IC

ICT for Sustainability

Web for Sustainability: Finding the Local in Global Warming with Open Data
Proliferating open data resources are providing new opportunities to build interactive applications for public engagement with the facts and the trade-offs of sustainability. Globe-Town.org is a web app where users can discover how ongoing globalisation is distributing the risks, responsibilities & opportunities of climate change between distant countries. #

@JackTownsend_

j.townsend@soton.ac.uk

Complex networks of interrelationships between countries are represented as a simple row of houses in a street using the familiar metaphor of being neighbours. Links may transmit the risks of climate change around the globe (e.g., the impact of the 2011 Thai oods on the Japanese economy (Bloomberg, 2011)). They can also transmit the responsibilities for causing it (e.g., the embodied energy in exports from China), and provide opportunities to act to mitigate and to adapt effectively (e.g., investing in renewable energy projects abroad).!

The application The problem

A major element of sustainability is responding to climate change, which presents a complex social and environmental challenge on a global scale. Diverse actions by people around the world are required to mitigate and adapt to it. However, for individual action to be effective, people need to be 1) well informed about the challenge and 2) motivated to act. Globe-Town.org is a web application designed to both inform and motivate by providing a multi-faceted picture of climate change in each country within the broader context of sustainable development, whilst also showing how networks of relationships between countries (such as trade, aid, travel & migration) connect the user with distant places in an era of increasing globalisation, sharing risks, responsibilities and opportunities to mitigate and to adapt.

World Bank prize winner

At the nals ceremony of the World Bank's "Apps for Climate" competition in June in Washington DC, Globe-Town was awarded third place.#

The future
This is the rst version of Globe-Town. Plans for developing the project include focus-group based redesign, deployment in the context of education, rigorous user testing, and enabling users to go beyond learning to taking action, so they are able to go beyond exploring global links to creating new ones, such as crowd-funding renewables projects.#

References
V Dimitrova, J Zapico, J Townsend et al. (2012) Open Knowledge Fes/val Sustainability Stream Recap, hTp://openeconomics.net/2012/10/06/okfes/val-sustainability- stream-recap/ World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, hTp://sdwebx.worldbank.org/climateportal/index.cfm G Lako (2010), Why it maTers how we frame the environment, Environmental Communica/on, Taylor & Francis. ONeill, S., & Boyko, M. (2009). The Role of New Media In Engaging the Public With Climate Change, Lakeland. Rosling, H. (2007). Visual technology unveils the beauty of sta/s/cs and swaps policy from dissemina/on to access. Sta/s/cal Journal of the IAOS ER Tude, PR Graves-Morris (1983), The visual display of quan/ta/ve informa/on

ICT4S, Web Science & Cleanweb

Globe-Town originates from themes in the authors Web Science research into the application of the Web to responding to climate change and other environmental challenges, sometimes called cleanweb (cleantech + web).#