china-energy-supply-sector-plan-workspace-2015

Overview

Question:

How should China address climate change in the energy sector?
Submit proposals: https://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1302015
Rules: All entrants must agree to the 2015 Contest Rules. and Terms of Use.
Deadline: Thursday, Jul 16, 2015 at 22:59:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
Judging Criteria & Prizes: See below.

 

Background

In this workspace, you develop plans for how China as a whole – its government, businesses, other organizations, and citizens – can take effective action in the energy supply sector to address climate change.

Working as an individual or in a team, you can select and combine proposals from Climate CoLab contests, as well as from outside the Climate CoLab, to develop a cohesive plan for this sector. With help from the Impact Assessment Fellows, you will be able to see your plan’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenario from 2020 to 2050, and compare that with a business-as-usual emission scenario.

In addition to being completed pieces on their own, proposals submitted here will serve as building blocks for the development of plans on a regional and global level.  They will only be evaluated if they are included in a regional plan.

This contest is part of new pilot initiative to create crowdsourced regional and global plans on how to most effectively address climate change. Learn more.  If you have feedback on the approach, please let us know by sending email to admin@climatecolab.org.

Key Issues

Any comprehensive combination of actions to address climate change in a sector must necessarily involve:

• activity at multiple geographic levels (national, regional, and local),
• interventions in the technical, biological, and geological systems that directly affect the earth’s carbon cycle as well as interventions in the economic and political systems, and behavioral patterns, that shape the relevant physical systems.

Judging Criteria

Different from a contest, a workspace has no evaluation period.  Rather, it is an open phase where proposals can be created and edited on an ongoing basis.  Proposals submitted here will only be evaluated if they are included in a regional plan.

Prizes

Proposals submitted here are eligible to receive prizes if they are included in a winning global plan. All subproposals of the winning global plan will receive Climate CoLab Points, and the top point-getters will receive share of a cash prize of Climate CoLab Points, and the top point-getters will receive share of a cash prize of $10,000.

Submission Format

 Building the plan.

When creating your plan, you will be asked to select multiple proposals from across the Climate CoLab platform. 

If you don’t see a proposal that outlines what you think needs to be done – or, if you would like to include ideas created outside of the Climate CoLab (such as policies currently under consideration; actions proposed by cities and governments; potential technological developments) – create a new proposal in a sector contest that summarizes (and links to further descriptions of) the actions you want to include, and link it in your plan here.

You will also be asked to justify how the selected actions fit together; describe the key benefits, costs, challenges and timeline of the plan; and estimate (working the Impact Assessment Fellows) the emissions that would result from the actions proposed (see below).

Evaluating impact.

The platform will automatically calculate a very rough estimate these emissions from the sum of all the proposals linked in your plan.  This can be viewed in the plan’s impact tab.  However, these automatically calculated totals will often be inaccurate or incomplete. They may, for instance, leave out many types of interactions between different proposals or other types of over- or under-counting.  To create more realistic projections, you are strongly encouraged to work with the Impact Assessment Fellows to use the modeling tools on the platform. 

Building blocks for global plans.

In addition to being completed pieces on their own, sector plans also serve as building blocks for the development of plans on a national, regional and global level.  The Climate CoLab regional and global contests invite individuals and teams to build plans for how countries and the world as a whole can address climate change.  Authors may select sector plans submitted in this workspace to include as a part of their regional plan, and sector and regional plan authors are strongly encouraged to work together.  In many cases, the same teams may create both sector and regional plans that are designed to be compatible.