2009 STATE OF THE WORLD FORUM
GLOBAL TRANSITION INITIATIVE
http://www.worldforum.org/2009global-transition.htmThe Challenge
There is nothing more critical in the world today than to bring people together from around the world to work together to solve our mounting and ever more critical crisis of global warming. Thousands of scientists and analysts worldwide agree with the statement of Rajendra Pachauri, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." He said this in December 2007.
State of the World Forum <http://www.worldforum.org/>, in partnership with the Forum of Leaders and a range of organizations and individuals, is developing a Global Transition Initiative that will contribute to the building momentum of concern about this crisis by enabling people the world over to share ideas, develop strategies, track progress and collaboratively build and implement a ten year integrated process. The purpose of this process is to shift us away from an economy that stimulates the mindless exploitation of inherently valuable resources to an economy that values what we already have and treasure, encouraging planetary stewardship and human creativity.
The Global Transition Initiative will attempt for global problem solving what Wikipedia has done for information. Relying on careful moderators and open source participation, Wikipedia has gathered information from people all over the world and a whole spectrum of interests and disciplines and constructed an encyclopedia that rivals Encyclopedia Britannica in both scope and accuracy.
It has also been done at a fraction of the cost. Similarly, our Global Transition Initiative would invite experts, lay people, and interested parties the world over to begin to self select and self organize around the critical crisis of global warming with a focus on developing resilience, adaptivity and collective learning.
Design
As currently envisioned, the Global Transition Initiative (GTI) will be designed collaboratively along the following lines:
• Our organizing principle is a vision and integrated process for greening our economies and lifestyles by 2020. This may seem ambitious but the crisis of global warming mandates that we take decisive action within the next ten years or risk undermining human civilization itself. Nothing is more urgent than a mass mobilization of people and ideas in action that can compel our governments and international institutions to confront head on the challenge of global warming and the reformation of politics this implies. The key orientation of GTI is that rather than confront the crises from the point of view of the problem, as just happened with the U.S government bailout of Wall Street, it would deal with the crisis from the vantage point of solutions that will establish the basis of resilient communities and the development of long term sustainable economies.
• We have developed a partnership with the UK based company Gaiasoft, which is a state of the art on line platform for information sharing and real time project management and community building. The Gaiasoft platform supports fractal collaboration, implementation and governance – enabling local social, environment and economic governance and stewardship and connecting city-to-city, nation-to-nation, fractal-to-fractal for an intelligent healthy system of systems to emerge.
• We are in discussion and seek to include a range of specialists and organizations active in this domain, beginning with Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0 but also including Al Gore and We Can Solve the Climate Crisis, the Apollo Alliance, the Climate Prosperity Project, the Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence, David Martin and M-CAM, the Asian Foresight Institute, the World Future Council, and the Presidential Climate Action Project. Our goal is to offer GTI as a platform and organizing frame for a coalition of groups similarly interested in developing and implementing an integrated, practical time sensitive plan for dealing with global warming.
• Working with these groups, among others, we plan to invite a range of scientists, policy analysts and systems thinkers to focus attention on the single overriding fact of our time: human civilization is now at stake and decisive, integrated and global action must be taken. In light of this, what would a ten year integrated vision of the human future look like? What integrated solutions can be put forward to our governments? How can the interested public be invited to participate and begin collaborating together in the design and implementation of the human future?
• Aspects of GTI will include templates for sustainability worked out within an integral framework, collaborative working processes between constituencies based on the principles of dynamic theory, integrated best practices that discern distinctions as well as interdependencies, and a data base of technical solutions that categorize emergent technologies, patents, blocks to dissemination, and pathways to open source sharing,
• Such a global process would be conducted outside of governmental and intergovernmental channels and draw on the thousands of NGOs worldwide which have been doing extraordinarily important work, although governmental specialists and intergovernmental agencies would also be invited to participate. The business sector will also be central to ensuring the success of this initiative. The consultation would use creative collaborative processes and a consistent planning framework and methodology to produce an integrated, multidisciplinary, and long-term approach to the many interrelated challenges that confront us, the most important of which is currently global warming.
Such a consultation would also seek to develop global solutions that are fact-based, values-oriented, and developed through an open, participatory, and transparent global process that would utilize and rely upon globally recognized subject matter experts to lead and manage the consultations.
• What is crucial to stress is that while specialists such as Lester Brown would provide the basic initial architecture of the solution set, GTI will be equally open to the literally millions of organisations worldwide that are working on similar and related issues. In fact, it is the interactivity between the specialists and the broad range of civil society, public sector and business organizations, that provides the synergy that will make GTI work. We are in a time in history when the technical and social expertise needed to solve our problems are shared by myriad people and groups around the world, something noted by Paul Hawkin in his book Blessed Unrest and by the research of Paul Ray on the Cultural Creatives.
• This in-person consultation, combined with the global participation of commmitted organisations, will be framed and based on a technology platform provided by Gaiasoft for conducting and managing the consultative and collaborative processes to ensure that they are deeply rooted in the power of information and technology. GTI will be designed to be expert based and moderated as well as open to input from interested parties on a global scale. We will take advice on its construction from the specialists at Wikipedia and other technical specialists expert in on line collaboration and open architectural systems. We are consulting with specialists like Dr David Martin, for example, who has already built an extraordinary online platform for cataloguing and assessing technological innovations.
• Simultaneously, we are working with a number of specialists in how to maximize cross sectoral communication and collaboration. Traditionally, environmentalists and the corporate sector, for example, have been systemically at odds. The key to the success for GTI is to design not only an integrated on line system for input and discussion around technical solutions but an integrated mechanism and process for the cross sectoral collaboration essential to a successful transition from the Plan A economy to a Plan B economy. How can hundreds of NGOs work together with counterparts in the corporate and governmental sectors? How do we ensure synergies of solutions rather than contradictions and blame? We are in discussion with Peter Merry from the Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence on this specific area of focus, to assist us in this important component of GTI.
• It is our intention to begin the international consultation and design of GTI in the beginning of 2009 with the goal of having the specialist group and participating NGOs and GTI itself be the centerpiece of the 2009 State of the World Forum being convened in Washington, D.C. November 12-14, 2009. This will provide sufficient lead time and also a major platform for the initiative to be profiled and discussed.
• We are viewing this as a long term project, one that will be developed, refined and expanded over the next ten years as world conditions unfold, the group of specialists learn to work together more effectively, the global interested public participates, and the initiative takes shape. Like Wikipedia itself, which continues to evolve and increase in accuracy even as it broadens the scope of those involved, so we view GTI as something that will find itself of increasing importance as its relevance deepens with the passage of time and its solutions gain currency with policy makers, governments and the individuals and organisations worldwide seeking to create a constructive future.
The Global Transition Initiative will be featured at the 2009 State of the World Forum and soon be available for people and institutions worldwide to join.
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