The Council on Energy Environment and Water (CEEW) screened a selection of short documentaries from their 16-part series titled “Faces of Climate Resilience”  on October 12. The documentaries, each of three to five minute duration, show cased the grassroots level local community driven, often by women, efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change vagaries.

Whether it was Ambojwadi, Mumbai urban slum suffering d frequent flooding due to rains, Tandahara village in Puri district of Odisha trying to rejuvenate the sea shore forest wiped away by super cyclone,Mandakini ki awaz , a community radio of Myka village in Rudraprayag, Uttarakhand or Firefighters of Sitlakhet of Kharkiya trying to save the forests in Almora district of Uttrakhand prone to frequent forest fires, it is the women and youth who have mobilized themselves to protect their own communities from Climate Change.

The series was made ahead of the 27^th UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt starting November 6

“Enough has been written, said and shown about the effects of climate change, but not much about what is being done to mitigate these effects,” independent  film maker Shawn Sebastian, who had made these shorts, said during an interaction with the students after the screening. 

“What is being done at the grassroots level? How are the people coping with the effects of climate change? What are they doing to try and make their own communities climate-proof? That’s what we wanted showcase,” he said

“The idea is to show that efforts at creating climate resilience need   not necessarily be top down—from the governments to the people in the villages. We wanted to show that it can be bottom up also, things done at the micro level of the villages and local communities that can be replicated on larger scale in other places facing similar issues,” said CEEW communication associate Suyashi Smriddhi, an alumna of ACJ, who was involved in the production of some of the shorts.

CEEW hopes to screen the series on the sidelines of COP27.