One month until entries close for Coalition’s outreach contest

Paris, 14 August 2012 – Young video producers and social media specialists are urged to get creative for a global cause and help raise public awareness of a little-known group of harmful pollutants.

Entries close on 14 September 2012 for an international outreach contest being staged by a new global partnership called the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants.

The Coalition is the first global effort to treat substances which are short-lived in the atmosphere – such as black carbon (or soot), methane and many hydrofluorocarbons – as an urgent and collective challenge.

The outreach contest is open to anyone aged between 12 and 25 who wants to promote the need to catalyze reductions in short-lived climate pollutants to protect human health and the environment now and slow the rate of climate change within the first half of this century.

The categories in the contest are:

1. Best tagline or slogan for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition.
2. Best description – “What is a short-lived climate pollutant - SLCP?”
3. Best social media proposal for messaging on short-lived climate pollutants, the Coalition’s work and for breaking news on issues related to SLCPs.
4. Best audio-visual product which communicates SLCP impacts and opportunities to address them.

The overall winner will receive a fully paid trip to a forthcoming Coalition meeting, as well as having his or her concepts implemented and displayed to an international audience.

The contest is simple to enter.  Just visit the contest page where entries may be submitted via an online form – or email or post your entry to the Coalition secretariat which is based at the United Nations Environment Programme Office in Paris.

Short-lived climate pollutants have harmful impacts on human health, agriculture and ecosystems.  They are responsible for a substantial fraction of current global warming, as well as having regional climate impacts. 

Fast action to reduce these pollutants – especially methane and black carbon – has the potential to slow down the warming expected by 2050 by as much as 0.5°C, as well as prevent over two million premature deaths each year and avoid annual crop losses of over 30 million tons.