Make climate change topical again, and drive interest to CNN International’s coverage of the United Nations COP17 Conference on Climate change held in Durban, South Africa

Objectives:- Show the audience the well-trodden climate change theme from a fresh perspective. Build fascination in the story by giving the audience a new insight into the issue(s).

- Make the public actively involved in the global discussion - drive interest by making people’s opinions and comments part of the story and part of the conference.

The ECOSPHERE project brought over 120,000 voices to the COP17 Conference and generated 6.7m media contacts in just 1 month (non-CNN media).

20m viewers followed CNN’s COP17 coverage on TV.

Today the ECOSPHERE continues to grow, displaying over 226,000 tweets from around the world.

The ECOSPHERE is a digital ecosystem growing from tweets using the hashtag #COP17: A living 3D visualisation of the global discussion on the Internet.The design and mechanics of the ECOSPHERE is closely based on organic growth the plant world. Incoming tweets tagged with #COP17 become part of 1 of the numerous plants representing topics like Sustainability or Carbon. Tweets that speak about similar things are grouped together on each branch, while new completely new thoughts are planted as seeds on the surface of the sphere - waiting to grow. Topics compete for space and survival in the limited environment.