December 2020 Newsletter
We are writing to thank all our members, supporters, authors and participants for your wonderful support this year in 2020 which has been of course one of the most challenging in modern times.
In the face of these challenges, our Institute has worked really hard to use the lockdown periods wisely and to ensure we have emerged stronger, more productive and with much more impact than ever before.
We have always been a wonderful Global Network of Voices from around the world from the Arctic to Asia and Africa and the Americas, and have always worked across boundaries together across the world so for us it has been relatively easy to scale up all our teams to meet on line. In fact we have met and shared more than ever before running weekly drop in team meetings, monthly members events, monthly campaigning meetings.
Our global network continues to expand -we think about 40,000 people are in regular contact with us and our ideas all the time- do ensure you join us to benefit from this. We have been complimented several times for our technically ambitious and challenging offerings and events which were carried out smoothly and successfully with very few technical hitches. The transition to on line working has been very smooth at the Institute and we planned it carefully well in advance as soon as the issues were apparent.
Our Impacts are large and varied and global: One of our team members is reporting for one of the largest TV networks in the world almost every day at the moment and another is in the House of Lords in the UK putting policy recommendations at an industrial rate- well done to both of them and our impacts continue to grow around the world as we are active in governments -with some of our alumni now in very senior positions in governments and civil services and infrastructure management and in one or two cases actual heads of state themselves. Our books have been used by Princes, Kings, The United Nations, Many governments around the world for food, farming, women – the all important health and many many more. Our impacts are everywhere.
We also have created a wonderful Green Economics Institute Blogspace which is updated at least once a day for you to enjoy. Please do visit it as often as you can- we love posting on it for you to use.
https://greeneconomicsinstitute.org.uk/category/news/ Do please visit it as it gives lots of ideas for campaigns and the latest science updates and policy possibilities and data -do please use it as a regular resource and inspiration. We enjoy posting on it- do send in your own ideas and we will post them there too.
We have continued to work on the Digital Space: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/green-economics-40-economics-innovation-and-sustainability-tickets-124613467235?aff=erelexpmlt
the future of work, income and labour and the digitalisation of life, health care and the economy and the implications for bias and democracy and freedoms etc. but also the importance of global connectivity most recently even formally raising this with the United Nations this week to help the Least Developed Countries, the poorest countries in the world, who are struggling to get their people on line, and to ensure they can take their rightful place at their events at the United Nations Adaptation to the Climate Emergency Talks and in preparing their own National Adaptation Plans. We ran several partner events on this and we will be running more in 2021. We are also participating in the Scientific and Research Activities as partners of the UN.
Our network is supported by a network of Very Active Websites and Social Media. These include our main website www.greeneconomicsinstitute.org.uk, our membership website www.geimembership.org our charity website www.greeneconomicsinstitutetrust.org and our climate website www.geiclimate.org. We also have a really lively action packed books website- www.geibooks.org.uk and our conferences website www.geiconferences.org and our www.geiacademy.org website currently undergoing upgrading and our brand new education website coming on stream after the holidays- www.greeneconomicseducation.org and this will be followed by an upgrading of our tv station migrating to its new website in the spring of 2021. Our conferences and events can be booked at our conferences website www.geiconferences.org and we also now post all our events on Eventbrite at the moment. We always need team members to maintain our lovely and professionally designed websites which attract a lot of compliments- so do get in touch if you would like to help with them and training can be given.
Additionally we have many social media accounts- facebook, academia.edu, mailchimp, twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, over 365,000 visits to our thousands of flickr photos -do visit that if you get the chance, and many many more social media accounts for you to enjoy. We need help with all those so if you like social media and would like to help do get in touch. We are also keen to increase our work on art, music, dance, song and other forms of communication and experience- and sharing with other species where that does not exploit them and where they take the lead as they sometimes do.
Our own governance activities have increased in frequency too, with meetings every Monday for the day- and a new Management Accounts and Business Continuity Team helping to get us through the pandemic in the most robust shape. We also now have a fund raising committee also meeting every week. Additionally our management team is now double in size and meets every week too. We are taking on new team members with professional specialities, including standards and norms, legal, biodiversity and marketing. We now have a specialist in house designer for books and publications. Please do not hesitate to get in touch to discuss all sorts of opportunities with us.
