All youth are capable of helping share awareness for climate change
Climate change is a prevalent aspect of our everyday life. There are many ways that people can get involved to help the cause. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) has a living video project called a Geo-Doc that was created ten years ago. The project is called the Youth Climate Report: a collection of short videos created by youth from around the world on topics of climate problems and change from across the globe.
Many policymakers are not scientists; the knowledge that they have to learn to make decisions is sometimes more complicated for someone who is not an expert. Starting in 2009, Dr. Mark Terry was working on a documentary in Antarctica at the time, called The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, and was asked to present the video at the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen. It was seen as a different way of sharing data. It was perceived in quite a positive way. The UNFCCC asked Dr. Terry to make another video a year later.
“Because this was really working well, they said, ‘Can you create something just for youth?’ So, let’s get young people in on this filmmaking thing. and so, what we did at the time was we asked young people around the world to just make a short little three-minute documentary about climate impacts where they live … around the same time, I went back to school to get my master’s and my PhD, and that’s when I discovered GeoMedia,” Dr. Mark Terry, Executive Director of the UNFCCC’s Youth Climate Report said.
Using the skills that Dr. Terry learned through his studies, he created what is now known as a living documentary called the Geo-Doc for the Youth Climate Report (YCR). It has since grown from the original five films to over 1,200 videos in over 160 countries.
Youth from across the world have continued to submit videos, including Laurier students. Dr. Terry is also an adjunct professor here at Laurier and has started the life levy project that provides climate change context to students to help them submit videos that meet the qualifications for the YCR.
“Such a unique experience for film space students so early on, really got my attention and I thought that that would be a good place to start, especially, like, as a film study student, to have like the name UN under your resume … if you’re a young filmmaker and you want to make a change with a message that really matters or something that you’re really interested in, the project is very flexible on what topic you could choose. So, you could pick literally anything,” Kristyn Cole, a recent Laurier Master of arts graduate said.
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