State of the World Forum: Live From Brazil!

I am thrilled to invite you to tune into the free live webcast tonight from Belo Horizonte, Brazil as we launch the integrally-designed, global 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign. Designed to operate on the global, national, state and city levels, tonight we launch the Brasil 2020, Minas Gerais 2020, and Belo Horizonte 2020 campaigns before 180 million people in the global south.

Tonight, Tuesday, August 4 at 3PM PST, 6PM EST, and 11PM GMT, Integral Life will be bringing you the live web broadcast for the launch of this awesome national campaign in Brazil, our first host country.  We are currently working on additional national campaigns in the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, and the United States.

Climate Leader Manifesto

• English
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Key highlights of the Brazil campaign include (courtesy of UPI):

1. Brazil's Rede Globo, the world's No. 4 TV network, is to begin a multimillion-dollar campaign to raise awareness of global warming and will include a "permanent" public service TV campaign, new dramatic story lines about global warming in at least four of the network's hugely popular "telenovela" soap opera miniseries and increased environmental news coverage, Globo's planning and social programs Director Albert Alcouloumbre told United Press International.

2. Globo's media campaign will be supported by the creation of lesson plans about the environment and climate change for teachers at more than 7,000 mostly rural public schools nationwide, Alcouloumbre said.

3. The campaign, which includes international broadcasting, marks the first time a major media company has "begun a trans-national mobilization around taking action on global warming," State of the World Forum President Jim Garrison told UPI.

4. "The news department is also putting global warming on its radar," with national and local news programs increasing their environmental coverage, Alcouloumbre said.

"I suspect the campaign, particularly the telenovela 'social marketing' component, will be pretty powerful," Brazilian TV expert Joseph Straubhaar, a University of Texas communications professor, told UPI. "In the telenovelas, small families were the prosperous families," Straubhaar said. "People model on what they see, including in entertainment."

5. Globo, whose programming reaches 98.44 percent of Brazil's geography and 99.46 percent of its population, is also Brazil's dominant TV programming exporter, with telenovelas and other programming seen worldwide, including on Spanish-language U.S. broadcaster Univision.

So such programming would be viewed by "close to three quarters of the U.S. Hispanic market," Straubhaar said.

6. Brazil is a so-called BRIC country, along with Russia, India and China. These fast-growing developing countries -- which, except for Russia, have weathered the financial crisis better than the world as a whole -- comprise about 15 percent of the world economy and could eclipse the current leading economies by mid-century, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysis indicates.

This tectonic shift will eventually nudge the United States and Western Europe away from the center of world productivity and power, the analysis suggests.

"These influential emerging powers are setting a precedent that people will follow," Straubhaar said.

"I can see why the State of the World Forum would want to pay attention to and reinforce this," Straubhaar told UPI. "It could be a model for the rest of the BRIC group."