A learning organisation – Giving and Receiving Training and Mentoring and Courses
The whole team has had training and these have ranged from Fire Prevention Training to Professional Boundaries, Managing Teams, The Roles of Trustees, to Safeguarding a charity during the Pandemic Times and also handling money and preventing Fraud in international organisations.
We continue to be a learning organisation both offering and taking training all the time. We also are now active in giving and receiving mentoring both academically – some via The University of Oxford and in terms of policies and partner NGOs. Via the EU and Brussels and other organisations and partner foundations.
Charity Work and our Green Economics Institute Trust- www.greeneconomicsinstitutetrust.org
Our charity The Green Economics Institute Trust has also expanded its work this year and supported many initiatives to make the world a better place. We have took advantage of the challenges this year to ensure we upskilled the team and we have been hosting and running professional training courses for our charity trustees and advising other NGOs, and mentoring students even at the University of Oxford, on such issues as how to walk the talk on our specialities including diversity, inclusion and multi disciplinary working. Several new people have joined the teams and greatly enhanced our efficiency and outputs-we would like to thank them and we are currently looking for new hands on working team members and volunteers of all kinds.
We have just founded our brand new Green Economics Institute Research Group GEIRG and at its first meeting we had people from all over the world- from Korea and Kenya to Brazil and many more countries represented and we have planned some really exciting outputs, research, reports, events and collaborations – so do contact us if you would like to join this initiative. We have specialists on climate prediction science, extinction, economics and wildlife experts. We will be reporting more on this over the coming months.
We continue to be really active acting almost as an Oracle in paving the way for visioning the future, one of most popular books, and setting the scope years before others wake up and realise. Our next events in January are Survival Solutions and The Green Economy. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/survival-solutions-and-the-green-economy-tickets-120362311915?aff=erelexpmlt
We continue to be really active in Global Climate Ambition Dialogues mainly through the UN and other partner activities and this year have run a very lively large climate hub with over 300 people booked in and top climate scientists speaking and participating as well as participating in the June Momentum for Climate hosted by the United Nations and the November Climate Dialogues where all the work teams report to countries about progress towards the United Nations COP26 Climate Conference next November 2021 in Glasgow. We will be putting forward our ideas at the top of the COP process and are rapporteurs for the worlds research organisations. We are also taking expressions of interest for people who want to join our delegation to COP26 in Glasgow next year as its all gearing up very fast at the moment. We also have team members who are active inputting to the IPBES the United Nations Biodiversity Initiative. www.geiclimate.org. As Greta Thunberg said- she ‘doesn’t want our understanding- she wants our panic and to act as if our house is actually on fire, which it is.!’
We made a particular point this year of showing how Recalibrating our role in nature really matters and its time to retake our place as one part of nature -possibly a temporary resident – not the ruler of all we survey- and also that all these pandemics are a direct result of encroaching too far into the spaces of other species or mistreating them so badly as to cause them to weaken and sickness to flare up. The latest such exploitation is the ghastly treatment of millions of minks and of horseshoe crabs to make industrial quantities of human vaccine -and so many more. It is time to be deeply ashamed to be human and to persuade others to stop treating other species literally like dirt. We are grateful to some excellent partners in this work including a fantastic film maker from Lithuania who showed his wonderful film at our conference really examining in detail how wild wild like is and how stunningly beautiful.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Additionally, we have used the opportunity or the lock down to create even more lovely books from our Green Economics Institute’s Publishing House- now having 100 book titles alone. These include, Endangered Ecosystem Services, Climate Change- the Inner Landscapes, Landfill in Latvia, The Stewardship Economy. The Stewardship Economy- How to make it happen, Visioning the Future- from the Anthropocene to the Biocene, Survival Solutions- tales from our summer conference. The Future of Income work and labour. We are now preparing many more books for 2021. These will include The Greening of the Japanese Economy, Climate Justice, 4 more books in our Stewardship Economy series, books on pollution and health, books on Heterodox Economics, books on health and mental health, Books on Food farming and agriculture, The Citizens Income and Basic Income, Womens power and softpower- just when we really need it. There are many more titles in production at the moment so do send in your own ideas as we are keen to keep these coming. All we ask is that each one embodies a message for making the future a better place. We will also be producing 2 mini research reports during 2021.
