Climate change and indigenous peoples

Not tools per se, but a nice introduction to climate change, the impacts on indigenous peoples and the potential for people to act.

Climate change modeling tools

Take a look at the WEadapt site which has a function which allows you to put observations in a layer on GoogleEarth.

weADAPT is a network of organisations collaborating on adaptation. They have a number of tools, including the Climate Change Explorer, Adaptation Decision Explorer and the Adaptation Layer in Google Earth. Downscaled climate data is available through the University of Cape Town, and there are also introductions to methods that we find useful in our work, such as agent-based modelling. The tools, data and the network could be useful for collaborative mapping.

 

 

United Nations Mapping in Climate Change Effort

The UN has initiated a Cities in Climate Change Initiative. As part of this, they'll be compiling a list of tools to map climate change impacts, particularly in cities. These also will include all kinds of tools related to risk assessment and vulnerability mapping. They plan to report on the Sustainable Urban Development Network. Stay tuned for their report.

Time Machine

Check out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Climate Time Machine. You can see all or portions of the globe, affected by sea ice or sea level rise or CO2 emissions or temperature rise.

Change at hand: Web 2.0 tools for development

Soon to come
… printed and online …
… in English and French …
 
Participatory Learning and Action 59:
 
Change at hand: Web 2.0 tools for development
 
Guest editors: Holly Ashley, Jon Corbett, Ben Garside and Giacomo Rambaldi
 
Web 2.0 tools and approaches are radically changing the ways we create, share, collaborate and publish digital information through the Internet. Participatory Web 2.0 for development – or Web2forDev for short – is a way of employing web services to intentionally improve information-sharing and online collaboration for development. Web 2.0 presents us with new opportunities for change – as well as challenges – that we need to better understand and grasp. This special issue shares learning and reflections from practice and considers the ways forward for using Web 2.0 for development.
 
Participatory Learning and Action is the world’s leading informal journal on participatory approaches and methods. It draws on the expertise of guest editors to provide up-to-the minute accounts of the development and use of participatory methods in specific fields. It provides a forum for those engaged in participatory work – community workers, activists and researchers – to share their experiences, conceptual reflections and methodological innovations with others, providing a genuine ‘voice from the field’. It is a vital resource for those working to enhance the participation of ordinary people in local, regional, national, and international decision-making, in both South and North.
 
ISBN: 978-1-84369-716-9
ISSN: 1357-938X
Order no: 14563IIED
 
Published by IIED and CTA, June 2009
 
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Recipients are encouraged to use it freely for not-for-profit purposes only. Please credit the authors and the Participatory Learning and Action series. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0

Governance, Participaton and the Geoweb: a computer-side chat

Jon Corbett and Chris Gore met virtually to discuss the impact of the geoweb on governance and how we might incorporate research related to this into the project objectives. We recorded the interview and post it here for your viewing pleasure...

The Revolution will not be Televised, it will be Twittered

From an IT standpoint, one of the remarkable things about the protests in Iran, is the amount of information that is being transmitted via new social media, like Twitter, Faceboo, Youtube and Flickr. And it's being mashed up in a way to transmit a cohesive and compelling picture of the events in realtime. Considering the urgency with which the Iranian government is shutting access to these same sites demonstrates that Web 2.0 represents an important new way to communicate about and with government:

Stripping away the hyperbole of that statement and we are left with the very real and grounded fact that the way citizens across the world
organize, react, and participate has forever been altered by the cornucopia of 21st century mediums, each of which presents a new platform for how citizens interact with and even select their government.

The blogger continues:

But the internet provides something more. Where print, radio and TV have permitted political and community leaders to "get their messages" out to the masses, they are largely one-dimensional methods of communication. With the internet, however, we are seeing for the first time how multi-dimensional technology allows not just for the amplification of a "message" by those at the top, but it also allows for the creation of sub-messages, anti-messages, and other reactions by the masses.

Can the same be done with global environmental change? Environmental change certainly works on a much slower timetable than political crises. It's nowhere near as immediate and may not generate the same kind of branched sensibilities of the word. And are science-related topics amenable to this frenetic branching of chatter? Science aims to be authoritative; whereas, politics aims to be assertive. Anti-messages, particularly around climate change, already flourish in Web 1.0. With conservatives' adoption of media like Twitter, the counter-chatter could swamp the authority. During the course of thi grant, we'll aim to find some of the answers.

Pamela Tudge's Research Video - Cultivating Change

Pamela Tudge, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan is investigating ways to engage the public in a two way dialogue with government around issues of farming and food systems.

Britta's Research Video

Randy Skinner's research

We've asked each of our students to create a video of their research. Here is the first one, from Randy Skinner, a Master's student at Memorial University in Newfoundland

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