The Drawdown Explorer is a valuable complement to the En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator. En-ROADS helps you understand the big picture by creating scenarios of climate action, showing how solutions interact, why fossil fuels cause temperature to increase, and what long-term futures different choices create. Drawdown Explorer helps you get specific through reading about what solutions look like on the ground today, and how different actors can implement them.
En-ROADS is useful when you want to:
- Understand how actions interact across the whole energy-climate system, including competition, tradeoffs, and feedbacks.
- See long-term outcomes, showing how choices today shape the world over the next decades and how emissions accumulate over time.
- Test policy choices (such as carbon pricing and fossil-fuel phaseout) and understand their system-wide effects.
- Learn how actions help to avoid climate impacts, including heat-related deaths, wildfire danger, and economic damages.
Drawdown Explorer is useful when you want to:
- See what specific technologies or practices such as heat pumps or landfill methane capture look like in the real world today.
- Learn who can contribute to implementing solutions (policymakers, businesses, households) and how to take action.
- Compare many specific solutions side-by-side at current costs and adoption levels.
- Identify where solutions have the greatest impact, highlighting geographic regions with high effectiveness, adoption potential, and opportunities for future scaling.
Our suggestion: Start with En-ROADS to grasp the overall picture of where the world is headed and what it will take to limit warming. For example, En-ROADS makes clear that the biggest driver of climate change is emissions from fossil fuels and highlights the importance of limiting their use alongside other actions. After getting the systems view with En-ROADS, Drawdown Explorer can be used to dive into specific solutions, learn their current potential today, and identify opportunities for scaling up the solution.
Similarities between En-ROADS and Drawdown Explorer
- Show that many solutions are needed. The takeaway message of both En-ROADS and the Drawdown Explorer is that there is no single solution that will itself solve the problem of climate change. It will take a combination of many different solutions to keep global temperature increase well below 2°C.
- Transparent and accessible. Both tools are designed to make science understandable and usable by everyone, with thorough documentation of methods and assumptions.
- Scientifically grounded. Both En-ROADS and Drawdown Explorer are rooted in rigorous analysis and peer-reviewed research.
- Available in multiple languages.
- Updated regularly.
Key differences
| Area | En-ROADS | Drawdown Explorer |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A dynamic, integrated simulator of how the global energy-climate system responds to climate solutions, alone or in combination globally. | An online platform to highlight the wide array of climate solutions, how they are applied today, and their opportunities to scale. |
| System behavior and interactions | Explicitly models the interactions, competition, and feedbacks between actions (e.g., how renewables and energy demand shifts affect fossil fuel use and emissions). | Considers each solution individually and does not quantify interactions between solutions if they are implemented in parallel. |
| Ranking of solutions | Does not rank solutions. Users learn which climate actions have the most impact by testing how each one affects desired climate outcomes when creating a scenario. | Arranges solutions into four categories: highly recommended, worthwhile, keep watching, not recommended. |
| Interactivity | Interactive simulator—it responds in real-time to different actions selected by the user. | Mostly static analyses; users can adjust assumptions around adoption and effectiveness for some solutions. |
| Maps | Interactive maps of climate impacts that update as the scenario changes. Maps show each decade from present day to 2100. | Maps that show present-day geographic relevance and potential for solutions. |
Takeaway
En-ROADS enables creation of climate solution scenarios—how emissions, removals, policies, technology deployment, and economic feedbacks combine to produce long-term climate outcomes. It makes clear why keeping coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground is central to avoiding dangerous warming. Drawdown Explorer explains specific solutions—what they are today, where they fit, and how people or institutions can advance them. Together, these two tools provide a fuller understanding of both the systemic changes needed and some of the practical steps available to accelerate climate action.
Share your experience
Have you used En-ROADS and Drawdown Explorer together? We’d love to hear what you learned and any suggestions you have. Let us know at support@climateinteractive.org.