Unique for its historical depth, State of the Planet reminds viewers that it is 35 years since the first UN Environmental summit in Stockholm. The list of all the landmark conferences and scientific assessments since 1972, each warning of the rapidly deteriorating state of the planet's health, make for a chilling roll call. GEO4, the UN's latest assessment provides the grimmest reading of all. It tells us, for example, that an astonishing 60% of the world's ecosystems are either kaput or on course to being so. Meanwhile humans continue to reproduce (an increase of 1/3rd in just 20 years), posing the dilemma of how to feed, clothe and house another 3 billion people.

The films ask if three and a half decades of environmental awareness-raising and action have been for nought? We report that all the easy stuff - ozone treaties and so forth - has been done. Meanwhile, what GEO4 describes as the persistent problems have barely been tackled at all.

We then set out to find places on the planet where genuine and lasting attempts are being made to tackle the intractable problems. We go to Singapore, Turkey, Botswana, Amazonia, Costa Rica, France, Alaska and India to deliver some good news. But is it all too little too late? We leave the viewer to make up his or her mind.
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Earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, tsunamis - we call them natural disasters. But the toll they take on the most vulnerable, especially children, is unnatural.

The number of those killed, injured or made destitute by natural disasters is due mainly to a lack of forward planning but also to environmental mismanagement and corruption.

Children on the Front Line comes from the frontline of disaster - natural and man-made.

We focus on the young people who are taking it upon themselves to reduce the risks to themselves and to their communities from natural disasters.
…as well as combating the man-made hazards of disease, environmental destruction and conflict.

The documentaries were filmed over a year in Pakistan, Philippines, El Salvador and Sierra Leone.
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A billion people in a million villages live with the threat of their fields and pastures turning to dust. Local reporters go to the frontline to find that villagers are not about to see their land blown away.

Each year the world loses 1% of its arable land. In 50 years China alone has lost crop and grazing land the size of Greenland.

Villages on the Frontline features the communities who are staging a fight back against one of the world's most intractable environmental problems.

We sent our crew to film in the Caribbean, China, India, Jordan, Morocco, Niger, Spain and Tanzania. < back more >

This is the thesis of “Breaking the Conflict Trap” by Oxford University’s professor Paul Collier, who participated in The Price of Peace. Collier argued that full-scale warfare fought between armies on a battle field is virtually a thing of the past. Nearly all modern warfare is civil conflict and is taking place in dirt poor countries, such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. None of the other panellists fully signed up to this argument.

For the editor of an Egyptian newspaper, the hand of the US was seen in virtually every conflict. In Sri Lanka, the fuel for the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese majority are the remittances of the wealthy Tamil business community living outside Sri Lanka. In Colombia, the insatiable appetite of the USA for the white powder was identified as a key cause of the world’s longest running civil war.