By Christmas, we just might have our first binding agreement to curb climate change worldwide. That's because the United Nation's Conference on Climate Change will meet in Paris on November 30 with the hope of establishing greenhouse gas emission limits for every nation on Earth.

Given the catastrophic specter of climate change, it's hard to overstate just how important an agreement from the Paris conference would be. But as recent history has shown, the simple threat of disaster is no sure deal-maker. Every nation at the negotiating table will be strategizing to get away with the smallest reduction of greenhouse emissions they can, and that wheeling and dealing could derail the whole conference.

But a new scientific study that looks at global climate negotiations through the eyes of game theory has some fascinating insights for the upcoming Paris conference. According to a team of systems scientists—led by Vilhelm Verendel, a negotiation modeler at the Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden—there are several ways to increase the likelihood that the nations actually reach a deal. The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change. (Negotiators, feel free to use the following as a tip sheet)

Have a Clear Threshold

Like weather forecasting, climate science is notoriously inexact. While scientists are in resounding agreement that continued emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the Earth, there's no way to know exactly how much greenhouse gas or temperature increase would push the planet past the point of no return—the threshold where runaway feedback loops of heating and polar melting become irreversible.

That lack of a definite threshold is bad news at the negotiation table. Verendel and his colleagues make clear that previous "experiments demonstrate that groups . . . tend to reach agreements with greater frequency when the threshold level is well-known, compared with when there is uncertainty about the threshold level." It makes sense—group consensus is far more likely when everyone is clear where the stakes lie.

As it stands, the Paris accords are loosely focused on the concrete (if arguably scientifically unsound) goal of stopping global warming at a two degrees Celsius increase above pre-industrial levels.

Limit the Chairs at the Table

For their study, Verendel and his colleagues created hundreds of model negotiations in which AI negotiators faced off with one another. In these models, the machines simultaneously bid their offers for greenhouse gas reductions in rounds. Before each round, the negotiators would estimate their opponents' bids (with varying levels of strategy), and during the round, they'd offer what they believed would be the lowest greenhouse gas reductions they could get away with while still contributing to a worldwide emissions cut of 50 percent.

In all these simulations, Verendel found that adding more negotiators to an agreement made any solution less likely. As the number of players at a table increased from two to ten, the chance the the talks would be derailed without a working solution increased (with just one exception) regardless which strategies the AI negotiators were using. These findings suggest that climate talks should use the smallest team of negotiators possible, with each negotiator representing not just a nation but some predetermined region or group of nations.

Restrict the Opening Bids

In the researchers' various negotiation models, the AIs' starting bids for greenhouse gas reductions were set randomly. From the opening bid on, the computers would try to strategize their way to the best personal deal.

Time again and again, Verendel's team found that, "one way to increase the success rate of finding an agreement. . . is to restrict the range of initial bids in the first round so that negotiations start from less extreme bargaining positions closer to agreement." In negotiations where, for example, two countries bid very low and one bid extremely high—together overshooting the 50 percent goal—all the negotiators would often wildly bid in the proceeding rounds, aiming to finish in an extreme low-ball position. Conversely, when bids started closer to one another, the negotiators tended to slowly whittle away toward a tenable goal.

The takeaway? It'd be smart for the Paris negotiations to open the conference with pre-negotiations, establishing an acceptable range greenhouse gas reduction bids.

Be Less Strategic, Strangely Enough

When the AI negotiators used "higher levels of strategic reasoning," the study found, that resulted in "fewer starting conditions to lead to agreement." That's right. The scientists found that contrary to what you might think, the more strategically skilled the negotiators, the more often the talks derailed. Obviously that's a troubling issue, given that "we may expect a [high] degree of strategic reasoning in international climate negotiations, which depend on experienced individual negotiators," the scientists write.

Here's how they simulated strategic ability: AI negotiators were programmed with different levels of strategic reasoning. AI negotiators with the lowest level of strategy (called level 0, or L0) would quickly calculate their upcoming bids assuming that their opponents would simply bid the same as they did in previous rounds. Pretty simple.

By contrast, the next-level AI negotiators—L1s—don't assume their opponents will keep bidding the same amount. Instead, they assume their opponents will act like L0 negotiators. Here's where it gets tricky. Clever L2 negotiators take an even deeper level of strategy, assuming that their opponents will behave like L1s. The highest level of strategy simulated was L3, which, of course, assumes everyone else acts like an L2.

The elite policymakers who go to Paris will be "predominantly L1 or L2 and higher," writes Verendel's team. But in the study's simulations, all the talks where everyone is using a L2 or L3 strategy are an outright fiasco. No agreement is ever made. But pretty much across the board, talks that included predominantly L1s and as few higher-level (L2 and L3) strategists as possible resulted in a higher chance that an agreement could be reached.

"This model is obviously a number of steps away from real climate negotiations," the scientists write. "But this suggests that strategic reasoning could be a roadblock to stay in agreements... the capability for strategic reasoning can thus seem useful for individuals but may also make it harder to cooperate to manage at least this global catastrophic risk."

We're not quite sure what to recommend to the Paris conference negotiators from this finding. It's a tough sell to tell negotiators on the eve of the most important climate change conference to date, "Can you be a little worse at your job?"

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