Saving the Planet:
New Asian regional media project calls for public nominations

TVE Asia Pacific has just launched Saving the Planet, a new Asian regional project to showcase the most innovative projects and efforts in education for sustainable development (ESD) in developing Asia.

The multi-year, multi-media project involves producing an Asian TV series in a participatory manner, and building the media-based communications capacity of selected organisations engaged in ESD in the region.

It is TVE Asia Pacific's main response to the United Nations Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (UN-DESD), 2005 – 2014.

The project is supported by its own dedicated website, which is now online at www.savingtheplanet.tv. It joins the regional organisation’s four existing websites.

The new project started off with an open call for public nominations of innovative ESD projects. Nominations can be made by anyone, anywhere in the world until 31 March 2007.

To be eligible, however, projects need to be based in one of 20 developing countries in the sub-regions of East Asia, South Asia or Southeast Asia. The South Pacific will be covered in a later series.

Click here for the list of eligible countries, and other terms and conditions.

The public nominations process has been made easy through an online form, which may also be downloaded for offline filling.

Click here for the Online Nomation Form.

An international panel of experts, comprising education, media and communication specialists from Asia, will select the best projects.

Click here to view profiles of seven panel members.

Saving the Planet TV series is to be filmed during 2007-2008. Like all other TVE Asia Pacific productions, this will be produced to international broadcast standards on an editorially independent basis. It will be entirely an Asian effort, using locally based film-makers wherever possible.

TVE Asia Pacific has recently produced several successful regional TV series, including Digits4Change and The Greenbelt Reports.

As with all TVEAP productions, Saving the Planet will be offered to dozens of TV channels across Asia that are in partnership with TVE Asia Pacific.

At the same time, the series will be distributed on video and DVD to thousands of schools, universities, NGOs, training centres and research institutes. The winning projects will also be featured on the dedicated website.

Representatives from all the selected projects will be invited and sponsored to a regional workshop in mid 2007, where they will receive a weeks training in communicating through audio-visual and new media. The workshop is to be held in a Southeast Asian city.
 
Saving the Planet is implemented by TVE Asia Pacific in collaboration with the Asia/Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU),Tokyo, Japan, within the framework of ACCU-UNESCO Asia-Pacific Programme under the UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust for the Promotion of ESD.