ECA-Effective Community Action Model - Investigation On How Collective Changes Can Make A Global Impact.

Abstract

Misinformation on climate change is rampant, malicious, and targeted to prevent collective action (Treen, 2020). Beyond the outright denials that it’s happening, or the attempts to claim that climate change isn’t due to human actions, assurances that climate change can be solved by individual actions can be just as counter productive (Levermann, 2019). Climate models are an excellent way to educate on climate change but most models focus either on individual’s carbon footprints or on the scale of UN resolutions and collective governments’ response to climate change (Sterman, 2013). Little to no models exist that bridge the gap between UN resolution and what the citizen can vote on at the ballot box. The ECA-Effective Community Action model is designed to address that need. It focuses on 6 core topics, travel, food, energy, residential and commercial, industry, and land use. Each topic has a number of anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide that the user can change to see the effect on the global system. The goal of the model is to demonstrate in an engaging way how policies on the national and local level can have an impact on climate change. The model successfully models 44 anthropogenic carbon sources, and produces results within the expected range of temperature rise. However, the model is still lacking in key areas and additional research is needed to continue to improve the model.