Today the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, started and every individual on the planet has a chance to participate. In an address to the opening session renowned broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has announced the United Nations’ launch of a new campaign enabling individuals the world over to unite in actions to battle climate change.
Sir David Attenborough urged everyone to use the UN’s new ActNow.bot, designed to give people the power and knowledge to take personal action against climate change directly on the Facebook Messenger Platform. In the past weeks Attenborough invited people all around the globe to contribute to his speech through the The People’s Seat campaign (#TakeYourSeat).
After showing a compilation of the thousands of contributions on social media, Attenborough addressed the world’s leaders, decision makers and officials assembled in the conference room, saying: ‘They want you to act now. The people are behind you, supporting you in making tough decisions, but they are also willing to make sacrifices in their daily lives. To make this even easier, the UN is launching the Act Now bot. Helping people to discover simple everyday actions that they can take, because they recognise that they too must play their part.’
Interactive chat bot
The innovative UN campaign was created with the support of Facebook and advertising company Grey and harnesses advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to engage people in the growing movement to take climate action.
The ActNow.bot is a fully interactive and responsive chat bot, located on the UN’s Facebook page that suggests everyday actions – determined by the user’s interaction with the bot – that can be taken to preserve the environment and logged on the platform to be shared with social media followers to persuade them to take action too. The collective actions will be presented during the Secretary-General’s Climate Summit in New York in September 2019.
COP24 coincides with the closure of the WDCD Clean Energy Challenge, for which you still have two days left to submit your projects. Enter your project through the challenge platform.