July 31, 2009
The World Wide Views on Global Warming citizens' conference was planned in an effort to make sure that the voices of citizens, rather than experts, would be heard in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) meeting held in Copenhagen in December 2009. On September 26 2009, around 4000 citizens from the 38 participant countries and regions used the same methods, materials and questions to mold their own position into a recommendation, while discussing some of the points of issue at COP15. In Japan, the event was held in Kyoto under the title of "World Wide Views in Japan," and 100 citizens from across the country gathered to spend eight hours debating global warming. Since RISTEX covers many R&D projects pursuing the keywords such as a participatory technology assesement(pTA), and a policy-forming dialog through discussion with citizens , which on global warming, mainly conducted within R&D Science Technology and Humanity Focus Area, we supported World Wide Views in Japan not as an event but as an implementation of action research of those projects.
In March this year a symposium was held in Tokyo, which reported on the World Wide Views on Global Warming experiment and its results achieved in Japan. Discussions unfolded about the significance of and issues in the experiment to give the rarely heard voices of citizens a place in a policymaking p rocess.
