OTTAWA (August 25 2010) - British Council Canada has selected five young Canadians to attend climate forums on finance and media in Shanghai, China.

Through a national competition for International Climate Champions, the British Council selected university students Roopa Suppiah of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont. and Lars Boggild of Dalhousie University, Halifax to attend a “Climate Finance Forum” (Sept. 1-7) with young people from 15 other countries. The British Council also invited David Lawless, an under-graduate student at Guelph University, to act as a facilitator at the conference.

The International Climate Champions will share their experiences and debate the issues surrounding this topic.  Participants will be invited to present case studies based on their own experiences and country perspectives. The event aims to open up discussion on a number of the core issues such as the costs of mitigation and adaptation, international carbon markets, carbon taxes and climate-friendly investment.

Climate financing for mitigation and adaptation represents a key challenge at multilateral and national levels. Speakers will include top researchers in the field as well as representatives from financial institutions and the private sector.

Through a competition promoted by the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, the British Council also selected two young journalists to attend a climate change international workshop in Shanghai (Sept. 1-5). The British Council in China arranged the program, which includes a visit to the British pavilion in Shanghai and a trip to a nearby city to see examples of green urban planning. The workshop includes journalists and journalism students from 20 other countries as well as senior British and Chinese scientists.

The journalists are Lee Flohr, who recently graduated from Toronto’s Humber College and holds a degree in biochemistry from the University of Lethbridge and Alyson Kenward, who has a doctorate from the University of Calgary and now is studying science, health and environmental reporting at New York University.

“We were extremely impressed by the quality of the applications we received for both forums,” says Liliana Biglou, the new director of the British Council Canada. “All of the young people we selected have extraordinary communications skills and are passionate about the environment.”

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organization to promote education and cultural relations.

For information, please contact:

Margret Brady, Programmes & Communications Manager for British Council Canada
Telephone : 1(613)364-6237 (Office) or 1(613)301-5922 (mobile)
Email: margret.brady@britishcouncil.org

PROFILES:

Roopa Suppiah is a 19 year-old Queen’s University student from Deep River, Ont.  From a young age, she has been actively involved in environmental issues. She has developed novel green-energy technologies for science fairs including a reactor for carbon dioxide sequestration and a closed-cycle fuel cell and has competed nationally and internationally, winning several awards. More recently, Roopa co-founded an organization with her sister called “Water Well-ness Project” to provide water facilities for people in developing countries. Last summer they successfully installed a bore-well in southern India after raising enough money through creative community fundraisers.

Lars Boggild is an undergraduate student at Dalhousie University, Halifax, where he studies political science and sustainability in the Environment, Sustainability, and Society Program. His hobbies include tennis, ultimate Frisbee and writing performance poetry. Lars has been an environmental advocate since high school and played a major role in his high school’s sustainable action committee. He recently won Environment Canada’s “Nature Matters” contest, and, as a result, his poetry was broadcast at the Biosphere in Montreal. He is an active and successful university debater, and won the Atlantic Canadian Novice debate championships in his first year of university.  Lars is a recipient of the Governor General’s bronze award for academic achievement and received Dalhousie’s Hector McInnes Memorial Scholarship.

David Lawless is a 19-year-old undergraduate student studying ecology at the University of Guelph where he is on the College of Biological Sciences Board of Directors as a Student Governor. Last year, he was selected by the British Council to speak at the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switz. Committed to environmental causes, David helped found Guelph’s Net Impact Environmental Chapter and has worked with the Ministry of Natural Resources undertaking extensive habitat restoration projects, monitoring endangered species and conducting climate change research across Canada. In January 2009, he attended the British Council’s Road to Davos Forum in England and is now founding a Global Changemakers Community Action Project with youth from this conference to help mitigate the effects of a changing climate on water ecosystems in local communities. Currently, David works at Parks Canada as a bilingual nature interpreter and biosphere researcher. He was a panellist on the “Climate Change Exchange” at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, a live video-conference debate that linked four countries and he was a presenter at the International Biodiversity Conference at the United Nations in New York that was organized with the British Council.

Lee Flohr is a Toronto-based freelance science journalist with a degree in biochemistry from the University of Lethbridge.  He recently graduated from a post-graduate journalism program at Toronto’s Humber College, specializing in broadcast and online journalism.  While there, he completed a four-month internship at Discovery Channel Canada’s flagship science news show – the world’s only daily science news show – Daily Planet.  There he worked as a science news intern, working on the “Planet Now” and “Weird Planet” segments of the show. He produced many pieces of television, covering many fields related to climate change. He looks forward to gaining valuable knowledge from world leading climate change researchers and experiencing it all with a Chinese lens.

Alyson Kenward grew up in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada and completed her BSc and PhD at the University of Calgary in Alberta. During her doctoral work, she developed a new series of metal-based catalysts and a deep appreciation for the way experiments never quite turn out the way one expects. Wanting to couple her love of storytelling with her shameless delight in all things science-related, she eventually traded in her lab coat for a laptop and began a career as a science writer. She is now enrolled in New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program and her writing has appeared in Scientific American online, Discover online, Climate Central, the Daily Climate and CurioCity. As an intern at Climate Central in Princeton, N.J., she worked with journalists and scientists to write, blog, podcast and video-document climate change news. Her particular interests are in the areas of alternative energies and geo-engineering. Her hobbies include running, knitting and “kitchen chemistry”.