The Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C) is a two-year research project funded within the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP). The introductory expert workshop and public symposium entitled “Climate Change Communication and Collaboration: Translating Awareness into Collective Action” took place on June 16th, 2010 at MODUL University Vienna. Photos of the event as well as the slides of the keynote speakers (see short biographies below) are now available for download:

• David D. Herring, Communications Program Director, U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Climate Program Office
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• Prof. Dr. Helga Kromp-Kolb, Head of the Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences
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• Prof. DDr. Arno Scharl, Vice President and Head of Department, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
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• Dr. David Stainforth, Senior Research Fellow, London School of Economics, Grantham Research Institute
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• Moderator: Thomas E. Bowman, MA, President of the Bowman Design Group and Founder of the Climate Solutions Project
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From December 7 to 15, the world's attention will be focused on the United Nation's Climate Change Conference (COP15) to be held in Copenhagen, Denkmark. The global importance of the event has sparked the interest of news media, blog authors, environmental organizations and the corporate sector alike.

Stefan Gössling, Professor at the Department of Service Management at Lund University, Sweden, and research coordinator at the Western Norway Research Institute’s Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism gave a presentation on the 23rd of October 2009 at MODUL University entitled: “The Future of Tourism out of a Climate Mitigation Perspective: the Post-Kyoto Emissions Challenge".

The travel industry must transform itself in order to adapt to the wide spreading impact of climate change. According to Stefan Gössling, it is still early enough for the industry to respond to climate change.

The World Environment Day 2009 is an ideal opportunity to emphasize the importance of new forms of communication and collaboration for addressing global environmental problems. Acquiring, managing and applying knowledge are crucial steps in coordinating environmental action and ensuring that change is conceived and implemented on both regional and society-wide scales.

Publicly accessible Web applications such as the Media Watch on Climate Change, released by MODUL University Vienna's Department of New Media Technology in a significantly extended version earlier today, are an important tool to increase transparency, create shared meaning and support sustainable processes.

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, MU Vienna hosted a panel discussion on "Climate neutral" travel offers organized in cooperation with the NGOs respect (Institute for Integrative Tourism and Development), Naturfreunde Internationale and Klimabündnis Österreich. Recognizing the interrelationships between climate change and tourism as outlined in the UN reports:

Invitation to Panel Discussion

Wednesday, 3 December 2008, 18:00
MODUL University Vienna
Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna

How important is climate protection to the customer when choosing a travel offer?  And to which offers does the travel industry react?

Dear all,

Welcome to the new issue of our newsletter. This issue provides news and web sources dealing with the issues of sustainability.

The Department of New Media Technology has recently presented its latest research results at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Geographical Information Processing and Visual Analytics for Environmental Security in Trento (Italy), the Annual Conference of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC-2008) in Philadelphia (US), as well as the Experience IT conference organized by Siemens IT Solutions and Services in Vienna (Austria).

Climate change is arguably the most serious environmental issue of our time, and tourism is not just a potential victim of it. Few studies have investigated tourism professionals’ attitudes towards global warming and their strategies to curb it. The University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde and MODUL University Vienna carried out a survey at the Berlin tourism fair (ITB) in 2007 and again in 2008 so as to fill this gap.

In April 2008, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Center for Excellence in Climate Change Communication Research at George Mason University invited a group of experts to discuss measuring public attitudes toward climate change. Prof. Arno Scharl presented the Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a public Web portal that aggregates and analyzes news media coverage on environmental issues.