Forum For Earth @ COP 26 - The Forum for Earth

Alongside the landmark COP26 negotiations and wider summit ecosystem in Glasgow and Milan, we held two events:

OpenCOP

OpenCOP is a unique virtual event space that facilitates exploration, broader ecological awareness and collective solidarities.

Forum for Earth initiated OpenCOP in November 2021 as a co-created, interactive online gathering, envisioning, and sensemaking space, to bridge projects and voices beyond those present at COP26 in Glasgow.

openCOP is dedicated to organizations and thought leaders wanting to share work, ideas and conversations with their wider communities, without the need to wait for permission to act, and seek to do so in radically more inclusive ways, bridging to the adjacent potential of decentralised and inclusive infrastructure.

We discussed and envisioned futures where we are all empowered:

to set our own goals and commitments;
to harmonize standards for the data layer that is going to be essential to tracking any kind of commitments at the nation state, or the city, or the individual level;
to embed frameworks for nested accounting that allow for the transparency over who’s doing what;
to create a world where all of these actions can be seen and recognized and rewarded in a entirely new economic framework that doesn’t succumb to the universal solvent of capital;
to share a renewed recognition of care and stewardship for the planet, with mechanisms for the flow of resources and attention to the individuals and organizations that are taking steps to protect and nurture the environments around us.

Over a 50-hour period, discussions and performances were live-streamed, alongside videos, digital art, and projects, accessible through a world of online event venues created by our co-stewards to bridge between the work of their communities and organizations, including Aerocene, All for Climate, Arkbound Foundation, Blue Marine Foundation, ChiPunk, CodeX Blockchain Education Initiative, Crowd4SDG, daos.fm, Global Regeneration CoLab, Global Sustainable Futures, Impact Collective, Liquidstar, Open Earth Foundation, Planetary International, PPL PWR, Projecting Change, Replenish Earth, and the Journal of Technoetic Arts.

Topics covered in sessions include: Art and civic engagement, impact funding, decentralized infrastructure for recognizing and rewarding care for nature and biodiversity, communicating the SDGs, purpose-driven corporate structures, how policymakers and data scientists are working with climate accounting experts, intersections between health and climate, how humanitarian organizations are using blockchains for community inclusion currencies, spiritual practice for the earth, bridging opportunity gaps, creating value from waste, joining and building movements of open collectives, investing in decentralized systems for biodiversity and climate action, the intersection of fashion and climate, oceans and health, with many more bridges built in side discussions and follow up conversations.

You can continue to access these spaces and recorded discussions from our previous gatherings, and interact with other visitors around everything climate, inclusive futures and beyond – go to openCOP.earth to sign up.

If you’re interested, as part of our next Gathering, to create your own event space as a partner, hold a talk or discussion, join the organizing team, or simply attend, please get in touch via the following link:

Forum For Public and Common Goods @preCOP Milan

The Forum for Earth team also facilitated an in-person and online gathering at pre-COP, alongside the preparatory discussions in Milan, on 1 October 2021.

For further details, see the event page on CERIDAP.eu

Our roundtable participants were hosted by the University of Milan’s interdisciplinary center for research on law and public administration (CERIDAP), both in-person and online. The topics addressed the intersection of climate change and new technologies, and aligning both public administration and social activation around decentralized local and global solutions, with roundtables focused around:

Collective Imagining towards New Economic Models of Value
The Rights of Nature
Green New Deals: Climate Data Policy, Deep ESG Finance, and Interoperability for Polycentric Governance
Citizen Sovereignty, Algorithmic Transparency, and Data Dignity for Equitable Planetary Governance
Blockchain Standards and Frameworks for Impact

From academic research on legal and policy-based strategies for civic leaders, to new standards and frameworks for corporate accountability around sustainability, to contributions and insights from technologists building tools and infrastructure for citizen action and decentralized coordination and collaboration, our hope is that these discussions are helping to inform and catalyze collaborations and creative activism.