The Green Citizens Network: www.greencitizens.net has officially been launched. It‘s an initiative by First Carbon (www.firstcarbon.org), a BITS - Pilani based consultancy start-up providing climate change advisory services to its clients.
GreenCitizens.net is a first of its kind Green Social Networking Platform on the World Wide Web. It is started with an aim to exhort individuals to turn into what they call, Green Citizens. The website is built on three principles which it feels are also necessary to achieve this aim and those are: Connect, Get Informed and Take Action.
A green citizen is an individual who is aware of the dangers involved with climate change, who is aware of his impact on the environment; one who is ready to participate in this movement by reducing his impact and spread the word for the cause in his society.
The website features an individual carbon manager for individuals to calculate and manage their carbon footprints, along with hundreds of tips and advices on how to reduce them, by bringing small and simple changes to one‘s lifestyle. A carbon footprint for an individual is a measure of his impact on the environment, the net GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions caused directly and indirectly by him, measured in terms of equivalent tones of CO2. The idea is to take the concept of calculating and being aware of one‘s carbon footprint to the masses.
The site has a special section on Green Living with thousands of tips and advices for all of us to incorporate in our lives. Overall, it is a social networking website with the theme “Greenâ€; developed to cover happenings from around the globe and act as a single information resource on net on everything green, through sections like News, Blogs, Forums and its own very own green wiki "Ecopedia".. It will also serve as on online directory and a networking and marketing media for NGOs and Green Businesses providing them with an interactive medium for reaching out to individuals and other organizations. The website is also the only online portal in India with a dedicated section for Green Jobs, catering specifically to the environmental, carbon and energy sector.
Green Citizens Network is an open platform where the members share their stories, experiences, opinions, knowledge and learn from others‘. The young team believes that GreenCitizens.net can develop into an online model sufficient to cater to the green needs of be it a common man, an environmental activist or even a green professional.