The consensus is clear: we need to cut our CO2 emissions drastically, and now.
That being said, the discussion on climate topics does not stop here. There is an incredible amount of research produced in every corner of the world by groups in universities, companies, NGOs, think tanks etc. This agora is here to connect all the dots together and offer a common global platform to carry out open research, collaborate, test ideas and develop collective intelligence on climate topics. Many such topics can be treated and studied through different angles (scientific, legal, ethical, economical, etc.). This forum offers an avenue to put “everyone in the same room”.
Why this online agora?
Open Climate Research Agora (OCRA) is an initiative and a community originally started by Bluteshi.
The goal of OCRA is not only to be an agora that connects experts from many climate-related fields together to collaborate, but also to aggregate climate knowledge and discussions for everyone (non-experts included) to read and learn from.
Climate change being an issue that affects us all, we wanted to create a dedicated forum to foster climate discussion, ease access to scientific evidence behind climate change, and to lower the bar for non-experts to learn from an expert audience.
Who is it for?
Everyone.
Whether you are:
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Experts willing to interact with peers (in your field or not),
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Students/Experts in the making,
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Non-experts willing to learn more, and curious readers in general
If you spend time writing and/or reading twitter threads about climate research, OCRA is definitely made for you. You’ll be able to engage with a relevant audience (who is here for the climate content) and do so without having to shrink your content to fit in a tweet.
What can you find here?
A wide range of topics, all related in one way or another to climate change and sustainable development.
Contributing
Everyone is invited and very welcomed to contribute to this forum.
That being said, Open Climate Research Agora is a civilized place, and so we abide by strict rules. We invite every member not only to follow them, but also to enforce them by reporting inappropriate content and misbehaving users. The quality of this forum entirely depends on the quality of its user base.
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This forum is not the place to publish topics beyond the stated focus of the forum.
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This forum is not the place to publish and relay random climate news that aren’t inviting for a genuine, constructive and respectful discussion that can grow the community’s knowledge.
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This forum aims to be as factual as possible. Always cite your sources. It is obviously ok to be wrong, ask questions and disagree. However, refusing to discuss or accept a piece of information backed by data, without providing constructive arguments or constructive questions in return, is counterproductive and a time loss for everyone.
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This forum is not the place to promote civil disobedience and carry out or promote any sort of unlawful activities.
It goes without saying that respect, inclusivity, intellectual honesty and politeness are absolutely required. Also, please be sure to communicate in English in order for everyone to understand and be able to engage.
All users failing to meet these basic rules and whose noise-to-signal ratio gets too high, will be banned from this forum.
Please keep discussions informative and strive for all your posts to make this community a better place and as useful as possible to the users and audience.
Feedback on the forum
If you have feedback on this forum and would like to suggest ways to improve it, please do so! We are always very eager to engage on ways to improve this platform. You can open a topic on the Site Feedback category to start a discussion!
Final notes
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This forum uses Discourse, and thus new users’ abilities are temporarily restricted while they learn how the agora works and while they get familiar with the community. See Discourse Trust Levels for more information.
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Posting on this forum implies that you agree with its Terms of Service.
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Please see the About section for more information.
As a “thank” for making it to the end, here is a little treat (web version) 
Enjoy OCRA!
Appendix: Some tips to get started.
Create content
- To create a new topic, click on the “New Topic” button on the top right hand corner of the UI.
When creating a new topic, please make sure to provide a topic title, a clear description of the topic explaining the problem/question you want to discuss, and make sure to assign a Category (when possible) to keep the forum’s content tidy and ease information retrieval by your peers.
Note: If the newly created topic does not fit in any available category, that’s fine. Categories are created organically, so, if you can, create a new category that fits your needs. If you can’t create the category, someone with high enough Trust Levels will do it for you after enough related topics get created! This forum contains discussions on various climate-related topics, so we prefer to create categories and tags as we need them.
- To create a new comment/post in a topic of interest, go in the topic, and click on the “Reply” button at the bottom of the page.
It is possible to reply to specific posts in a topic. To do so, click on the “Reply” button right underneath the post you wish to reply to (as shown by the “Reply” on the right of the picture below).
Writing maths
This forum supports \LaTeX maths environments and equations.
Equations can be written between single dollar signs $ <your latex equation> $, or between double dollar signs $$ <your latex equation> $$.
Examples:
- This is an equation
$x^n + y^n = z^n$which renders as x^n + y^n = z^n - This is another one:
$$
f(x) = \sum_{i=0}^{n} \frac{a_i}{1+x}
$$
which renders as
Report content
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To report a topic, click on the “flag” icon at the bottom of the page.
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To report a comment, click on the “flag” icon underneath it.
