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I belong to a group of Fulbright Scholars that has been entertaining the idea of an online massively collaborative approach to the climate change crisis. Particularly, imagine a stack exchange site that assumes the operating premise that the climate crisis is real (thereby preventing the degeneration of the site into a debate) and focuses on clarifying and developing novel scientific, technological, economic and social concepts to attack the problem.

An innovatively large collaboration in immunology is underway to fight Ebola and massive online collaboration has worked somewhat surprisingly in mathematics. It is natural to wonder:

Question: Is there sufficient demand, beyond Earth Science Stack Exchange, for a Q and A site aiming at addressing concrete problems surrounding the climate crisis?

Several positive reasons to consider this:

(1) If and when governments warm to the idea of fighting climate change, a public repository of ideas and solutions will be ready and available online.

(2) Visibility and open access to the site will encourage novel ideas from outside established channels, but with moderation to prevent inappropriately simplistic or ill-formed ideas.

(3) Although Sustainable Living SE has a "climate change" tag, and is certainly an appropriate and broad forum for the topic, a specific SE site may be somehow simultaneously be more focused and more inclusive and diverse. (The main reason for this question is to determine what the ES SE thinks of this bullet point, since there is a ``climate change'' tag here!)

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    This question fits rather on Meta Stack Exchange or area51 discussions, the downside of the latter location being that nobody will see it. I believe you are familiar with the Area 51 site creation process? I suspect it may be difficult to define the scope of a climate crisis website — I expect it has elements of SL, ES, Politics, Economics, Law, perhaps others.
    – gerrit
    Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 8:03
  • There already a bunch of places that provide repositories of ideas and solutions. Websites, journals, databases. What are you trying to add, that doesn't exist already? Why would your site be a better one-stop shop for answers than all the other attempts to do so?
    – 410 gone
    Commented Jul 5, 2019 at 13:26
  • Have you seen Azimuth Project.
    – Keith McClary
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 23:53

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Stackexchange sites aren't really set up for collaboration on primary research - which is AIUI what you're talking about. Anything asking about existing knowledge is likely to be on-topic on other sites (here, Earth Science, Engineering, Politics, etc)

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I feel a StackExchange site that is about "addressing concrete problems surrounding the climate crisis" will overlap with Sustainable Living SE, Earth Science SE or Politics SE so my personal opinion is: no, there is no need for a new site.

Of course you can always try to launch a new StackExchange website on Area51, but chances are a proposal site will (eventually) get closed for overlapping too much with existing sites.

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    According to this Area 51 discussion from a year ago, the process is changed from being a place to gather momentum behind a new site, to being a place where an existing community can go to start a site once they've already got momentum.
    – LShaver Mod
    Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 13:26

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