The fiercest battles for a climate deal are fought online

Using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, campaigners are using the web to harness people power on a big scale
From campaigners TckTckTck and Avaaz to the UK climate secretary's office and the UN, organisations are using the web to harness people power on a scale not seen since Obama's famous digital election strategy. It's not hard to see why.
Campaigners and governments need a popular mandate from voters to justify a tough deal on emissions reduction at the Copenhagen talks this December. The internet is also a way of going direct to citizens and bypassing mainstream media, which often sees the subject of climate negotiations as dull, worthy and wonky unless there's a "clash".
These digital campaigners can already claim some success. When Gordon Brown announced on Sunday that he'd be attending Copenhagen – which is a meeting of environment ministers, not world leaders – more than a little credit belonged to Greenpeace and BeThatChange, which organised a "Twitterstorm" in an effort to get the tag "#pm2un" on to Twitter's trending topics. Kieran Battles, BeThatChange's director, said: "We're pleased that we played our part in getting the prime minister to attend but ultimately this is a success for the climate change movement."
Social media is the main weapon in campaigners' arsenals. Twitter, Facebook fan pages and groups, YouTube videos and photo collaboration projects – see Seal the Deal's photo wall, Christian Aid's Mass Visual Trespass or our very own Message to Copenhagen – have been the most popular tools.
Unsurprisingly, the NGOs have produced some of the most web-savvy campaigns, from Avaaz's "Wake-up Call" to world leaders yesterday, to TckTckTck's thousands of Facebook fans. What is unusual is the way usually monolithic organisations, such as the UN and the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change, have opened themselves up with decent YouTube videos (see above) and dedicated sites (see Act on Copenhagen, and Ed's Pledge).
The way in which all these campaigns operate is different to conventional top-down offline campaigns too, says Andrew Male, communications director for TckTckTck, the umbrella climate campaign representing Oxfam, Greenpeace, WWF and other NGOs. "What is so exciting about this kind of online campaigning is that it's about giving people a set of tools and letting them do whatever they want with them. It's not about controlling people and telling them what to do, it's about creating a space and frame and having individuals, groups and communities let their imagination and passion take them somewhere," says Male.
And with 75 days until the summit proper, we've only seen the beginning of this digital drum-banging. Expect the noise to get a lot louder on 15 October if a poll by Blog Action Day elects "climate" as this year's subject – a move that would see thousands of bloggers, many usually uninterested in the environment, writing on climate change for a day.
Finally, it's worth noting that I've only touched here on a fraction of the innovative and eye-catching web campaigns on Copenhagen. Let me know in the comments which ones I've missed, and which ones you rate.