By Sue Cardwell, Communications Manager at Bike Auckland
I heard about Climate Fresks long before I had the chance to be part of one. A chance to learn climate science by playing a game? I was keen. Not just as a participant, but as a climate action advocate – how could this game help the movement?
Wanting to do everything I can to mitigate climate change is the reason I joined the crew at Bike Auckland. While there are many great reasons to hop on a bike, surely climate change is one of the greatest. It factors into the thinking of many of us who cycle.
Climate change is a problem that looms over everyone. Despite this, the general population still has a poor understanding of climate science. This, to me, is a huge loss – we need the world’s best minds focused on this vast and complex problem. And we need a shared understanding of the backdrop to the problem.
As a professional communicator, I was sure there was a better way to share climate science with everyone open to hearing about it.
The challenge with sharing climate change science
What the world knows about climate change science is assessed and shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body created for this purpose. The IPCC publishes its findings once or twice a decade in an encyclopedic “Assessment Report”. The latest is Assessment Report 6, published in 2023, and it’s just shy of 4,000 pages. A light bedtime read it is not!
Thankfully, a French lecturer called Cédric Ringenbach thought of a better way to help people get their heads around the climate science in the IPCC reports. In 2018, he developed a collaborative game to unpack the science in a more engaging way. Over the course of three hours, groups uncover the mechanisms behind climate change for themselves – creating a ‘fresco’ to display the complex chain of cause and effect. Then, they use their new knowledge to create new ideas for action.
It’s now in over 100 countries and 45 languages. My opportunity to participate came when Climate Club Aotearoa offered to run Climate Fresk as part of Biketober 2024.
My encounter with a Climate Fresk
I sailed up to the Flagship Centre on my bike on a chilly midweek evening. Joining me were an assortment of bike folk, people from other NGOs or community groups, people who were curious about the Climate Fresk concept and bringing it to their organisations, walk-ins from the street. Many came to learn, some came to argue, for some it was a social event.
Luckily the charismatic Emily Mabin-Sutton from Climate Club had us in hand, and expertly wove some Fresk magic around us to keep all voices balanced and everyone focused on the task in hand – building our ‘fresco’.
Emily’s own Climate Fresk story is worth sharing. After participating in a Fresk, she quit her job and founded Climate Club Aotearoa.
I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t find the game easy. Spectres of school chemistry lessons haunted me as I grappled with the scientific mechanisms on the array of cause and effect cards in front of our team. At least they hadn’t dumbed down the science, I reasoned. Thankfully, each of us in the team brought some prior knowledge (and universally better understanding of chemistry than me) and we reasoned our way through.
The output: a complex, yet cohesive, cause-and-effect web explaining what was happening in the world around us.
I was inexplicably proud of our Fresk. Things clicked into place – both on the network in front of us, and in my head. I suddenly grasped the disproportionate importance of oceans as our biggest carbon sink – and how fragile they are. For me, the exercise of creating the Fresk sorted the causes from their effects, and added in the linkages between them.
The secret sauce in Climate Fresks
And perhaps that is the secret sauce in the Climate Fresk concept. Learners make their own discoveries, and create their own knowledge framework – they own the process.
The learning was just one phase of the evening, however. What we learned had sobered us, and now it was time to rebuild our optimism with climate solutions. Emily teamed us up to come up with our personal action. I dutifully completed my homework after the session – an op-ed on why beef isn’t the future for Aotearoa.
But the Climate Fresk sparked much more than that for me. I continued conversations with the people I met that evening. My knowledge structure on climate had shifted.
I was ready to be part of the climate conversation.
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Find out more
In New Zealand, Climate Club Aotearoa runs Climate Fresks regularly.
There is a Biketober 2025 Climate Fresk on Thursday 16 October – see biketober.nz for details. Registration is encouraged.
