Need Ideas from the Google Earth Community

It would be interesting to learn what other members of the Google Earth Community are thinking, regarding the "great challenges of our time" that are the focus of the Copenhagen Consensus. In order to get the discussion going, I'll put the following plan on the table for using the specified 50 billion dollars in funding.

An International Non-Governmental Organization with Local Partnerships

If, during a moment of clarity, those who have the power to do so would provide sufficient resources to enable a group of creative, sincere, hardworking people to put self-interest aside as they devote themselves full-time to the mitigation of these problems, perhaps some progress could be made. The aim would be to initiate an effort with a strong sustainable home base and an active global scope of operation. The group's primary mode of operation would entail leveraging of effort though collaborations with other groups.

The funds would be used to finance the establishment and operation of a new non-governmental organization (NGO) that would function both as an academic and community service organization on a global and local basis. Academic activities would include university level courses and degree granting programs on an undergraduate and graduate level. While fundamental math, science, social science, and arts courses would be part of the program, the major emphasis in most courses would be the cultivation of an integrated Earth System perspective that would combine multiple disciplines to focus on natural systems, human society, and the interactions between both. The academic facet of the organization would also include outreach to schools, governments, businesses, and corporations on a worldwide basis. For schools, the organization, sometimes in collaboration with national and international organizations, would train teachers to implement programs that promote geographic awareness and systems thinking, beginning on a simple basis, in the earliest grades. This would include discussions and hands-on activities related to current events and fundamental challenges that we face as a society. For governments and corporations, there would be workshops at their offices and headquarters designed to promote thinking about the specifics of the interconnectedness between their operations and the needs of the larger world.

To perform its service operations, the organization would form alliances with existing governments and NGOs in all parts of the world, including the local neighborhood surrounding the organization’s campus. These alliances would involve, in part, internships for students and faculty that would enable them to work for the allied organizations at the sites of their operations. The alliances would also include research collaborations designed to advance knowledge, techniques, and technology that the allied organizations and governments need to perform their work. After their internships, the students and faculty would return to the on-campus classrooms and research laboratories where they would be encouraged to enrich the ambient knowledge base with their experiences. The campus would also have space and resources devoted to an NGO incubator.

Concerning prioritization, $50 billion is not sufficient to solve all the world’s fundamental problems at once, although many of them are interrelated, and must be addressed together. Therefore, the organization would continually need to decide where to emphasize its efforts. These decisions would be made by a board, in consultation with the research and teaching faculty and students, and could be done on a case-by-case basis as opportunities arise, or could be guided by predetermined general principles.

One of the many tricky parts of this project will be governing the organization. A broad spectrum of cultural and political views need to be represented in order to provide a good set of ideas with which to work. This is likely to present challenges regarding identification of a set of mutually-agreed-upon guiding principles. But that challenge mirrors the problem of dealing with the world as it is, which is the raw material that forms the basis of the problem at hand.