Find out about the insightful trip of OurWorld 2.0 to Bonn attend the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. Here is the slide presentation we delivered to the session on the influence of social media which focused on how to present solutions rather than problems when it comes to report climate change issues.

Listen to the full workshop session and get to know more about Ideas for a cooler World from Deutsche Welle as well as the German Ministry of Environment.

A must watch for all leaders of the future! A very well articulated vision for change.
Well done to the Knife Party and the 24 artists from around the world who came together on this one. Please share widely!

coalitionofthewilling.org.uk/

At the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum on Wednesday, we will be screening this 1 minute Our World 2.0 trailer, together with some stories from Our World 2.0. This year’s forum is focusing on the role of the media towards climate change issues.

Melting ice caps, catastrophic hurricanes, floods and drought plunging entire regions into crisis: these are the drastic images usually conveyed by the media. What we hardly hear about is what is actually being done to halt and adapt to global warming.

Media representatives from around the world, high-profile experts of governmental and non-governmental organisations, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs and scientists will sit around the same table at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. A simple philosophy drives this initiative: Those working on the future have to think in networks – and in global dimensions.

Deutsche Welle GLOBAL IDEAS will host a Workshop at the Global Media Forum about the best practices and solutions from around the world how to adapt with climate change. As part of the United Nation University we are very much delighted to represent the Our World 2.0 webzine in this workshop.

The Workshop will be held on 23 June 2010 – 11.00 a.m. in Room Aeltestenrat

Manuela Kasper-Claridge, head of the Business Department and responsible for the special coverage of climate issues at DW-TV, and Brendan Barrett, Head of United Nations University Media Studio will explore the challenges facing the media in covering climate protection and raise the following questions:

* Why does current media coverage focus mainly on the negative impacts of climate change rather than on ways to deal with it?
* Is it difficult to report on climate change in a pro-active manner?
* What role should the media play in the future?
* To what extent can this influence public opinion and motivate people to become involved?
* How can a global network be built to promote collaboration on the climate front?

Find more information on the site of the  Global Media Forum.

Today’s forum on ‘Green Lifestyles and the Powers of Consumers’ was the most engaging of the 2-day conference: The Great Transformation – Greening the Economy. The panel, including the Executive Director of the Forest Stewardship Council Andre de Freitas and a well-known member of the German parliament, discussed the extent to which people’s buying habits can change unsustainable production.

As soon as you talk about what we eat, wear and use, and where it comes from, people tend to take notice and want to have their say. The audience was keen to know how they could change their buying habits in the name of a better world.

Yet, consumers’ (or citizens’ as many prefer) preferences to be green are undermined by an over-supply of information and an under-supply of time. There are several surveys out there that indicate that people would like to buy products that are more sustainable, organic or fair-trade. But, as illustrated by this recent one in Britain for sustainable seafood cleverly entitled ‘The Which?‘, people are bombarded by confusing labels.

Furthermore, every type of product e.g. seafood, coffee, timber has different certification and labeling standards meaning that you need to recognise many organisations and ratings systems.

“People don’t want to deal with these issues 24 hours a day” said German Greens and Bundestag member Bärbel Höhn.

“Consumers are too busy with their lives and their kids”.

What is the true value of a label?

The session, however, did not provide simple answers – in fact, to the contrary, the panel illustrated that shades of gray and contradictions pepper the debate on ‘ethical consumer’ issues. Simplistic slogans that say ‘boycott this’ or ‘only buy that’, although appealing, may not always make a positive difference on the ground.

One audience member suggested that we could reduce our environmental impacts by avoiding favoured products like coffee, chocolate and bananas,  rather than trusting long and poorly governed supply chains to deliver fair trade and organic products.

But de Freitas cautioned against complete boycotts of product which are known to have negative impacts.

“The boycott of tropical rainforest products in the early 1980s resulted in more deforestation because the timber became less valuable and people switched to raising cattle”.

“The world is far too complex to make those assumptions,” he said.

It seems impossible to know with 100% certainty that you are supporting sustainable primary producers in the developing world obtain a fair price for their work. de Freitas and others working to encourage large companies to be socially responsible don’t have any illusions about the shortcomings of voluntary standards. Although far from a great transformation, maybe there is value in labeling as a first step in the evolution of a better system.

Blogservations

Here are some thoughts and observations I took away from the conference, in no particular order:

- Credibility counts: it helps to have conference organisers who are green in name and deed, not to mention professional. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung provided a green building and seasonal, local, vegetarian food (although the provision of bottled water instead of tap water seemed unnecessary).

- Bigger is not always better: it might seem obvious but usually representatives of current governments and executive members of organisations make the least original contributions to the debate, either because they have more at stake or less time to prepare something new to say.

- Global green: if a global movement for climate change is needed, as several speakers like Jerome Ringo called for, then surely language matters. Global climate advocacy seems to be so Anglo-American centric and some ideas don’t translate well, even into a related language like German. Still, Avaaz and others do their best to provide different terminologies, but without volunteers this can be costly.

- Growth pains: even the experts had trouble articulating what sustainable or progressive growth is. There seem to be many competing ideas our there and this has made it easier for societies to preference the economic devil we know.

Check out Our World 2.0 in the next couple of weeks for more detailed stories on innovative solutions presented at the conference.

