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The Climate Change Institute is an Australian organization that claims to support solutions to climate change by providing information and research on emission reduction and verified carbon offset projects that remove and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

History

The director, Steve Gye, states on his Twitter account that the institute began in 2015  as an informal grouping of social media sites where all work was conducted on a voluntary basis. The group mostly broadcasted information and research on ways to mitigate climate change.

For the first four years, the organization operated primarily as a social media news aggregator gathering material from different sources of climate change news and research. Their number of followers in social media grew to over half a million in the first five years to until 2020. This may have been aided by the fact that the group did not have advertising or sponsors and was seen by many as being independent.

The Institute was officially formed and name ‘Climate Change Institute’ was registered by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2020. The group then began to undertake its own research.

Research

In 2020 the Institute created an emission reduction program for businesses which was provided free along with a carbon footprint calculator. This program provides a template for the policies and procedures which must be adopted in order to reduce emissions.

It developed a virtual reality climate change research simulator. This is a client-server application using the open source to facilitate research into climate change.

It has conducted research into Australian an irrigation project to facilitate carbon reduction vegetation and tree planting processes which is an effective way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. There are vast tracts of dry inland areas in Australia and other parts of the world where trees could be grown. The proposal is a modified version of the Bradfield Scheme.

In 2021 the Institute released a discussion paper on proposed new standards for organisations to be able to self-asses their carbon neutral status. This would enable them to be register as climate neutral, provided they have implemented a carbon reduction program. The aim of the program is said to be an attempt to make it easier for smaller companies to navigate the difficult process of becoming carbon neutral.