Canadian filmmaker and humanities PhD candidate Mark Terry will launch The Youth Climate Report in Germany at the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP23) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The report is a series of nearly 300 videos on global climate research produced by young people.
COP23 runs Nov. 6 to 17, and Terry will present his report Nov. 15.
Mark Terry
Terry’s project is designed to provide a voice for the communities of global youth, as well as global science. He first introduced the project at the UNFCCC in 2011. Now, The Youth Climate Report GIS Map Project offers an interactive digital map, whereby users can click on different parts of the world and watch corresponding short documentary films.
Each video is situated at the longitude and latitude coordinates of where each film’s research took place. Each video also contains meta data for those interested in further information on the related climate topic and the corresponding research done by the profiled climate scientist.
“Working in collaboration with the UNFCCC’s Communications Department and the delegates attending the COP conferences, I have been able to customize the project to best suit the needs of the policy-maker,” said Terry, who teaches Science and the Humanities: Nature and Human Nature at York University. “The project’s current format provides both explicit and implicit narratives of climate research and allows the scientific community to present their work in a more accessible, non-text format.”
Videos are curated by the UNFCCC and Television for the Environment, a charitable division of the UN Environment Programme. Youth from around the world submit videos on specific themes, with the 2017 themes being “Climate Friendly and Resilient Cities” and “Oceans and Climate Change.”
The Youth Climate Report press conference will be held at the COP23 on Nov. 15, followed by the launch of this year’s winning video entries on Nov. 16. The winning entries are Let Mangroves Recover by Adarsh Prathap from India and Turning Green by Younes Lamsaoui from Morocco.
The Youth Climate Report project is an official partner program of the UNFCCC together with UNEP, TVE, the United Nations Development Programme and the GEF Small Grants Programme.