European Climate Champions website launched!

We're very happy and excited to launch the website and the agenda for the European Climate Champions conference, taking place on the 14th - 15th December 2011!

The conference is the culmination point of the CHAMP project and is going to present the results of the project. Furthermore, we will discuss the integrated approach in local climate work more broadly and try to find solutions to the need of continuos capacity building for local authorities and form a bridge between the EU policies and the work that local authorities do.

We have been planning and preparing for the conference for a long time and are very thrilled to see how it really works in practice. After all, this will be the first ever online conference organised by the team!

See our Welcome video to find out more and save the date!

Climate 2011 - OR finding inspiration for the CHAMP final conference

Currently everyone in the world can take part in the "World´s CO2-friendly scientific online conference" CLIMATE 2011, which runs from today until Saturday, 12th of November.

We do that for the third time, but this year it is a bit special: in 5 weeks we´ll launch the "European Climate Champions" final conference for the CHAMP project!

Online conferences become more and more common: either its possible to follow sessions as live streams in the internet, or videos are available afterwards, but there are also some "all-online" conferences, very often dealing with environmental or climate change related topics.

Meeting online is up-to-date, it´s easy (at least for the participants), it usually doesn´t cost any fees and you also save time and money with staying at your own desk - a lot of advantages!

Nevertheless there are still many that doubt that an online conference can be as efficient and resultful as a physical conference. The whole networking adn mingling part is missing as well as you are not physically bound to a place.
But is this necessarily negative?

Not in my opinion.

An online conference gives me the chance to listen to the presentations I am most interested(and skip those I am not), read and print papers that I might use later on and also it might be easier to ask questions in a discussion forum than in anauditorium with hundreds of people.
The biggest advantage is in my eyes, that you have the chance to take part in so many different events all over the worls without leaving your desk (and spend a lot of money on flight tickets)

The new possibilities will never replace face-to-face meetings but offer whole new ways of collaborating!

I am excited and happy that we have the chance to test this now with our online conference, it´s a lot of work and organisation, both content-wise and technical-wise, but we keep the fingers crossed that everything will work out.

So YOU are warmly invited to take part in the
"European Climate Champions" conference
14th-15th of December
at www.climatechampions.eu!