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Climate Roulette examines the relationship between climate catastrophe, economic inequality, and the uneven distribution of environmental risk. Borrowing the visual language and mechanics of American roulette, the interactive game replaces the traditional numbered wheel with 38 countries, evenly divided between 19 Western nations and 19 countries in the Global South. By placing these countries alongside one another, the work invites participants to consider the historical and economic inequalities that shape who is most vulnerable to climate change.

Participants begin with 21 fictional chips to wager on the countries they believe are most likely to experience a climate-related disaster. Although each country occupies an equal amount of space on the wheel, the probability of being selected is weighted using historical climate-related disaster records from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT). The game also incorporates vulnerability and adaptation data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), allowing participants to explore the social and economic conditions that influence how countries experience and recover from environmental disasters.

The equal representation of Western and Global South countries on the wheel creates the appearance of an even playing field, while the underlying data reveals how differently risk is distributed. The familiar mechanics of roulette become a way to examine the limitations of treating catastrophe as a matter of chance when the conditions that determine vulnerability have been produced through centuries of political and economic decisions.

By inviting participants to gamble on environmental disaster, Climate Roulette confronts the ways human suffering becomes abstracted into statistics, probabilities, and financial speculation. The act of placing a bet asks players to consider how easily catastrophe can become a calculation, particularly when its consequences are experienced elsewhere. Through the spectacle of a casino game, the installation questions who has historically profited from the systems driving climate change, who is left to absorb the losses, and what it means to gamble with a future whose risks have never been equally shared. Play here https://climateroulette.pages.dev/