One Planet Pictures


State of the Planet All the publicity surrounding climate change has given the impression that "the environment" equates with climate change and little besides. On October 25th the UN's Environment Programme published its 4th Global Environment Outlook report on the state of the planet. According to GEO 4, climate change is merely one of many interlinked environmental issues that nations are failing to address. Its publication falls on the 20th anniversary of the Brundtland Report which invented the term 'sustainable development'. But it finds that most development is still unsustainable. Page by page, the outlook for the year 2015 makes for grim reading but not uniformly so. The good news is that the world has done well in tackling issues such as saving the ozone layer and dealing with acid rain.	But the GEO 4 report focuses on what it describes as the "wicked" or persistent environmental degradation, some of which is only marginally affected by predicted climate change: issues such as over-use of water, the accelerating rate of species extinction, the impact of over-population in fragile lands and the runaway expansion of slums. Our two programmes focus on what Indian environmental journalist, Sunita Narain recently described as the 'leapfrogging' steps that government, business and ordinary people have taken to deal with the 'wicked' problems. We film in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia and show that there are instances where these persistent problems have been addressed, and on a scale that offers hope for the future. We find that when an imaginative leap has been made, the people behind those decisions have - as Al Gore has describes it - "de-enthralled" themselves with current thinking, and the current preoccupation with destructive but materially rewarding patterns of economic growth.	We tour the world interviewing presidents, prime ministers, business leaders, scientists and Mrs Brundtland herself. Our main question: - 20 years on from Brundtland Report, when our survival was said to be at stake, why have we taken so little action to confront the identified causes? In short, why are not more leaders 'de-enthralling' themselves? The full-length interviews for State of the Planet can be seen on www.stateoftheplanet.org.uk Click the buttons to see programme1, part 1 programme1, part 2 programme2, part 1 programme2, part 2 < back

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