However, she was not cut short mid-sentence by her fellow panelist, an impatient chairperson or an overexcited audience.

Rather, ironically, it was a few seconds of noise from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s (HBS) new open-plan office building itself. A remotely controlled curtain was released in order to allow the full morning light to enter the large auditorium through a long glass-paneled wall. No doubt deliberately timed with the curtain, specially located windows also opened to let the fresh outside air into the room.

According to HBS, the concept behind the building follows three basic principles:
• Intelligent systems with as little equipment as possible that save resources and keep down installation and operating costs.
• Energy is not lost until it leaves the building. Waste heat is recycled in an innovative manner.
• Ventilation and cooling are as natural as possible and give users maximum control.

In quantitative terms, the building consumes 55.7 kilowatt hours of energy/metre squared while the solar system on the roof generates 53 000 kWh of energy every year which is fed into the heating system.

The large auditorium at the new Heinrich Böll Stiftung building

Something harder to measure, but equally important, is how building design can enhance people’s quality of life. Nobody likes to be stuck inside on a nice day, let alone for a conference. But this conference has been all the more enjoyable because of the natural light and air coming in.

Of course it helps to have a view of a beautiful city like Berlin. Still, the principle of limiting our separation from the natural environment through building design can be universal. Furthermore, money can easily be saved in the long term through energy savings.

(Photo by Stephan Röhl).

Renewable returns

The same principle applies for the renewable energy industry where the earlier you invest, the more you will make in return.

In the ‘Towards 100% Renewables’ forum, Martin Rocholl, Policy Director for the European Climate Foundation spoke enthusiastically about ‘Roadmap 2050’.

Using modeling projections for future energy use and pricing, this new study claims that the European Union can plausibly achieve an 80% emissions reduction target by 2050.

According to Rocholl, a former director of Friends of the Earth Europe, some of the typical arguments against renewables are debunked by the research. These include claims that renewables are not cost effective or a reliable and continuing source of energy. Rocholl and supporters on the panel stressed the study’s backing by several large European energy providers.

Values must change

It may be just one building but HBS is walking the walk and setting an example for other organizations still talking the talk. Real change has to begin at home.

This was a theme echoed by many speakers and audience members throughout the day including Künast. Her approach is that a real transformation is needed in the West, where “people are living off the cost of others”.

She was unapologetic in saying that for most of the people in room, predominantly from Germany and other European countries, climate change is not yet an existential threat.

“People are doing add-on green elements but this is not a transformation.”

“The EU has to determine what it wants to be in 20 years time, not just economically but also socially…whether or not financial markets should be primary policy or whether 100% energy renewable should be the target,” says Künast.

For a truly great green transformation to take place “the values we live with have to change.”

To follow on from the previous post… an invite has been extended for 3 of the Our World 2.0 Indigenous climate films to screen in Moscow at the H20 film festival from the 27-30th May, 2010. I think our traditional knowledge films will be screening on the Friday night (28th May) around 7:30pm. For more information check out the festival’s site: http://www.kino35mm.ru/

I also found a short Moscow times article listing the 4 day program. After finally finishing the Russian subtitles for these beauties, oh, how I wish we could be there to cheer everybody’s stories along! Raaaaa!!!!!

United Nations University’s Our World 2.0 web-magazine has been selected as the official blog site for a major international conference on a global green new deal.

“The Great Transformation – Greening the Economy”, brings together German and world leaders from government, industry and civil society and will be held in Berlin, Germany, on May 28 & 29. The conference is a joint initiative of German political foundations the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and Stiftung Mercator, as well as the Center for American Progress.

The aim of the conference, in the wake of the failure of last year’s COP15, is to discuss how the world can transition away from unsustainable fossil fuels and towards a ‘low carbon society’. Two vital topics will be focused on by the participants: firstly, ’smart policies’ that guide and regulate changes in economic and energy policy; and secondly, ’smart technologies’ that can kick-start an ecological turnaround for a declining planet.

Of particular interest to the Our World 2.0 community will be the session on Social Media and Climate Change. While development of technology to mitigate and adapt to climate change is important, the real challenge is to communicate the benefits of environmental change to the public, especially through the internet.

More information on “The Great Transformation” including the conference programme can be found here. Keep an eye on Our World 2.0 for reports and interviews from the event.

UNU Media Studio is working on a new documentary to portray 4 seasons in Kanazawa city.  The documentary theme is biodiversity in city environement. People do not usually connect city and biodiversity, and that’s very natural.   Therefore, it’s a challenging theme for a documentary.  However, Kanazawa is a city with diverse landscape.  It has deep mountains to ocean in the small city boundary. That help the residents to enjoy diverse plants and insects, birds and animals to live around them and shows up depending on the season.

It is a Kanazawa city’s project to make this documentary to celebrate UN International year of biodiversity, especially because the closing event will be held in Kanazawa this December.

Media Studio usually use HDV cameras, which is good for documentary shoots with small crew travels all over the world.  However, for this project, we decided to use Red One camera, partly because we are working with a cinematographer who is experienced in Red shoot and owns one.

To illustrate the quality of the camera it can bring, I put together a short video.  David from Media Studio did a Quick color correction, but not too much has done yet.  I’m not sure if this is a good example of Red footage, but since there hasn’t many documentary shot on Red in Japan(I think) it might be a good example.