En-ROADS in Korea's 2026 Climate Citizens' Assembly — Overview

Korea's first national Climate Citizens' Assembly (2026, 200 deliberating citizens — 20 planning + 180 deliberating-only, established under Article 19-2 of the Carbon Neutrality Framework Act) has adopted En-ROADS as its shared simulation tool for small-group deliberation. En-ROADS is an interactive global climate model developed by Climate Interactive with MIT Sloan, Ventana Systems, and UMass Lowell, released under CC BY 4.0. Eighteen policy levers — covering coal, oil, gas, renewables, nuclear, new zero-carbon technology, bioenergy, carbon pricing, transport and buildings efficiency and electrification, agriculture, waste, deforestation, nature- and tech-based carbon removal, plus population and GDP assumptions — let citizens see the year-2100 temperature curve, energy mix, and co-benefits (air quality, heat mortality, crop yields) redrawn in under a second. This is the international showcase page; the working Korean handbook lives at /ko/tools/en-roads/comprehensive-guide.

The Assembly's design team chose En-ROADS for two reasons specific to Korea. First, the 2017 Shin-Kori 5/6 deliberative poll proved that Korean citizens can engage rigorously with technical scenarios when given good materials and facilitation, but that exercise was a single yes/no question on one reactor pair. The 2026 Assembly must instead consider electricity, transport, industry, buildings, and land-use as a package — and the 2024 generation mix that small-group moderators will reference (nuclear 31.7% / 188.8 TWh, coal 28.1% / 167.2 TWh, LNG 28.1% / 167.2 TWh, renewables 10.6% / 63.2 TWh; sources: MOTIE and Korea Power Exchange 2024 settlements) only sharpens the trade-offs between levers. Second, the Gyeonggi Climate Citizens' Assembly (province-level, 120 + 330 members, 90% recommendation adoption rate) showed that interactive tooling at the table — rather than printed policy menus — keeps deliberation grounded in cause and effect rather than slogans.

The Korean handbook linked above covers, in this order: what En-ROADS is and is not (it is a global single-region model, not a national forecast — Korean numbers are referenced externally, never confused with simulator output); how to operate sliders and share scenario URLs (including a v1.1 patch documenting the URL parameter structure traced through the open-source en-roads-py wrapper, since Climate Interactive has not published the integer-ID mapping table); the baseline 2100 temperature of +3.3 °C above pre-industrial (v23.6.0, June 2023 update, consistent with NGFS Current Policies); a four-part dossier on each of the 18 levers (definition, default assumption, Korean context note, link to Assembly agenda); a chapter-by-chapter summary of the 131-page Technical Reference; an English–Korean glossary aligned to the Carbon Neutrality Framework Act terminology; concrete moderator scenarios with the "bathtub," "balloon squeeze," "crowding out," and "delay" metaphors translated for Korean audiences; and a status report on the volunteer Korean UI translation that the Assembly preparation team is proposing to Climate Interactive.

The handbook is explicit about what moderators do and do not say. Moderators do not advocate for or against any lever; they let citizens move sliders and read the graphs. They do, however, transmit the scientific facts that the original Climate Interactive sources stamp as load-bearing — for example, that subsidising wood bioenergy can raise net CO₂ because of regrowth lag, that carbon pricing requires a just-transition design to avoid burdening low-income households (the 2022 Seoul semi-basement floods and the 2024 April–September heatwave anchor this in lived Korean experience), and that nuclear and renewables can crowd each other out under a fixed demand path. Assembly recommendations are not yet government policy. This wiki documents what the Assembly is currently deliberating, citing the 11th Basic Plan for Electricity Supply and Demand (2024–2038), 2030 NDC (40% reduction from 2018 levels), and 2018 baseline emissions of 727.6 Mt CO₂eq as the legal and statistical coordinates against which En-ROADS scenarios are being read.

Citation

Climate Interactive. (2026). En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator. https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/ 2026 Korea Climate Citizens' Assembly Moderator Team. (2026). En-ROADS Korean Comprehensive Guide v1.1. https://climate-assembly.org/ko/tools/en-roads/comprehensive-guide

Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Korean source: tools/en-roads/ko/comprehensive-guide.