Dev Blog 11 - The Climatologist: Analysing Our Way Toward Sustainability

//This Dev Blog was originally posted as an update on the Earth Rising Kickstarter on September 16th, 2021//

The Climatologist allows you to redistribute one Strain to a different ‘Ecological Burden’. Each Sustainable Practice within the Energy sector allows the Climatologist to move one extra strain.

This is particularly useful just before the strain calculation phase, as you can redistribute it to a sector that is doing well enough to remove strain, or to prevent Ecological Collapse.

The really unique thing about the Climatologist's ability is they can be used during the actions of any other player's turn! Just don't forget to use them before you enter the strain phase...

What is Energy, and why is the Climatologist its specialist?

The Energy sector is how electrical power is generated, stored and used within a society. While at first this doesn’t sound as vital as food production or reliable running water, the vast majority of modern society requires electrical power to run at all.

Blackouts - a period where an area loses all access to power - can cause widespread disruption to infrastructure, businesses and jobs, and cause severe danger in the forms of electrical short-circuit fires and the loss of emergency systems. As such, it’s vital to any society that they have access to a constant, stable supply of power, with backup options should they fail.

A simple change you can make is swapping your energy provider to one who provides clean, green energy - produced by wind, water or sun! Beyond production itself, decentralising our networks would also create a more sustainable future for the energy sector, decreasing the risk of power failure alongside increasing energy conservation.

As with all sectors, Energy cannot work alone. The network of support created by all six sectors is necessary for change.

The Climatologist is the specialist of the Energy sector because the vast majority of CO2 comes from our energy supply! Tracking and documenting its effects and providing clear evidence that they are the origin of our global heating is vital to proving that we need to divest from them.

Did you know that coal plants contribute more radioactivity to their surrounding area than a nuclear power plant?

Further than that, it’s by tracking our changing climate that we’re better able to prepare for problems that arise, and it’s through this that our Climatologist can divert Strain to other burdens, giving our society the warnings we need to avoid an Ecological Collapse.

Thank you to Renewable World for helping us with this sector of the game! A great charity providing green energy infrastructure in the developing world, they helped us get the research we needed to understand why certain energy networks are unsustainable, and why others present a positive alternative.

In our build up to launch, we discussed Nuclear energy, and why we eventually decided not to represent it (either as Sustainable or Unsustainable) in Earth Rising. Check out our blog post all about it here: Nuclear Energy: Sustainable or Not?(coming soon)

Want to read more on the characters of Earth Rising? Click their names below to jump to them!