We have also been active in publishing with other publishers too to ensure we keep on our toes in terms of the latest ideas and methodologies. We continue to also have 3 other series with other publishing houses too and these have been going for over 10 years.
We continue to publish our leading Green Academic Journal- The International Journal of Green Economics now entering its 15th volume ! and its very well received having received compliments from academics around the world and governments. We are always keen to expand our editorial, reviews and writing teams so please do contact us if you would like to participate in this ground breaking project which we have maintained at one of the highest standards and consistency in the world over many many years.
Additionally we would like to relaunch -The Green Economist Magazine this year and we are looking for board members, editorial teams, correspondents from around the world and people who would like to create it- Please get in touch if you would like to join this team.
We have held about 9 major events this year, with our main conference, our 15th Annual Green Economics Institute Conference, Survival Solutions, attracting the most wonderful, sessions, feedback, participants, speakers and huge compliments from almost everyone who came along. It meant a lot to us and a lot to many people who shared in the vision and goals of our Survival Solutions ideas. The speakers were simply marvellous and ranged from well known personalities, to film makers, to health specialists, doctors, specialists in stopping corruption and all kinds of fascinating insights. It was also characterised by many young people taking the lead and pointing our way to the future. Our team was bigger than ever and I want to thank all the wonderful team members who worked so very hard to make it happen. We had over 1000 registered participants for our main conference and over 350 for our climate networking hub conference last month. We have more events than ever planned for 2021 and we would ask you to visit Eventbrite to see them all and do start booking for them- they will all be on line- and if the virus does disappear we can make them hybrid events very easily. Don’t miss the 16th Annual Conference on line booked for the 23th -25th July 2021. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/survival-solutions-climate-biodiversity-economy-and-health-3-days-tickets-120363332969?aff=erelexpmlt
We also started a wonderful initiative this year of Virtual Visits which we are currently expanding as our network is so large ranging from reindeer herders in the Arctic to indigenous peoples in the Rainforests and many more besides we were able to escape the lockdowns in our minds and travel with our team members to the remote parts of the world together and ask questions and interactive- it was a truly wonderful experience which we are continuing throughout 2021 and is a feature of many of our events. We held remote quizzes in nature parks in central Europe, went over snow in the arctic and visited the downtown parts of RIO with a specialist economics professor as well as visiting dancing on a farm in Uganda and log cabins by the sea in Finland and many many more. Our thanks to everyone who provided such inspiring activities. The feedback was extraordinarily warm and positive.
We are also active in Education, and we have used the lockdown to create 2 new websites. Our new Green Economics Institute for Education website www.greeneconomicsinstituteeducation.org will be coming on stream very shortly- we are just doing final tests at the moment and as result we will be running a whole swathe of new courses and three more summer schools in the summer of 2021. Our remit is very much about educating the public and so we continue to provide many events and exhibition stands where ever and whenever we can as well as speeches. Our team members have been active on tv commenting on the issues of the day and advising the public of the wider implications of what is happening in the world.
We are also running partner Climate Training Courses throughout 2021 and at the COP26 and legal training for understanding the climate treaties and also training climate ambassadors and feminists climate ambassadors and many more collaborative partner projects to realise climate ambition and make a difference.
We have been running many more Members’ Evenings throughout the year and will continue to do this during 2021 as they have been very popular.
We want to thank you so much for your continuing support and participation this year.
Could we therefore invite you to do two things to support us.
- Please Renew your membership for 2021 via our lovely membership website- geimembership.org at https://geimembership.org/product/regular-institute-membership/
- The second thing is to come along on Sunday 13th December 2020 on line to our lovely event and share 2020 with us, and hear all about our lovely activities and network with other people who share a passion for making the world a better safer place in the months to come by registering for our lovely Winter Warmer for supporters and members event next week on the 13th December at Please book here on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/green-economics-institutes-first-ever-annual-winter-networking-day-for-tickets-126965235437
We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all the hard work, support, encouragement and participation you have all given this year and hope you have found it as useful as we have and felt proud to have really made a difference to real people’s lives- including our own future and those in our global network too.
We look forward hugely to working with you in 2021 and for your wonderful and hugely appreciated continued support.
Kind regards
Miriam Kennet
CEO and the rest of our wonderful very hard working and fabulous team at the Green Economics Institute.
