[governance] WSIS+10 and climate change sensitive regions

[Norbert Bollow]

Dear all

Can you help me get in touch with participants in the WSIS+10
conference in Paris coming from regions which are particularly
sensitive to climate change (such as countries that will be
severely affected by rising sea levels, and countries that
will likely be affected by water insecurity, or by adverse
impacts on agricultural production and food security) ?

See below for an explanation of the reasons for this interest.

On 2/26/13, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> Personally I found the remarks of Rajendra Pachauri (the chair
> of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) very inspiring
> and energizing: He spoke on applying knowledge to address
> important global problems, among which he emphasized not only
> climate change but also poverty. Nothing about what he pointed
> out is really new or surprising to anyone who is minimally well
> informed, but I still found his intervention highly significant.
> Perhaps the reason which makes me assign significance to his
> words is not so much the content of what he said, but the fact
> that (at least from my perspective) he did not come across as
> someone speaking with the voice of a politician, but as someone
> with a mindset grounded in engineering. Also significant is the
> prominence that the WSIS+10 organizers assigned to his brief
> speech by putting it first in the "high level panel" before all
> the ministers.
>
> In summary, perhaps the main point of the day is that the
> concept of knowledge societies really needs to be about the
> sharing and application of knowledge in practical ways.

Another major reason why I found this inspiring is of course that
this resonates with plans that I've been pondering for quite some
time, to try launching a refocused version of the "Enhanced
Cooperation Task Force" (ECTF) that was discussed here a while
back [1]. I'm keeping the ECTF proposal alive with minor changes
more or less as-is in the hope that it may in some way be a useful
input to the CSTD Working-Group on Enhanced Cooperation. But now
that the UN system has started a probably slow process on deciding
an official meaning for the term “Enhanced Cooperation”, I really
don't want to delay application of the key ideas of that proposal
until it is clear whether the UN will eventually take action in
that direction or not.

I'm calling the branch of the proposal that I want to go forward
with without delay "Wisdom Task Force" (WisdomTF) [2], and I want
to focus it initially at least on addressing the problem of
developing effective policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions
globally, and getting governments to implement such effective
policies, together with whatever information society and development
issues that will turn out to be effectively inseparably linked with
this objective. In other words, the plan is to apply information
society techniques, inspired significantly by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), to a policy area which is not
primarily technical. Of course, if this plan works out, it will
end up impacting also other areas of governance, including Internet
governance in the narrower sense of "governance of what makes the
Internet work".

[1] http://enhanced-cooperation.org/RFA/1
[2] http://wisdomtaskforce.org/RFB/1

Greetings,
Norbert

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