If you don’t read Celsias, you should. Don’t let the unconventional spelling fool you. Celsias’ blog is among the most insightful (and widely read) on the climate crisis and ways to avert it. (Full disclosure: Celsias has published articles that Joe Brewer and I have written separately in the past. Don’t hold that against them!)

But Celsias is far more than a blog. It is a project-oriented endeavor that, in its own words, is “all about doing something practical to reduce climate change.” In addition to its blog, the site, which originated in New Zealand, hosts projects from all over the world which cover a wide range of efforts to prevent climate catastrophe.

From non-profit educational campaigns to new business models to increase energy efficiency, the projects that Celsias members submit vary greatly, but all have an opportunity to gain attention and potentially funding. To entrepreneurs who are motivated to strengthen our environment, the variety and creativity can be inspiring.

Among the most popular projects at Celsias are Hotel Diaries: A Story of a Green Hotel, Planet Car Club, and the New Zealand Wine Company Organic Conversion Project.

Hotel Diaries is an effort to document the conversion of an abandoned building in Toronto into a hotel that uses 80% less carbon than a typical hotel of its size. As a Celsias project, Hotel Diaries focuses on sharing the knowledge needed to create a green hotel and accomplish such a large reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. (You can read blog posts describing the work in progress on the Celsias blog.) Joe and I will be writing more about this type of knowledge sharing and ways to apply insights from the world of open source software to help such sharing succeed, but suffice it to say that it is an important practice for community entrepreneurs to take up.

Planet Car Club is a British effort to enable communities to create car-sharing co-ops. In part, this involves creating resources that make it possible for people to reserve cooperatively owned cars online to use by the hour. The project is organized by a non-profit called Our Future Planet.

The New Zealand Wine Company’s project involved organic certification of a vineyard and winery. The company describes itself as the producer of the “world’s first carbon neutral wines.”

Other projects recently listed at Celsias include one to help people in Canada find locally grown food more easily, another to encourage communication about climate issues between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking people, and another to offer ebooks as a way to reduce the environmental impact of conventional books. Celsias also features Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects, typically from major corporations, some of which choose to sponsor efforts by other Celsias members.

Celsias offers a number of ways to get involved with the projects that it hosts: by contacting a project’s leader, becoming a member, promoting the project online, or just by adding a comment. To me, the projects that Celsias hosts constitute a treasure trove of ideas for entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. As such, they can serve as a proving ground for techniques that can be tested, then adapted and applied in other settings.

Evan

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