Microsoft Offers Climate Change Tools

Microsoft has introduced two new tools designed to help individuals understand the climate debate and manage their carbon footprints.

The Environmental Atlas of Europe is "a digital platform for educating citizens about climate change," Microsoft said. Meanwhile, the company's new Bend The Trend app is "an online global program that helps people make pledges to reduce their carbon emissions."

The programs were introduced Sunday at the United Nations 15th Climate Change Conference (COP15) by the European Environmental Agency.

"The governments of the world realize they can't do it all alone," said Paul Lloyd Robson, Microsoft's sustainability lead for the Nordic region, in a statement. "They need industry and NGOs and their citizens supporting them because we're facing such a momentous challenge," said Robson.

The Environmental Atlas of Europe features nine case studies about how individual communities across the Continent are responding to climate change, a theory that holds mean temperatures across the Earth are on the rise.

Bend The Trend is an Internet-based program that allows people to log on and track their own efforts to become carbon neutral. The aim is to help individuals to reduce their carbon emissions, according to Frank McCosker, Microsoft's manager for global strategic accounts.

"Essentially, it's a way to involve every single citizen with an Internet connection who wants to help," said McCosker, in a statement.

Microsoft sent a delegation of climate and technology experts to COP15 in an effort to demonstrate IT's role in the nascent climate change industry. The conference, in Copenhagen, runs from Dec. 7-18.

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