Communication and Media Studies

ABSTRACT:
Creating international policy for implementing laws and practices related to the impacts of present and future climate changes has been a challenge. Scientific data, some of it inconsistent with varying data sets of time and location, have been difficult for the policy-makers, locally as well as internationally, to assimilate and use in creating definitive policy. 
In my own climate research in the polar regions, documenting this data in film proved to provide a medium that improved understanding and accessibility to this complex information.  Invited by the United Nations to present my two documentary films, The Antarctica Challenge and The Polar Explorer, to delegates, negotiators and world leaders attending the UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun (2010), policy-makers eagerly responded to the data contained in the films and accelerated the policy-writing process.  In particular, international policy-makers have proven to prefer receiving their information through film rather than through text as it provides a visual context that aids in the comprehension of material usually difficult to understand by the untrained audience. 
Additional film presentations were made to great extent through the conferences' social media. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube resulted in close to 60,000 views of the film during the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen.  After two rounds of drafts, a new resolution addressing the imminent threat of rising sea levels was adopted: Enhanced Action on Adaptation: Section 2, Subsection 25, based primarily on footage I shot of the Petermann Ice Island during a research expedition across the Northwest Passage in October, 2010. 
Since 2008, I have been working closely with the world’s climate change scientific communities and the United Nations using filmed reports of research in the field to aid and assist policy-makers in understanding.  This achievement has been recognized with the presentation of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Stefansson Medal (the Explorers Cub) and the Gemini Humanitarian Award (Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television). 
As a result of this success, the UN has established a partnership with me to provide a new film each year for presentation at its COP conferences. Focused on climate change research around the world, the film series brings the latest findings on climate research, not just in the polar regions but around the world.  The series is in its fifth year and feedback from both the scientific community and UN policy-makers is
Mark Terry,
Master's Candidate (Humanities),
York University,
Email: [email protected].
Tel: 416-899-5855
http://gradstudies.yorku.ca/2014/09/lifelong-york-member-comes-full-circle/

York University has just announced I am the winner of its President's Sustainability Leadership Award. The purpose of the award is "to raise awareness on the important work that sustainability champions are doing at York". Specifically, it recognizes the current research I am doing in multilinear documentary mapping of international climate research. My ongoing PhD project was used by UN delegates at the Paris climate summit last December. The award presentation will take place - appropriately - on April 22, Earth Day, at York University. Thank you Professors Gail Vanstone and Markus Reisenleitner for nominating me to this prestigious award.

One of the most difficult, yet most valuable, measurements of the success of a social-issue documentary is the direct impact it has had on a group it intends to change. Lawmakers and policymakers are usually the targeted groups of activist filmmakers, but it is rare to see a significant social change attributed directly to the influence of a film. As a result, funding organizations and measurement strategies and tools have begun to emerge as recently as 2005 to assist filmmakers, their funders and the change-makers to create documentary films that have impact and to create ways of measuring that impact.

Kate Nash, Craig Hight and Catherine Summerhayes have edited a collection of essays examining some of the new ways the documentary film is taking shape in the digital domain. New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses sheds new light on the multilinear documentary, the database documentary, the interactive documentary and how new theories in these fields are yielding new methods of production and professional practices.

A multilinear, interactive, database documentary film project curating reports on climate research from all seven continents presented on a platform of a Geographic Information System map. The project is currently being used by the United Nations Frameworks Convention on Climate Change as a partner program under its Article 6 mandate for education and outreach.

ABSTRACT - Connecting the Docs: Geomedia Applications for Informing Climate Policy

“By viewing scientific images as powerful rhetorical expressions that participate in the techniques and goals of the documentary tradition, we may begin to mobilize their persuasive power to enable a fuller understanding.”

In Kirsten Ostherr’s essay, Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery through Documentary Film, she examines the importance of data visualizations for those in power working with scientific research. Policymakers often do not have the same scientific background or education as those providing data to them, and in climate-related policy sessions such as the United Nations’ annual COP conferences, geomedia projects are emerging to facilitate data comprehension.

The Youth Climate Report is a multilinear, interactive, database documentary film project presented on a platform of a Geographic Information System map of the world. Its content represents more than 300 student-produced video reports of current climate research on all seven continents. Each pin on the digital map contains a three- to five-minute “mini-doc” as well as metadata to augment the written texts provided to policymakers by the global climate scientific community.

