Our World shares expert views, research and commentary on contemporary affairs of relevance to the mandate of the United Nations. This award-winning web magazine, brought to you by the United Nations University (UNU), exchanges these insights through video briefs, articles, debates, photo essays and public events.
Our World was first launched in July 2008 primarily as an environmental magazine focused on solutions to global challenges of climate change, energy, food security, and biodiversity loss. Though it no longer does, Our World’s name originally included “2.0″ at the end of it because it was launched at a time when the internet was transforming into something known as Web 2.0. We too wanted to harness the new power of online sharing, co-creation, and emerging social media to entice readers to help us find sign posts to an improved version of the world.
After more than five years, over 700 articles and 65 video briefs, Our World was re-launched on 1 November 2013 with a completely new design and expanded topics to improve coverage of the work of the United Nations in tackling pressing global problems.
Our World is produced by the UNU Office of Communications team in Tokyo. Since the first article, the magazine has been dedicated to bilingual publishing in English and Japanese, and has become one of UNU’s key communication platforms with our Japanese hosts as well as millions of readers worldwide.
We are honoured that our network of contributors includes not just UNU academics, researchers and students, but many others who are passionate about the topics covered by the magazine. Working closely with our editorial team, these contributors bring a broad spectrum of points of view from around the globe.
We are committed to providing an open platform for people to express views on the topics that we cover (for full details, please see our Community Standards page). Each of our articles has a comment section. You can choose whether or not to sign up with Disqus, the comment platform we use. However, we do require that you enter your name and e-mail address when commenting (though your e-mail will not be shown on the site). The Our World editorial team is also keen on other forms of social networking and invites you to connect with us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter via the icons listed in the footer of each page.
2011
The Communicator Awards — 2011 Award of Distinction in the Green/Eco-Friendly category
2009
Society for New Communications Research — 2009 Excellence Award in the category of New Media Creation in the Academic division
Earth Journalism Awards — 2009 Honorary Mention
2008
The Weblog Awards — 2008 Best Blog Design