Andrew Jones is the co-founder and Executive Director of climate-interactive, the organization he built with elizabeth-sawin to apply system dynamics modeling to climate policy communication. His background in system dynamics connects Climate Interactive directly to the mit-system-dynamics-group tradition that jay-forrester established and that shaped Donella Meadows's career.
Jones's technical contribution to climate-interactive has been the development and maintenance of C-ROADS and En-ROADS — simulation models that translate the core methodology of the World3 model underlying limits-to-growth-1972 into interactive policy tools. Where World3 modeled the global system across five major sectors to identify overshoot-and-collapse risks, En-ROADS focuses the same dynamic modeling approach on the climate system, allowing users to test how combinations of energy, land use, and efficiency policies affect long-run temperature trajectories.
The feedback-loops, stocks-and-flows, and delays-in-systems concepts that Meadows made central to thinking-in-systems-2008 are built into En-ROADS's structure: the model shows users that policies have delayed effects, that emissions accumulate in the atmosphere like stocks, and that reinforcing-feedback-loops in both economic and climate systems create non-linear dynamics that defy intuitive prediction.
Jones's mentorship under Meadows at the sustainability-institute provided both technical grounding in system dynamics practice and exposure to Meadows's distinctive approach to using models as learning tools rather than prediction engines. This philosophy — that the value of a model like World3 or En-ROADS is in the thinking it forces, not in the precision of its forecasts — runs directly from Meadows's own framing of limits-to-growth-1972 and thinking-in-systems-2008.
Climate Interactive under Jones's direction has become one of the most widely used applied system dynamics organizations in the world, with En-ROADS deployed in policy workshops, university courses, and international climate negotiations. This applied reach represents the fulfillment of the pedagogical ambition Meadows articulated in her later career: making systems thinking a practical tool for policy change rather than an academic methodology.