Introduced in 2015 at the Paris climate summit, the project was adopted by the United Nations at its 2016 COP conference in Marrakech, Morocco and curates approximately 100 video reports per year. Created with an experimental program developed by Google called Fusion Tables, the architecture of the project affords regular updates providing opportunities for both temporal and spatial analyses in this living documentary format.

The goal of geomedia projects such as this is to provide international policymakers visualizations of climate research in more robust data sets that help enhance comprehension of written texts. These projects also offer both explicit and implicit narratives that enable a fuller understanding of scientific research and yield more accurate and expedited global environmental policy.

Links:
Youth Climate Report (Project Website): http://youthclimatereport.org/
Youth Climate Report (Academic Website): https://futurecinemaproject.com/

While acknowledging earlier classic environmental documentaries such as The Plough That Broke the Plains, Rain, Nanook of the North and others, eco-cinema, or as it is sometimes referred to in the particular, the eco-doc, is a relatively new sub-genre of the documentary film that is developing its own style as it is so closely related with informing both public and power about issues that impact all of us. In his book Eco-cinema: Theory and Practice, Scott MacDonald describes how eco-cinema uses a new mode of story-telling designed to change the way we perceive cinematic content: “The fundamental job of eco-cinema…is a retraining of perception, as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media spectatorship, like a garden within the machine of modern life.”
Another perspective on this mode of perception is offered by Alexa Weik von Mossner in her book, Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film: “The primary importance of eco-cinema is to affect our automatic, visceral response and emotion...to make (these films) artistically successful, theoretically powerful and culturally influential.”
This goal of audience engagement leading to powerful and influential action is what many scholars believe the eco-doc with its perception-altering mode of story-telling make the sub-genre reliably successful in advancing progressive social change, perhaps one of the most effective styles of social issue documentary filmmaking: “(The eco-doc)...has created visible and legible data and insights that inform global discussions on the environment. It becomes particularly prominent in documentary films on climate change in the twenty-first century.” (Helen Hughes, Green Documentary).
My own professional relationship with eco-cinema (The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, The Polar Explorer, The Youth Climate Report) will be drawn upon from two perspectives: as a maker of its films and as a conduit between the scientific communities its films represent and the environmental policymakers to whom they speak.

Pennant Expedition Field Report of the Mindo Cloudforest in Ecuador conducted January 10 to 14, 2015.
Area Explored:
The Mindo Cloudforest is located on the western slopes of the Andes Mountain range in Ecuador
covering an area of 268 square kilometers. It is located 101.7 kilometers northwest of the
country’s capital city of Quito at 0.0512° S, 78.7783° W. It is at an approximate altitude of 1,100
metres on a North South axis.
Area Description:
One of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world is found in this region where the Tropical
Andes meets the Chocoan Lowlands. Altitudes range from 960 meters to 3,440 meters. There are
three main rivers: Mindo, Saloya, Cinto feeding 15 waterfalls.
Notable Fauna Populations:
As of 2015, there are more species of bird (450) and butterfly (1,200) than any place on earth.
One species of bird – the hummingbird – has more than 130 subspecies alone represented in the
area.

Many scholars believe film pioneer John Grierson "coined the term" documentary when he first used it in a film review for the New York Sun in 1926. This paper provides documentary evidence that another film pioneer - namely, Charles Urban - used the word in film terms and in English in 1907, nearly 20 years before Grierson.

In response to an expressed need for a centralized system of data delivery in a visual and digital environment for the delegates of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, I have taken new and emerging documentary presentation formats and incorporated experimental GIS mapping software as its platform to create a living documentary film project.
The Youth Climate Report is a multilinear, interactive, database documentary film project. Video contributions to the project in the form of “mini-docs” (running about five minutes each) are situated on the map by longitude and latitude coordinates. Users can then access the films via a pinpoint allowing the user to select content by geographical location. Each pin also contains additional information and media related to its respective video report.
This project incorporates climate change data and research as its central theme and the filmmakers will be students from around the world. They will be presenting their own research or that of a climate scientist they are currently working with or have selected to interview. Links to the researchers’ websites, their profiles and their universities or science organizations are also provided.