Play climate games!

Facts: Unsung climate heroes🏞️| | Action: Play climate games! 🎲

Welcome to We Can Fix It, where we tackle the climate crisis with facts, feelings, and action. Written by me, climate scientist Kim Nicholas.

Hi friends,

I hope your 2026 has been off to a more peaceful start than mine! I’m happy to report that my dad is now doing well in a lovely senior living community, but it was an extremely stressful January. Lots of love and strength to all of you with aging parents.

This month, we’ll reveal some unsung climate heroes, and I’ll share my favorite new game, which happens to be about solving climate change. Here goes!

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Facts: Unsung Climate Heroes🏞️

Did you know that wetlands store more carbon per hectare than tropical forests? I didn’t, and I did my master’s degree in ecosystem carbon cycling!

I learned this nifty fact from the new Carbon Garden at the wonderful Kew Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Tonnes of carbon stored per hectare in vegetation (green) and soils (black), as displayed in Kew’s Carbon Garden. Data source: Visual Capitalist. Photo: me.

Ecosystems vary a lot in how much carbon they store aboveground in trees and grasses, vs. how much carbon builds up in soil from the leaves, stems and roots of those plants when they die.

In cold and waterlogged ecosystems, like boreal forests and wetlands, microbes can’t break down much of the soil carbon, so it accumulates. Globally, there’s more than twice as much carbon in nature (soil + vegetation) as in the atmosphere. (DG Environment from the European Commission has a good overview.)

The IPCC ranks natural climate solutions like protecting and restoring ecosystems among the most effective measures available to fight climate change. (We’ll also need to build lots of wind and solar energy to replace fossil fuels.) One more reason to save and restore nature!

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Action: Play Climate Games 🎲

Climate change is serious business, but what if solving it could be … fun?

I’m a big board game geek (relative to the general population; among true board game geeks, I’m considered a mere enthusiast). I’ve played climate-themed games before, which were… educational… but honestly, not something I’d do in my free time.

So I was super happy to play a new board game that was fun enough to play two nights in a row, with the added bonus that it’s about solving climate change!

Daybreak has clever strategy like Terraforming Mars, beautiful design like Wingspan, and feisty collaboration like Pandemic. [Fun fact, Simon and I got engaged playing Pandemic Legacy 🤓].

Source: Daybreak press kit

In Daybreak, you play the role of the EU, US, China, or the Majority World, trying to replace your fossil fuels with clean energy and eliminate high-emitting cars, agriculture, and buildings. If you remove fossil fuels too aggressively, energy supply may not meet demand, and rioting communities slow you down and distract your resources. So you have to stay focused, plan carefully, and build resilience to withstand social and biophysical shocks. This 11-minute video explains how to play.

At home with Simon and our friend Charlie playing Daybreak. Bourbon optional.

Why are games climate action?

What will we need to solve climate change? Well, creativity, collaboration, experimentation, daring to try, learning as we go, learning from failure, and an expansive sense of possibility will all come in handy. Games are wonderful ways to tap into these ways of being and working. Plus, they help bring out silliness and laughter, which is just good for the soul and makes us want to keep at it. I love how Britchida puts it: “Play is the opposite of survival mode.”

Games can spark conversations and insights that can translate to real-world understanding and action. Plus, games are a great way to maximize fun while minimizing carbon. One of my favorite studies, on “High Subjective Wellbeing, Low-Carbon Leisure,” identified “games and hobbies,” along with reading, music, and sleep and rest, as activities to live better and happier while consuming and emitting less.

Do you have any climate games you love? Let me know in the comments below!

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Parting Tidbits

Upcoming talks, come see me here:

March 2, 15:15: High-impact climate action for academics, Sölvegatan 18B, Lund

Book Recommendation

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan. Gorgeously written, haunting and provocative. Really made me think about what we owe future generations, and how they’ll judge us. I love that climate fiction is being taken up by amazing novelists who make you care about the characters and conflicts and not just carbon.

xo,
Kim

P.S. Still working on improving my sleep!! It’s getting better. Thanks so much to readers for your tips. Latest trick is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia which has good evidence for success; check out this podcast (thanks Meg!)