Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the changes in our climate we can longer avoid, will require significant shifts in how we live our lives in Scotland. The Scottish Government’s Climate Change Plan 2026-2040 sets out an ambitious roadmap for the next 15 years of policy making to help us make these changes. 

But turning ambitious plans into well-designed policy that leads to effective action in a complex world is far from simple. To future proof policies, we need to predict the impact of different approaches against the uncertain backdrop of societal and environmental change. 

Using scenarios

Scenario analysis is a modelling tool that assesses the impact of different plausible future scenarios while accounting for uncertainties and complex systems and it has gained popularity in policy making recently. The approach allows policy makers to assess the evidence and data for a specific topic or system and explore the consequences of new and existing approaches on the system dynamics of the future. However, a recent ClimateXChange (CXC) report on Using future climate scenarios to support today’s decision making identified the complexity of data and processes needed for successful climate scenario analysis as a barrier for stakeholders, including policy makers. 

The CXC report recommends developing a practical scenario analysis tool to overcome both the capability and the data challenges. There is clearly a need for improved decision-making tools to empower people to use scenario analysis, accommodating the wide range of capabilities users may have. These tools also need to be able to represent complex systems and the variety of data available. Decision support tools need to be intuitive, allowing users to interact and engage with complex topics and data.

Building complex worlds

One sector that is well developed in Scotland and that has engaged millions of users with complex worlds and scenarios is video gaming. Popular games made or developed in Scotland such as Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto are complex worlds that have hundreds of millions of users. There is also a wealth of lesser-known games attracting users on a daily or weekly basis. This is where our vision in the Ecological Knowledge Games project comes in: we produce knowledge games that use scientific evidence to build engaging games that take the player through future scenarios and let the player make decisions that are immediately translated into system changes immediately. 

Games are an intuitive way of engaging with climate change scenarios. They can address the challenge of user capability by building games that have different levels, where the first levels allow learning about the system and advanced levels are about finding solutions to complex challenges. Today’s games can model complex systems and calculate in real time the system changes that result from player decisions, addressing the challenge of complex system dynamics that is inherent in climate change scenarios. There is a real opportunity to combine the power of the Scottish games industry and the need for complex climate scenario analysis in policy making. 

Predicting decision making

The decisions we make, and our day-to-day behaviour, will have to change to adapt to climate change. This was already evident in 2025, for example, in the farming community who had to adapt practices during the driest summer on record in Scotland. However, for climate scenario analysis it is important to know whether new policies will change the behaviour among the intended group of people. In other words, we need to improve the evaluation of behavioural interventions as recommended in another recent CXC report (November 2025). 

Games can be used to upscale behavioural experiments which would previously be carried out in laboratory setting. The underlying data can be collected and analysed to test whether new policies are likely to lead to behavioural change. Because games can be very engaging, especially when developed by professional game companies, games could also engage policy makers with behavioural science and evidence, another recommendation from the CXC report. 

In January 2026, Scotland’s Games Action Plan produced by the Scottish Games Network was discussed in the Scottish Parliament, setting out a roadmap for Scotland’s games industry to play a crucial role in education, research and policy. The potential of knowledge games is currently underused in policy. Scotland is the ideal place, and this is the perfect time to make this happen.