Elizabeth Sawin is the co-founder and Co-Director of climate-interactive, an organization she built with andrew-jones to apply system dynamics modeling to climate policy communication. She was directly mentored by Donella Meadows during 1995-2001 at the sustainability-institute, making her one of the most direct living carriers of Meadows's pedagogical and applied systems thinking tradition.
Sawin's work at the sustainability-institute during Meadows's final years put her at the center of the practical application work that Meadows considered the mature phase of the Limits project: not just modeling collapse scenarios but building the institutional and educational infrastructure to help communities and policymakers understand and act on systems dynamics. This pedagogical orientation — using simulations and interactive tools to make complex system behavior accessible to non-specialists — became the defining methodology of climate-interactive.
Climate Interactive's flagship product, the En-ROADS climate policy simulator, is a direct institutional descendant of the systems modeling tradition Meadows inherited from jay-forrester and mit-system-dynamics-group. En-ROADS allows users to interactively test climate policy combinations and see projected global temperature outcomes — applying the same logic as the World3 model underlying limits-to-growth-1972 but targeted at climate policy rather than general resource limits. The tool has been used in workshops with thousands of policymakers, educators, and community leaders worldwide.
Sawin has also developed the concept of "multisolving" — the idea that well-designed interventions can simultaneously address climate, health, equity, and economic challenges — which extends Meadows's leverage-points framework into practical policy design. Where Meadows identified high-leverage intervention points in systems, Sawin's multisolving work asks how to identify interventions that move multiple systems toward better outcomes simultaneously.
As one of the people present at the sustainability-institute during Meadows's most intensive applied work period, Sawin carries direct transmission of Meadows's teaching style, her commitment to combining rigorous modeling with accessible communication, and her conviction that systems thinking must translate into practical community action. The donella-meadows-institute lineage runs most visibly through Sawin and Jones's climate-interactive work.