Youth Climate Report in 2012

Posted on by
Reply

With the success of Youth Climate Report at COP17 in Durban, South Africa, we will continue to gather interviews from our youth reporters around the world throughout 2012 and to bring these reports to the UN conferences Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro in June, the UNCBD in Hyderabad in October and the UNFCCC in Qatar.

We currently have youth reporters actively working in Canada, the United States, St. Vincent, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, The Seychelles, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Singapore, Indonesia, The Philippines and New Zealand.

Check out our YouTube channel to see the reports as they come in.

Follow us on Twitter: @ycrtv

And of course, we are on Facebook. Like Us!

Youth Climate Report

Promote your Page too

Off to COP17

Posted on by
Reply

Once again Neko Harbour will be presenting interviews with climate change research scientists at the United Nations climate change conference, taking place this year in Durban, South Africa. This year will mark the third year in a row that we have been invited by UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme) to screen a film to delegates and negotiators at the conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Youth Climate Report is unlike our previous films though. This new film is really a new and ongoing initiative. It is a call to the youth of the world to engage with climate change, sustainability and biodiversity researchers and learn about their most recent, their most important work: the work dealing with discoveries, adaptation methods or mitigation concepts which must be understood and discussed by the delegates and negotiators at high level UN conferences and events.

We are very excited to be bringing this important project to Durban. Project founder and Neko Harbour principal John Kelly will be present in Durban booking screenings from November 30.

Contact him to arrange a screening: john at youthclimatereport dot org.

the environment, on the agenda or not …

Posted on by
Reply

Here in Canada we are in the middle, figuratively and calendrically, of a federal election campaign. Last night, for instance the party leaders engaged in an English language debate and tonight, they will be debating in French (surely one of the least appreciated benefits of official bilingualism).

It was quite dismaying to see little mention of the environment or even the party platforms on carbon emissions or other topics of environmental concern. Supposedly the electorate is more concerned with the economy, although as Gerard Kennedy, the Liberal critic on the environment in the last parliament, points out in this debate convened for radio, policies tying economic recovery to infrastructure investment in renewable energy technology is being pursued around the world except here in Canada.

Amazingly Professor Tim Flannery, interviewed on the Toronto CBC radio morning show,  watched the debate with interest from his Toronto hotel room. He too was gobsmacked by the lack of focus on the environment. The timing of his current book tour couldn’t be better for Canadians concerned with our diminishing standing on the world stage vis a vis environmental leadership and stewardship. Hopefully Professor Flannery will help engage voters in Canada over the next two weeks to think more carefully about the issues which should be at the heart of decisions about who will form the next government.

Delivering our new film

Posted on by
Reply

Well we are down to the short strokes in our delivery of The Polar Explorer to our domestic broadcaster, the CBC. Our festival screening version is the international broadcast length version of the film, about 52 minutes in length. The CBC requires a 45 minute version. We’ve taken out one of our narrative “chapters” from the longer version, without, we believe, impacting the message of the film. But this requires additional post-production resources and tinkering. The 52 minute version will continue to be our festival screening and speaking tour version of the film, and the one that our sales agent TVF will rep to international broadcasters, starting this week in Cannes at MIPTV.

We hope to hear of some potential international broadcast partners over the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile at home, we are fielding expressions of interest from several educational distributors for North American rights.

Mark and I are very pleased to have the film out and starting to attract attention. One of our film`s ambassadors, Geoff Moore of TBC Capital has been actively putting the film in front of fellow delegates at the 2011 Skoll World Forum, a tremendous opportunity for us as filmmakers and for our company. Thanks Geoff!

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

Impact Investment

Posted on by
Reply

Mark and I are off to Montreal today to meet with our friends at TBC Capital and to attend the inaugural Eye4Impact speaker series featuring Russell Read, formerly CIO of CalPERS (California Public Employees Retirement System), the largest pension fund in America, and currently the Chairman and Managing Partner of C Change Investments. I see from the write-up for the speaking engagement that Dr Read is a founding member of the P8 Group of the world’s eight largest pension systems coordinating towards scalable green investment solutions.

I am really interested in hearing his thoughts on how the world can move toward investment structures that permit a more open approach than what is currently considered permissable for fund managers under what is known as the “prudent decisionmaker” model. For a detailed discussion of this topic and other recommendations for Canada to move in this direction (to catch us up with other jurisdictions) a great read is The Canadian Task Force on Social Finance report Mobilizing Private Capital for Public Good.

UPDATE: There is a video interview here with Dr Read who provides many of the same insights he provided at the lunch. There is an article here too. Well worth a view and a read.