Climate change (CC) is an increasing societal concern for many countries around the world, and yet international negotiations continue to make slow progress. CC is an issue that is proving difficult to address using traditional approaches to information provision and education. This article reviews the development of climate and CC games and simulations in recent years as an alternative and novel way of addressing CC issues and communicating with decision makers. It gives an overview of published CC games and analyses a selection of 52 sophisticated CC games in detail. The results allow comparisons of the temporal development of climate games, actors involved in CC game development, game formats, and game subjects. Many climate games appeared around the time of the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, with an increasing number of commercial game developers entering the field. Role-play and management games dominate the scene, but we see a rapid increase in the number of online games or games with an online component. Both local and global mitigation issues are frequently addressed and as yet few games focus on adaptation to CC.

Cities are increasingly aware of the need to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to changes in weather patterns leading to the production of urban climate change plans. The few existing systematic studies of these plans have focused on either adaptation or mitigation issues, and are typically based on surveys completed by city officials rather than analysis of documented evidence. To gain insight into the status of adaptation and mitigation action across the UK, climate change documents from 30 urban areas (representing ~28 % of the UK’s population) were analysed. An Urban Climate Change Preparedness Score, which could be applied to other urban areas outside the UK, has been devised for comparative analysis. This analysis characterizes progress against (i) Assessment, (ii) Planning, (iii) Action, and (iv) Monitoring, for both adaptation and mitigation. The Preparedness Score allows a quantitative comparison of climate change strategies across the urban areas analysed. This methodology can be transferred to other countries and makes an international comparison of urban areas and their climate change adaptation and mitigation plans possible. We found that all areas acknowledge climate change being a threat and that adaptation and mitigation planning and action is required. However, two urban areas did not have official adaptation or mitigation plans. Typically, mitigation activities across all cities were more advanced than adaptation plans. Emissions reduction targets ranged from 10 %–80 % with differing baselines, timeframes and scopes, for defining and meeting these targets. Similar variability was observed across adaptation plans. Several reasons for these differences are considered, but particularly notable is that a combination of incentives and regulation seem to stimulate more comprehensive strategies and action in many urban areas.

In this guest editorial, we survey some of the main themes and issues in anthropogenic global warming. We emphasize the great potential of simulation/games as an educational strategy. The diversity of issues in climate change is matched by the variety of simulation/games. We then provide a summary of the main points of each of the eight articles, which together contain a wide range of perspectives on climate change, of types of simulation/gaming, of level of abstraction, and of method of implementation.