Abstract for: Climate Change Hackathon

The IBM Academy of Technology is hosting a hackathon to model the impact of climate changes on vulnerable populations over time. We know that climate change shut down agriculture in Syria in 2006-7 and created urban conditions of unemployment and social tension that erupted into Civil War. We want to understand the social, economic, cultural, and political ramifications of subtle and overt climate changes on societies and the way they may adapt in the future. We want to develop an international community of model developers creating re-usable model components in XMILE that can help any community in any nation to understand the long tail effects of climate change by linking SD models to Open Data resources. All models will be open source, stored online in libraries, and presented to decision-makers at an event in Washington DC in October. Please bring your computer and your ideas. XMILE-compatible modeling software will be provided for those who need it. For those who wish to participate some source materials are being provided for background reading to inform the conversation. Please see the associated links for “paper” and “supporting materials.