GRIAN has two main platforms in the early stages:
1) To campaign and to provide for public awareness and education in Ireland on the threats posed by climate change.
Until now there has been no specifically Irish portal to the vast amounts of climate and climate-related sites and information available on the Internet. Similarly, this vast array of information has never been selectively organised into a format suitable for local use.
GRIAN's website will be slowly and comprehensively built up into an educational resource suitable for everybody's use and any level of interest, from primary school level right up to professional and policy-makers' needs and requirements. www. grian.net should go live shortly.
2) To serve as a node for public awareness and action in Ireland on climate solutions.
GRIAN intends to build partnerships between and within other NGOs (Irish and international), members of the public, the private sector, financial institutions, local and regional authorities, and State and semi-State bodies to facilita te both a change in the current generally complacent attitudes towards climate change, and to stimulate the appropiate cross-cutting and interdisciplinary responses that climate change so clearly demands.
In a local context, there are over 3.7 million people living in the Republic, and over 5 million people on the island of Ireland. All of us are currently involved, like it or not, in causing climate change to a greater or lesser extent, and nearly all us are likely to be affected by it within our own lifetimes. Although this makes for a large constituency , GRIAN believes the time is well overdue for Irish civil society to get involved in constructing an alternative to a thoroughly preventable, if looming, disaster.
All that is needed is a programme for awareness of both the threats and the solutions, and a focus for action based on this awareness.
With your help, GRIAN intends to set about providing both.