Climate Interactive is a nonprofit organization founded in 2010 by elizabeth-sawin and andrew-jones, both of whom were mentored directly by Donella Meadows and worked with her at the sustainability-institute before her death in 2001 (meadows-death-2001). It is the most direct institutional descendant of Meadows's application of system dynamics to policy communication.
The organization's primary product is the En-ROADS climate simulator, a system dynamics model designed to allow policymakers, educators, and the public to explore the long-term consequences of different climate and energy policy combinations. En-ROADS is explicitly in the tradition of limits-to-growth-1972 and thinking-in-systems-2008: it uses stocks-and-flows, feedback-loops, and delays-in-systems to model the climate system and the energy economy together, making the structural dynamics accessible to users without systems modeling backgrounds.
The connection to Meadows's core mission is direct. One of Meadows's persistent concerns was that complexity was used as an excuse for inaction — that policymakers and the public were told systems were too complicated to understand, which conveniently insulated powerful interests from scrutiny. The En-ROADS simulator embodies the counter-argument: that thinking-in-systems-2008 concepts can be made accessible, that leverage-points-paper-1999 insights about high-leverage interventions can be demonstrated interactively, and that public understanding of system dynamics is achievable.
Climate Interactive works closely with john-sterman at MIT and maintains institutional connections to the mit-system-dynamics-group. It has trained thousands of facilitators to use En-ROADS in workshop settings, extending Meadows's approach of convening small groups — as she did with the balaton-group — to build shared understanding of complex systems.
The organization's Washington DC location reflects its policy orientation, distinguishing it from the academic home of the mit-system-dynamics-group and the rural Vermont location of the sustainability-institute and cobb-hill-cohousing. Climate Interactive represents Meadows's legacy translated into contemporary climate policy communication — the same structural insights about exponential-growth and overshoot-and-collapse applied to the most pressing long-run challenge of the early 21st century.