Sustainability Productions is a series of short video reports that showcase good practices and real-life examples of local urban and grassroots initiatives which are helping to pave the way to a better world.

There is much talk about climate change, the rapid loss of biodiversity, the increasing scarcity and price of fossil fuels, the erosion of fertile agricultural land, food shortages, growing freshwater scarcity... and the list goes on; these are in turn affecting peoples' health, their ability to meet basic needs and, ultimately, their ability to lead a happy and fulfilling life.  These issues are not so much problems as symptoms of an unsustainable human economic entreprise, a system which will need to be radically reconfigured in order to safeguard the Earth's essential life-support systems in the necessary context of social justice and the respect of human rights.  The world community has come together on a number of occasions, particularly under the auspices of the United Nations, to tackle these big questions, and promote sustainable development, a holistic approach to planning and development that integrates the social (and cultural), economic, and ecological spheres.  The goal of sustainable development is to improve quality of life for all—meeting basic needs such as access to health, education, food and shelter—within the ecological carrying capacity of the Earth.  Change is admittedly very slow, and to many, "sustainability" is still a fuzzy or confusing concept, or simply dismissed as “all talk and no action”.  Sustainability Productions would like to dispel this myth by showing a hopeful, more positive and inspiring side to the sustainability debate.

Sustainability Productions features initiatives that cities and local communities have taken to reduce energy and water consumption, promote social diversity and intergenerational mixing, decrease the emission of greenhouse gases and increase the production of renewable energy, improve the quality of urban life of residents and provide engaging and fulfilling job opportunities.  In these short video reports, architects, city councillors, planners, project coordinators and citizens are interviewed to get their personal and hands-on perspective on the efforts and policies that have been carried out, with details given on how the projects came about, the purpose they serve, their various phases, the obstacles that had to be overcome as well as the solutions that have been imagined.  Technicians, educators, policy makers as well as citizens will find invaluable information and ideas in these video reports that will help them implement their own sustainable-development projects and programs.

Click here to watch a short Sustainability Productions series demo video (2 min. 30 sec).

Average time to download: 30 seconds with an ADSL connection