Marine Debris VCC
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The Marine Debris community aims to contribute to tackling the challenge that marine debris poses to the marine biosphere and, in many ways, to humans. To achieve this mission, the community assesses related societal knowledge needs, assesses existing technologies and identifies needs for new technologies, approaches and best practices, utilizes Earth observations and models to meet those knowledge needs, and assesses options that could mitigate existing marine debris or prevent future debris entering the ocean.

If you are concerned about the plastics and other marine debris in the ocean, join us and help finding pathways to limit what goes into the ocean and to extract form the ocean what is already there.

MarineDebris VCC Billboard

[Sep. 16, 2022] Ratings and Mappings: On the Participatory Modeling Floor a rating of priority actions and several mappings of stakeholders and rules are open for Place4Us users to contribute...

News

Platform News

[Apr. 25, 2026] World Happiness Report Finds Positive Impacts of Collaborative Platforms: The World Happiness Report 2026 has a strong focus on the impacts of social media and the Web in general on human happiness. The results of most studies indicate that the use of most social media seems to have a negative impact on happiness, while those tools that generate trust and collaboration have a positive impact. The report sumarizes: “Internet activities fall into two groups. Communications, news, learning, and content creation are associated with higher life satisfaction. Social media, gaming, and browsing for fun are associated with lower life evaluations.” This supports the mission of Place4Us as a trust-focused collaborative platform for intercreativity and learning.

[Apr. 25, 2026] Neurodivergence VCC opened: The "Made by Neurodivergence VCC" has been initialized and is open now.

[Apr. 21, 2026] SlaveryToday VCC opened: The "Fighting Modern Slavery VCC" has been initialized and is open now.

[Apr. 19, 2026] Earth Energy Imbalance is Increasing Rapidly: Finally the extreme increase in the Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) is slowly starting to make headlines - far too late, though. The article “ What are zettajoules – and what do they tell us about Earth’s energy imbalance?” by Jonathan Watts published in the Guardian explains some of the basics. Importantly, the EEI double within only 13 years. In another article by Watts also in the Guardian and titled “ Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high” the author points out that the World Meteorological Organization warned that Earth is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming the oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies. Considering that Earth is more like a pool house with a very large pool than a greenhouse, the ocean is only delaying the heating of the atmosphere but not preventing it.