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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 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.#
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