Welectricity, the innovative social network, that we have mentioned before in GLOBAL IDEAS, has won an award at the prestigious Knowledge@Wharton/Wipro Technologies Innovation Tournament. The competition was held at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania on April 27th 2011. Welectricity has excelled and beat 44 other teams, that also made it to the semifinals. Welectricity’s web-based service was judged to be the “Best New Sustainability Innovation” (full press-release here). Well, congrats for the award! The idea behind Welectricity is absolutly worth it in our opinion. It allows users to track, compare and reduce their electricity consumption at home. Users from 86 countries worldwide are participating already.

We would like to give you the opportunity to watch the report that GLOBAL IDEAS made with the help of Welectricity again. In this post you will also find an interview we did during the filming in Kingstown, St. Vincent.

Iranildo de Sousa Ferreira is a 16 year old student who has been working  in the environmental area for several years. He is a student and lives in the city of Ibiapina, Ceará in Brazil. Protecting the environment is his passion. Iranildo is writing for the GLOBAL IDEAS Blog about his experience with climate change and about projects he’s working on.

Part I

I am very concerned about climate change as it has progressed in recent years from mere conjecture to suspicion, and finally to reality – backed by real data. Now we know for sure that around the world, year after year, decade after decade, the world’s temperature is rising.

In 2010 I was selected to be a British Council Climate Champion by the selection process of the Climate Generation Programme in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a Climate Champion, I’m doing several actions in my city, my state and country to increase public awareness about climate change. My aim is to change habits and encourage mitigation and adaptation. I initiated and am involved with the Brazilian Government’s first Young Brazilian delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference where I will exercise the role of president.

To legitimize the performance of my actions and my work as a Climate Champion got great support from the people at the British Council in Brazil, with whom I keep in touch through the Project Manager, Ana Paula Bessa, who accompanies and guides me in the execution of my actions.

When we work on the issue of climate change, we must remember that climate change will affect all living beings on our planet, and so we can minimize the effects, not only by using clean energy technologies but we need something much bigger – we need everyone’s help. We must act now and start from our homes, our schools, our institutions. We will prove that the human beings are not what they say but what they do.

Biodiversity is important to protect, especially in the world’s rainforests, oceans and mountain ranges where we often find rare species. But biodiversity is important in “ordinary” places, too – like continental Europe. The region boasts a lot of its own unique species, like the Iberian lynx in Spain (pictured above) and the Bavarian pine vole in the Alps. But those animals might not be around much longer.

A new report from the European Union shows that hundreds of species in Europe are now facing extinction. In fact, that assessment includes about up to a quarter of the species native to the continent. All types of animals and plants could vanish, including birds, reptiles, mammals and butterflies.

The problem stems from a variety of factors, including pollution and climate change. The EU has set forth some targets to protect Europe’s biodiversity, like restoring ecosystems. But there is no funding to back those proposals, so some critics don’t believe anything will change.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the world! Since we’re celebrating mothers today, we thought we’d share a cool initiative in Australia called “1 Million Women”. The campaign strives to inspire 1 million women to fight climate change by slashing 1 million tons of CO2. So that means each women who joins the cause would reduce her own CO2 emissions by 1 ton.

All the women who join the campaign get tips on how to cut their carbon footprints and help tracking their progress along the way. The more than 50 daily tips include things like staying away from plastic bags or bottles, cutting down on food waste and reducing your meat intake. You can check out some of the women’s stories who have joined on the campaign’s Youtube page.

Sometimes it's easier to understand a complicated issue if you can play with it. Take climate change as an example. To garner support for climate action a video game is released today. The game is called Fate of the World that and it is based on state-of-the-art climate models, the developers say. Red Redemption from Oxford have created that strategy game in cooperation with the global TckTckTck campaign. People who are downloading the game are literaly ‘players’ in the climate change debate and can contribute towards real-life changes. In the game users must find a way to deal with Earth’s resources and the climate crisis. At the same time the needs of the growing world population need to be minded, such as more food, energy, and living space. TckTckTck and Red Redemption seek to increase the understanding and awareness of climate change by providing gamers with the opportunity to learn and explore the subject. More informations you will find here: http://tcktcktck.org/fotwgame/