organize the millions of concerned individuals who today have no idea how to effectively tackle climate change.

We’ll also explore how the Climate Web can actively support Team Urgency in playing Climate Chess. The Climatographers, authors of this ebook and developers of the Climate Web, have been studying climate change as a source of societal and business risk for the last 35 year, and Climate Chess represents a synthesis of our thinking based on that work.

We hope you find this Climate Chess ebook insightful, and look forward to your suggestions and feedback. Particularly if you’d be interested in making Climate Chess a real option for the 100 million individuals in the United States alone who are alarmed or concerned about climate change according to the Yale Project on Climate Communications.

The Climatographers