ACT Alliance

ACT member DanChurchAid's smart, witty film Ripples won this year's global climate film competition at the COP17 climate conference in Durban. The film tells the story of how poor people in Bangladesh, with support from ACT members Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service and DCA, improve their possibilities to live with the effects of climate change.

Ripples was filmed among some of the most vulnerable people in Bangladesh, who, due to climate change increasingly face flooding, storms and cyclones. While taking a humorous approach to the serious consequences of climate change, the film depicts people as they prepare themselves to manage the next catastrophe by organising and sharing responsibilities within the community. It shows the people living with the effects of climate change, but as human beings, not victims.

While it was not part of the fomal COP17 negotiations, the film competition actively contributed to the debates taking place in Durban. There is always a risk that the “climate” is limited to words on paper in the negotiations. But climate change is not about words: it is about life and survival, and about what real people are experiencing right now. The community-driven work carried out by DCA and RDRS in Bangladesh was funded by the European Union.

Bangladesh is one of the countries which are hardest hit by climate change. Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting, and this, together with a sea-level rise and an increase in cyclones, has put the country and its population under extreme pressure. If global greenhouse gas emissions continue to swell, big parts of the country will risk being flooded, which would be a catastrophy for the already highly populated country.

The film was made by the DCA team of Søren Vestergaard Nielsen, Lene Ejg Jarbøl and Anne Mette Futtrup.