Global Citizenship in Reality: The 2017 Climathon as a Transformative Event (Keynote)

The 2017 Climathon the 27th of October was a very interesting event. It is not often you see large groups of people, in this case participants from more than 100 cities come together and only focus on solutions to a global challenge, climate change. Most initiatives are still national and often lose the global perspective. The few international gatherings that take place tend to bring policy makers and business that try to do as little as possible, where governments look after the short-term interest of their countries (or their own re-election) and companies focus on the next quarterly earnings report.   

This Climathon was such an interesting event and I can't help but wondering if this is how a new generation of global citizens are born. The people participating think global and then begin to implement local with the aim of providing global solutions (through export and/or networking). I hope it is not long until such an approach is the default approach to global challenges. I actually think we will look back in ten years and wonder why not many more events like this were organised, not realising that doing events like this still require a significant amount of social capital ( you can't just throw money out and expect results like this, you need the right kind of group with the right kind of network). 

My guess is that we will see some very interesting results coming out of processes like this. The reason for this guess is that when you reach a certain threshold (as you do when 100 plus cities all over the world are included) you almost always see disruptive results, not always directly, but though unforseen consequeneses of the critical mass that has been created. 

Perhaps we should to distinguish between international political events (bringing countries together that look after themselves), international business events (when companies come together with the aim to find ways to make money) and global events, where people come together as global citizens? We need international policy and business events, but more than anything I think we need global events. 

I will do what i can to support these kind of processes and ensure that the people participating connect globally and find new opportunities for collaboration, but also that the ideas that are developed during events like this are given a chance to be implemented. Hopefully we will also see more tools that allow for collaboration, especially for the teams, but also for us who had the opportunity to present some of our ideas and perspective. It would been fantastic with a global Q&A session. 

Link to the Climate KIC page for the event

Video of my presentation during the event (not sure how long the link will work)