- The project represented by the Belgian weather presenter Jill Peeters has been awarded as the best proposal to communicate climate change in the international Call for Proposals conceived by CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, and co-produced with the Festival for the Earth.
- Climate Without Borders is an international network of weather presenters committed to communicating climate change in a scientifically accurate manner, and to engaging with people who want to make a difference in changing the world around them.
- Weather presenters are going to spread the message on TV and on social media about key topics such as disaster prevention, resilience, innovation, sustainable energy. They will do it on a daily basis, not only when heavy rains, floods, heat waves or other extreme events occur.
- Two Special Mentions of the Jury have been assigned to the projects Climate Feedback and Climate Tracker.
- Nobel, Pulitzer and Goldman prizes, speakers at the Festival for the Earth (Venice, 3-4 December 2018) attended the award ceremony, held in the same days while the United Nations World Conference on Climate Change COP24 begins in Poland.
Venice (Italy), 4 December 2018 – Expertise, balance, commitment against fake news and catastrophism. These are the strong points of the best climate communication project – CLIMATE WITHOUT BORDERS – which won the Best Climate Solutions 2018, co-produced by CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and Festival for the Earth.
Awarded during the gala event of the Festival for the Earth at the presence of all the speakers including Nobel, Pulitzer and Goldman Prizes, the winners of the competition on how to “Communicate climate change risks and opportunities” achieved the best results out of over a hundred proposals from around the world.
The 2018 edition of Best Climate Solutions Award, the platform created by CMCC to showcase the most innovative and effective initiatives to build a resilient and climate-smart future, has rewarded international collaboration, in-depth information and the efforts to avoid catastrophism. These features also characterize two other projects which were awarded the Special Mentions of the Jury announced in Venice: Climate Feedback and Climate Tracker.
Climate without Borders is a new organization building a global network of renown weather presenters through which reaching a huge public and spreading independent and accurate information on climate change.
Represented by the founder Jill Peeters, the organization is committed to spread independent and accurate information on climate change and to engage with people who want to make a difference in changing the world around them. For this reasons, weather presenters members of Climate without Borders are going to spread the message on TV and on social media about key topics such as disaster prevention, resilience, innovation, sustainable energy. They will do it on a daily basis, not only when heavy rains, floods, heat waves or other extreme events occur. Climate without Borders is “a new, strong project with a high impact potential”, it reads in the Jury’s note. “It is an initiative that acknowledges the need to set up training opportunities for weather presenters to learn more about climate science, communication, policy, and action”.
“We are truly honored by this. It’s a tribute to all weather presenters worldwide, who are working on the front lines of changing weather and climate”, said Jill Peeters, founder of Climate without Borders, and weather presenter in Belgium. “We see what’s happening and we are worried. It’s important that we have a place to unite our voices and this award shows just how critical communication this information is.”
Commitment against fake news and climate journalism in the Global South are at the core of the two projects which received the Special Mentions of the Jury.
Climate Feedback is a worldwide network of scientists assessing the credibility of climate change media coverage, with the goal of “help readers know which news to trust”. Fact-checking, collaborative structure, and scientific expertise are the cornerstones of this initiative which sifts through social media in search of climate change news to verify its reliability and release science-proven analyzes.
Climate Tracker is a youth-led organization involving over 7000 environmental journalists in more than 150 countries to mainstream the topic of climate change in national media around the world. It delivers in-person and online training, travel scholarships, and mentorship activities to empower young journalists, especially in the Global South, in order to enhance climate change coverage in their respective countries.
This year’s Award saw the participation of over 100 proposals, out of which 42 candidates were selected from over 20 countries. Journalism and new media, visual communication and gaming, art, literature, education, and advocacy: these were just some of the themes that inspired the 2018 edition of the Best Climate Solutions Award, demonstrating that climate change communication is an extremely landscape, home of an extraordinary evolution of themes, tools, and languages.
“The huge participation in the Call and the quality of the competing projects have shown increasing sensitivity, awareness and interest on the topic, especially by the younger generations, going beyond sensationalism and catastrophism”, said Carlo Carraro, creator of BCS and member of the CMCC strategic committee. “It is a positive sign for a key challenge that is not only to disseminate scientifically based information but also to develop innovative tools and channels to turn knowledge into action at all levels “.
The prizes, worth three thousand euros for the winner and one thousand euros each for the Special Mentions, were made available by Greenfid, main partner of Festival for the Earth, and were presented in the prestigious setting of the Festival for the Earth in Venice. Authoritative figures in the field of journalism and science attended the gala event held at the Hotel Ca ‘Sagredo, including the Pulitzer Prize Daniel Fagin, the world-renowned climatologist Nigel Tapper, the spokesman of the European Commission for the Environment Enrico Brivio, the director of National Geographic Italy Marco Cattaneo.
The awarded projects were selected through an evaluation process that combines the judgment of an international jury of experts and the online voting carried out on the Best Climate Solutions platform, participated by over 2000. The jury for the Best Climate Solutions 2018 Award is composed of the Pulitzer Prize Kenneth Weiss, the director of National Geographic Italy Marco Cattaneo, Jessika Berns (Communications Manager of the Green Growth Knowledge Platform), Marion Ferrat (former head of Communication of IPCC Working Group III), Liliana Hisas, (Director of the Universal Ecological Fundación).