Gaia is a new collaborative facility that seeks to bring together climate thinking, Command and Control (C2) and coordination/integration of subjects with an express aim of supporting climate-based decision making at local, regional and national levels.
Gaia is the world’s first C2 Centre: a collaborative endeavour between K Sharp and Cardiff University in Wales. Gaia aims to apply C2 principles to inform and support decision making activity relating to climate change. The Gaia C2 centre will aggregate and exploit diverse data associated with the Earth’s changing climate and human operatives. This will be possible by relying on effective human-computer interaction and transdisciplinary collaboration to educate, empower and revolutionise scientific endeavours to tackling human accelerated climate change.
Social science research conducted through the pandemic has shown that the ability to gather large amounts of data about human behaviour is possible on a scale that has been previously unthought of. This type of research has been able to influence the national messaging on virus protection activities such as social distancing and vaccination.
Gaia is a concept that will seek to utilise similar research concepts but focused on climate change and climate action. Gaia will have two main aims: research and action. The initial and ongoing research will develop a deep and dynamic understanding of attitudes to climate change through avenues such as social media and how they relate to climate action, or lack of. The action will look at how social data, in combination with physical climate data from disparate sources, can inform and coordinate decision making and visualise the outcomes.
What capability will it provide?
Gaia offers the ability to conduct cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that looks to better understand how technology and ergonomic principles can enable individuals, organisations and governments to make climate conscious decisions. The centre will have a strong focus on both practical application and empirical research. The Gaia C2 centre embodies a new area of research: Climate Ergonomics (Kirby & Gamble, 2022; Kirby, Gamble, Kirby, Morrisette & Morgan, 2021). In practical terms, Gaia aims to operate in five domains:
