Abstract:

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our era, as stated by ex Secretary General of United Nations Ban Ki-Moon. In the last COP27 held in Sharm-El-Sheik, Egypt, in November 2022, the need to fight hunger and food insecurity emerged as a key topic to advance in adaptation and greenhouse gases (GHG) emission reduction. In this regard, during the World Food System Forum held in September 2021, the interdependencies between climate change and the food system were highlighted as the global food system is one of the major sources of GHG emissions, accounting for 31% of the total global emission.
Youth is recognized as playing a key role in tackling climate change challenges and in recent years several initiatives to include them in policy decision-making processes have emerged worldwide. Thus, educating on the connections between food system and climate change is essential for college students at the School of Agricultural, Food and Biosystems Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), both to their careers development and to engage them as citizens to promote innovative solutions to face climate change.
A role-playing game is used to explain the interconnections of climate change and the food system. Gamming in the classroom can stimulate learning on complex topics from a playful and practical perspective, where students must learn to behave, reflect and make decisions, exposing them to real challenges that they must live through.
The participants will have to assume the role of different stakeholders of the food system chain in order to, through a negotiation process, achieve a common objective related with GHG emission reduction and sustainability aligned with different international Agendas as the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda.
After developing the role play with grade and Master students, we observed that game dynamics specially facilitated the understanding of the differentiated roles played by the actors of the food system as well as the complex interactions among them.
A pre and post-test which showed knowledge acquisition in all the relevant topics analyzed, specially regarding the level of contribution of the food system to the global emissions, the interlinkages on environmental, social and economic factors affecting the different roles played and the complexity of the impacts on climate change on the food system. The students also perceived that the game reflects reality to a wide extent. Overall, the results demonstrated the effectiveness of role-play simulations for learning purposes on complex topics related to climate change.

Keywords:

Role-play, complexity, food system, climate change.