Page 51 - The Channel Issue 2 2010

Ushahidi.com, which was chosen as the best blog at Deutsche Welle’s international weblog awards The BOBs, collects and shows reports from users who have the Ushahidi application built into their own websites via mobile phones, email and social networks.

It then visualizes information from conflict and disaster regions on an interactive map. “One of our goals with Ushahidi has always been to help save lives and speed recovery“, said Erik Hersman from Kenya, one of the co-founders of ushahidi.com who attended the awards ceremony on June 22 in Bonn. The “Special Topic Award Climate Change” was given to Bruno Rezende from Brazil for his blog “Coluna Zero” which is about “minimizing excessive consumption”. The Blog “We are Journalists” of Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist Zhila Bani Jaghob won the Reporters without Borders prize – restricted from working as a journalist and sentenced to one year in prison, she was unable to attend the awards ceremony. The full list of this year's winners is at www.thebobs.com.

“Being a part of the 2010 GMF was a great opportunity and experience for Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) as an organization working for climate change affected populations through disaster risk reduction, and I am glad that we could add our thoughts and experiences to the lively discussions with like-minded people. The forum brought different stakeholders together and provided a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas and connect with each other. At an individual level, I really enjoyed the forum and staying in Bonn."

American scientist Naomi Oreskes took part in a panel discussion at DW GMF, with Bob Ward from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the

Environment and ex-BBC journalist Alexander Kirby. Oreskes said that the media treated the topic like a pure scientific debate, although it was grounded ideologically: “Global warming is no longer a debate – it’s a proven fact.” She went on to say that the so-called climate skeptics are nothing but “contrarians” and can’t be taken seriously because their critique isn’t scientifically based. According to Oreskes, these are the same people who didn’t want to believe that the consumption of tobacco had negative effects.

In his keynote speech, Hermann Scheer, President of EUROSOLAR and Member of the German Bundestag, said that “people don’t want greenwashing methods, they want green solutions”. There are too many stories about the problems associated with climate change and not enough about possible solutions – and the media needs to combat the “no-future” attitude. Scheer said the focus should be more on successful, local measures. German initiatives have become the model for many other countries.

Suditpo is the winner of DW's global photography competition “Hot Shots – your view on climate change”. The winning picture shows two boys diving into the river Ganges from a submerged temple in the Indian city Varanasi. Suditpo writes: “According to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sea levels will rise by at least 40cm by 2100, inundating vast areas of coastline, including some of the most densely populated cities whose populations will be forced to migrate inland.”