Decarbonization Studio: A tool for Climate Change Education

Decarbonization is the process of removing carbon from a system. When that system is a nation's carbon emissions, decarbonization is highly complex and understanding its many facets is challenging. To understand the challenges, implications, and benefits of decarbonization for a country requires in-depth examination of current data and developing future emission scenarios. A major barrier to teaching and learning about decarbonization is that emissions data must be assembled from myriad sources, with often varying reporting years, emission sectors, and structures to the data.

Here we present Decarbonization Studio, an online application built with the goal of efficiently merging these various data sets in order to provide a platform for student-led discovery. The app gives students direct access to information on emissions by sector, over time, by country, as a function of what we get from activities driving those emissions - wealth, energy, food, etc. This emphasis on not just emissions but the activities that incur emissions helps focus student's attention on examining what's important, what's possible, and what it might cost for a country to decarbonize.

Decarbonization Studio was inspired by the C-Roads system but designed to allow deeper exploration (across sectors of a country and between countries) over the course of a semester. Designed with the R coding language's Shiny library for web development, it allows for easy and interactive data visualizations, manipulation, and user inputs. This allows students to view and manipulate data pertaining to emissions and resultant climate change. Features of the Decarbonization studio were designed and initially tested as an application for students to use within a graduate-level course as part of the Carbon Management Certificate at Colorado State University. Students were assigned a country and tasked with first predicting future aspirations and wealth of that country, then second, determining the decarbonization potential based on those aspirational goals. This culminated in a mock negotiation where students presented the decarbonization plans for their countries. We are currently wrapping up its pilot session and will share lessons learned in its first in-depth use.