Greening the Blue Helmets: the UN Goes Green

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The United Nations might be the body long responsible for hosting the forum for international agreement on climate change, so it’s about time it gets its own climate house in order.

Imogen Martineau of Martineau & Co. is responsible for this task and she's using web 2.0 tools to do it. Though when I asked her how she was using social media to catalyze behavioural change, she wanted to be clear, "a website can't turn down the heating or turn down the air conditioning or shut the window, you need people to do that. The way we use it is what's important– it's the messaging and how you present information."

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The United Nations might be the body long responsible for hosting the forum for international agreement on climate change, so it's about time it gets its own climate house in order.

People divide into three groups, explains Martineau (citing research by WWF and Cultural Dynamics): about 2%, will be swayed with a moral and intellectual argument. "Most greenies," she says, "fall into this group."

The majority of other people fall into two other categories: one group's sense of well-being comes from how they are esteemed in society. This group is about 50% of the population and this group is the group that all the green lifestyle messaging has been directed at (titles, status, lifestyle). The other group is security driven and don't like change, they tend to be inner directed and like what's familiar but are therefore well networked locally.

To be clear, says Martineau, we have all of these types within ourselves, it's which one is dominant that determines how we do things.

Article continues: http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/11/greening-the-blue-helmets-the-un-goes-green/