On the 26th of September 2009 World Wide Views of Global Warming will for the first time provide citizens around the world with the opportunity to discuss and communicate their own opinions and experiences of climate change and global warming. The results of these citizen consultations will be presented to the national delegations at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in December 2009. The Danish Minister of Climate and Energy is the ambassador for the project and is tasked with ensuring that all of the results are presented at the COP 15.
Decisions taken during the negotiations in Copenhagen will likely mould global climate policy for years to come. Given, moreover, that the world's citizens will have to live with both climate change and the policy decisions made in Copenhagen this process of citizen consultation is expected to provide a useful input into the negotiations.
Nordregio - The Nordic Centre for Spatial Development - together with the municipality of Borlänge is responsible for the citizen consultation process in Sweden. On the 26th of September approximately 100 citizens from Borlänge and its surroundings will meet to discuss climate change and to formulate the recommendations to be presented at the COP 15 in December. On the same day citizen consultations will be undertaken in roughly 50 other countries from across the world. Through a web-based tool the results of all of these individual consultation processes will be uploaded to www.wwviews.org.
The consulted citizens will be selected to show diversity with regard to gender, age, geographical zone, educational level, occupation and so on. The citizen consultation process is performed in accordance with a method elaborated by the Danish Board of Technology which is based on many years of experience and research in the field of citizen participation/ deliberation.
For more information regarding the project please visit http://www.wwviews.org