Facing The New Reality
Climate action film "Facing The New Reality" featuring Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh is a finalist for the Smiley Charity Film Awards.
Watch and vote for the film
via this link by 12 March 2024
The 7-minute film, Facing The New Reality, premiered at the opening ceremony of the world's biggest climate event of its kind at Climate Week NYC in September 2023, in front of hundreds of world-leading politicians, business executives and civil society representatives.
Since then, the film has been viewed more than 54,000 times online and has now been shortlisted in the Smiley Charity Film Awards.
The film is the only finalist with a sole focus on climate change, and is up against some of the industry's biggest names, including a Greenpeace short film with Simon Pegg and Jane Fonda.
In Facing The New Reality, Professor Shuckburgh and fellow climate scientists Harvard's Naomi Oreskes, World Meteorological Organization's Petteri Taalas and Energy for Growth Hub's Rose Mutiso take centre stage to report on the current state of the planet, outline the action needed to tackle climate change and urge global leaders to take the critical decisions today to construct a just and sustainable world.
Professor Shuckburgh offers a glimpse of optimism in the film and urges the assembled world leaders to press on with the critical action needed this decade to address climate change.
"We have all the building blocks in order to do it, we just simply haven't put them together... yet," Professor Shuckburgh said.
Climate Week NYC has grown hugely in importance from small panel discussions in 2009 to a weeklong happening of events, networking, dinners and spectacle and was described by New York Times as "Burning Man for Climate Geeks" last year.
Climate Week NYC is a partnership between The Climate Group and the United Nations General Assembly and is run in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York.
In 2023 it centred around the UN General Assembly, the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Ambition Summit as well as hundreds of national government, business and climate group initiatives, making it a unique opportunity for Cambridge to communicate with the world.
Facing The New Reality was produced by The Climate Group, with the creative agency Nice & Serious, who ask viewers to "let it inspire us, let it challenge us, and let it empower us to act - because the time to make a difference is now."
Watch the full film and cast your vote via the Smiley Charity Awards page by March 12th 2024.
“There's still hope if we're determined.”
Professor Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge’s ambitious climate change initiative to help to stop climate change and create a resilient and sustainable zero-carbon world.
"We're thrilled to be a finalist at the Smiley Charity Film Awards, but what we really need is for global leaders to take bold action today to create a sustainable tomorrow." - Prof Shuckburgh
Professor Shuckburgh also appeared on Climate Week NYC's main stage for one of the key discussions on the New frontiers of Climate Action alongside the Chief Sustainability Officers of Google and Siemens, a Cambridge alumni event hosted by Cambridge in America Mission Possible: Creating a Better Planetary Future and met with dozens of supporters, policymakers, business, industry and climate leaders.
Across the week she shared Cambridge’s efforts to tackle climate change. She mentioned Cambridge research on materials, batteries, photovoltaics, the Cambridge ecosystem for innovation, including Cambridge research on AI, aviation, the Centre for Landscape Regeneration and the ground-breaking work of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
Image: Roberto Vivancos, Pexels
Image: Roberto Vivancos, Pexels
Published 5 March 2024
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Cambridge Zero is the University of Cambridge’s ambitious climate change initiative, harnessing the power of research to tackle climate change at one of the top global research universities in the world.
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