It’s Getting Hot In Here

The United Nations Youth Climate Change Challenge is an interactive competition that aims to inspire and educate young people on the key messages of the 2007 Human Development Report - the United Nations’ most comprehensive analysis of current scientific, economic and political thinking about the threat of catastrophic climate change and how to avoid it. To see these key messages Click Here. The contest invites young people aged 15-25 to make 30-150 second videos that relate these key messages to their own lived experience of climate change, their views about it, and/or their concerns about how the older generation have been, or should be, reacting to the challenge of combating it.

Videos to Engage and Inspire the World:
The United Nations is made up of 193 member states - and young people aged 15-25 in each of them are welcome to enter this contest. Even if you do not own a Video Camera, or a computer, you can take part in the contest. Click Here for full details.

Prize:
An all expense trip paid to attend the World Youth Congress 2008 in Quebec City, Quebec.

The 4th World Youth Congress will bring 600 of the world’s most dynamic young activists in the field of sustainable development to Quebec from 120 different countries.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change might have happened 4 months in the past but the video footage is still coming strong both in supply of footage and the messages from the youth that attended.

Here is a video featuring Jonathan Joanassie Edward Epoo who is an Inuit youth working to educate and engage other youth on the current changing conditions that climate change is causing to the region he lives in and to his culture.

The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report (HDR) is probably the most widely read document published by the UN every year. But the reports are not widely read by young people, which is why the UN is inviting young people to make a short, colourful summary of it.

The process is the same as before. If you did not take part last year, what we do is to create a task force of individual young people, school groups, etc. and get them to bring to life the key messages of the HDR with opinion pieces, reports, poems and stories, paintings, cartoons and photographs - so that everyone can understand these messages. The result is a beautiful, fascinating book entirely written and illustrated, designed and edited by young people. You can view the one we did last year here the design and editing is done by the young international interns here at the world-famous Peace Child International centre, near Cambridge, UK.

Contributors can watch the book come together, page by page, online. Also, you can suggest a different story, another photograph, painting or design element, just as if you were sitting at the Editorial Meeting table.

Continue reading ‘Help Create A United Nations Youth Climate Change Publication and Video Project’