Climate Action

SDG 13 is the failure mode of Watts and Wealth. If the table cannot coordinate, the Tipping Point ending fires at 600 global pollution and all four players lose together. That collective failure structure is the strongest mechanical encoding of SDG 13’s “urgent action” framing in the game.

Primary mechanics

The pollution counter is a stock, not a flow. Every facility adds to it per turn. Cards add or subtract one-shot amounts. The counter never resets between rounds. This is a deliberate teaching mechanic on the stock-flow asymmetry that Sterman identifies as the central mental-model error in public climate understanding.

Only a handful of cards reduce pollution: Direct_Air_Capture, Carbon_Capture_System, and Plastic_Ban_Enacted are the main pollution-reduction vectors, and all three are era-gated or expensive. This scarcity is intentional — it teaches that drawing down the stock is harder than slowing the inflow.

Card-level grounding

• Paris_Climate_Agreement is an era-2 Event card that draws a free Mitigate when the drawer owns no more than two fossil plants — a structural reward for low-fossil portfolios that echoes Article 2 of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement.
• Net_Zero_Movement is an era-4 Policy card that halves the toll on fossil facilities (penalising fossil holders) while doubling solar tolls (rewarding solar holders) — the in-game expression of a regulatory push toward renewables.
• Direct_Air_Capture is a late-era Policy card (era 4, costs 20 tokens) that subtracts ten from global pollution — modelling the real-world cost asymmetry of negative-emissions technology.
• Climate_Adaptation_Strategy_E1 and Climate_Adaptation_Strategy_E3 are era-tiered Mitigate cards that halve any token loss the holder takes.
• Drought, Tsunami, Solar_Storm, Wildfire_Near_Facilities, Flash_Flood, Ocean_Acidification are Event-pool disaster cards. Some destroy the nearest facility (Tsunami, Flash Flood), some block specific facility types (Drought blocks hydro builds), some impose a token or maintenance cost (Solar Storm, Wildfire).
• Climate_Protest is an era-2 Policy card that forces a chosen fossil-fuel facility to be decommissioned — modelling the social-movement lever AR6 cites as essential to regional transitions.

SDG 13 sub-targets in mechanics

• 13.1 (resilience and adaptive capacity): Climate_Adaptation_Strategy cards + Mitigate layer.
• 13.2 (climate measures in policy): Paris_Climate_Agreement + Net_Zero_Movement + Carbon_Capture_System.
• 13.3 (education and awareness): The whole game.