A Day in the Life series

At COP27, Connect4Climate launched a new series of stories focusing on young climate leaders called “A Day in the Life.” Since then, we’ve given audiences a glimpse into what it’s like to attend the World Bank Group / IMF Spring Meetings and Innovate4Climate in Bilbao, providing a personal lens into major international events as well as the different ways that climate advocates approach their work. I’ve enjoyed following not only young leaders around - from the COP27 Youth Envoy to Bangladeshi students to one of the members of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on climate change - but also giving intergenerational perspectives on the many ways that climate action manifests itself in everyday life.

ROLE: DIRECTOR, EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER

Amplifying Youth Voices

One of Connect4Climate’s overarching objectives is to amplify the voices, ideas, and expertise of youth climate leaders in spaces of power. For me, this means leveraging the time I have with these impressive young people while I’m filming at major international events to find creative and unique ways of capturing their stories in social media friendly formats. Some of the content we’ve developed center around games inspired by popular trends, such as Common Climate Questions and Name That Climate Acronym, while other series like My Piece of the Puzzle allow for quick dives into the young leader’s specific area of work. There are also one-off videos I’ve produced that target a particular event or advocacy goal using compilations of youth interviews.

ROLE: DIRECTOR, EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER

COP27

Connect4Climate attended the 27th UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt to highlight stories of youth leadership, unpack important climate concepts, amplify intergenerational dialogue, and support the World Bank Group communications team. I spent the full two weeks running around the COP venue with my camera, interviewing youth leaders and climate experts for a variety of content threads that we produced both during and after the conference.

ROLE: DIRECTOR, EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER

Intergenerational Action

At COP28, Connect4Climate partnered with the UN Youth Office to produce the Heart-to-Heart series of intergenerational dialogues featuring candid conversations between high-level climate leaders and young climate champions. In 2022, Connect4Climate partnered with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to highlight intergenerational responsibility at Stockholm+50 and I traveled to Sweden to interview dozens of young people attending the conference. From this footage, we created a series of intergenerational conversations as well as fun games such as “Name That Climate Question,” “Common Climate Questions,” and Intergenerational Quickfire Questions.

ROLE: DIRECTOR, EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER

ONCE REPRESENTED

Role: Director, CINEMATOGRAPHER, Editor

Launched at #COP28, "Once Represented" was created by Ahmed Badr using responses from the cohort of 100 COP28 International Youth Climate Delegates that were invited to Dubai by the COP28 Presidency to represent their communities. These impressive delegates brought their unique perspectives, backgrounds and voices to the international climate negotiations, where I captured their experience of being in the COP space.

ONCE UNIMAGINABLE

Role: Director, Editor

Launched at #COP27, "Once Unimaginable" was curated by Ahmed Badr from conversations with Youth4Climate delegates from each of the Sahel G5 countries. I then worked with these young people to capture their voices and personal video of their communities, combining this user-generated style footage with clips from the feature documentary Great Green Wall, courtesy of Make Waves Ltd.

TIME FOR NATURE

Role: Director, Editor

C4C launched this collective poem in partnership with Narratio and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to celebrate World Environment Day in the midst of the pandemic. As part of a social media campaign, we asked C4C’s network to respond to a poetic brief which were curated by Ahmed to create a poem selected contributors recording their lines.

TRANSLATIONS

Role: Director, Editor

“Translations” was created for the 2021 World Bank Group/IMF Spring Meetings to close out the high-level climate event Key Green Transitions for People and Planet. Given the restrictions of the pandemic, we created this video using remote filming technologies, which allowed me to direct poet Ahmed Badr in real time from 1,600 miles away.

“REPRESENTATION” POEM

ROLE: directOR, EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER

Ahmed Badr composed the original piece “Representation” Poem in response to the Youth4Climate Manifesto, which C4C brought to COP26 in partnership with Little Amal, an 11-foot puppet representing a Syrian refugee girl. We paired the poem recording with a soundscape of youth delegate voices as part of a performance on the banks of the River Clyde.

role: director, editor, cinematographer (niger story)

At COP24, the World Bank announced a major new set of climate targets for 2021-2025, including a major focus on adaptation finance. To support this launch, Connect4Climate helped produce a series of videos showing the human side of climate adaptation in Niger and Kiribati. I worked closely with the World Bank team to create an outline and choose locations, then travelled to Maradi in the east of Niger to film Amadou, a cassava farmer. By creating a clear shot list and working closely with our videographer in Kiribati, I was able to match shots during editing and weave these two stories from different sides of the planet into a cohesive narrative.

role: director, editor

In 2019, Connect4Climate collaborated with the World Bank Climate team again to support the launch of the Global Commission on Adaptation’s new report “Adapt Now: A Global Call for Leadership on Climate Resilience.” Instead of shooting new content, we used recycled footage from the World Bank archives to create a new video highlighting how climate change is already impacting lives and livelihoods, especially in the world’s poorest countries and that good adaptation can help improve lives, reduce poverty, protect the environment, and enhance resilience around the world. At its heart, Adaptation is about People.

Innovate4Climate

ROLE: director, editor, cinematographer

Innovate4Climate is about tapping the ideas and ingenuity of a growing community of business, finance, technology, civil society and policy leaders and increasing their role in driving climate action.  Innovate4Climate 2019 was in Singapore, where the Connect4Climate (C4C) team produced a quick turnaround video to document the inaugural Pitch Hub Competition as well as a wrap-up video for the entire summit. At the 2018 conference in Frankfurt, Germany, the C4C team created a 24-hour turnaround video to close the conference and a full recap video.

Film4Climate

ROLE: directOR, EDITOR & CINEMATOGRAPHER

The #Film4Climate initiative aims to use the power of storytelling and filmmaking to raise awareness about climate solutions and inspire audiences worldwide to act on climate.  By partnering with film festivals like Cannes and Guadalajara, Film4Climate supports filmmakers, especially young ones, in telling climate stories and encourages filmmakers to adopt sustainable production practices throughout the filmmaking process.