Mapping the Contours of Climate Change - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

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Mapping the Contours of Climate Change

With formal negotiations on the new international climate change treaty due to open in three weeks time , Independent readers are starting to work with the Debategraph community to develop a comprehensive map of the issues around climate change that are confronting the negotiators.

The map (above) is part of a wider online collective intelligence project, ESSENCE 2009 – being run in conjunction with the Open University and MIT and supported by the World Federation of UN Associations – that is building towards the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The map is still in the early stages of development; however, it has already benefited from significant input from, among others, Mark Klein at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence , and the excellent debates at the IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change held at the Royal Geographical Society at the end of January.

As before , the whole structure of the map is like a wiki – every aspect is mutable provisional, and open to further refinement – and anyone can add new issues, positions, arguments, events and evidence to the map.

The aim is to weave together the key scientific and political arguments – from all perspectives on the subject – into a rich, transparent structure that anyone can explore and gain a relatively deep understanding of the complex considerations and choices quickly; confident in the knowledge that, as the map matures, all views are being represented fairly, succinctly and in full.

So where you spot gaps, or incorrect and/or unchallenged arguments on the map, please help us to fill the gaps and correct and challenge the arguments.

Each element on the map can be cross-related to any other element on the map; so any point can ...

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/mapping-the-contours-of-climate-change-1640886.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/mapping-the-contours-of-climate-change-1640886.html