September 6th 2012, Toronto. To raise awareness of the environmental impact of climate change, the World Bank last year launched its first Connect4Climate competition, a contest that encouraged African youth to tell their own climate change stories through photos and videos. The initiative resulted in more than 700 submissions, with at least one from every African country.

But this year the World Bank decided to take the initiative one step further and go global with its Voices4Climate Photo/Video/Music Video Competition, a precursor to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Qatar this December. Participants aged 18 to 35 are asked to submit photos and videos to highlight how the ever-shifting climate is changing life for them, their family and friends, as well as their community and country. The best part—participants are being invited to come up with their own climate change solutions or innovative tactics for dealing with weather-related changes in their regions.

Submissions must tell a climate change story in one of the following categories: energy, forests, cities, agriculture, gender, jobs, health, the green economy and water. This year a new podcast competition category has also been added in partnership with the land degradation-focused organization TerrAfrica. Entries in that category should focus on a land degradation or sustainable land and water-management story from Sub-Saharan Africa.

The issue of climate change isn’t going away, so it’s important that we keep raising awareness about climate change-related challenges, as well as how people are adapting and managing to overcome its effects.

Voices4Climate leverages Filemobile’s Media Factory platform and UGC contest application via Facebook to host and manage the climate change-related video and photo content, while providing innovative geo-tracking functionality to track the origin of submissions from around the world.

“We’re proud to be working with the World Bank on this important initiative,” said Filemobile co-founder Ron Watson. “The World Bank has long been a leader in highlighting climate-change facts, challenges and adaptive solutions, and we think Media Factory will provide the right technology to help spread the word.”

Winning entries will be featured at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Qatar, while TerrAfrica podcast story winners will be invited to cover the conference for TerrAfrica Green Radio. Winners in the music video category will have their submission featured on MTV’s Voices platform after spending a day with MTV editors in New York or London. Entries must be received no later than 11:59pm EST, October 15, 2012.

For full contest details and to learn more about the Voices4Climate Competition, visit http://connect4climate.org

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