In 2003, Madagascar’s previous president set the objective of increasing the size of the country’s protected areas from 1.7 to 6 million hectares. Ten years after this announcement, the UN programme REDD+ has become an essential part of national conservation strategies. The country has launched four REDD+ pilot projects, each led by large conservation NGOs. For these NGOs, carbon finance now seems the most promising option for the sustainable management of protected areas. Some of the NGOs have already started selling carbon credits from protected areas on the voluntary carbon markets. Others intend to follow suit, such as the French foundation GoodPlanet/Etc Terra and WWF Madagascar, who have been in charge of the Holistic Conservation Programme for Forests (HCPF) in Madagascar since 2008, with the financial support of Air France.
This pilot project has invested a large sum of its funds into means of measuring carbon and monitoring the forests. The logic of which is lost on the local communities who are nonetheless the ones who suffer the consequences including the restriction of available land for agriculture and collecting wood. What began as a project intended to benefit local communities by fighting against deforestation has become a project essentially focused on measuring the consequences of deforestation, and which contributes to food insecurity.
This video is the result of a field mission organised in May 2013 in a new protected area of Madagascar’s spiny forest. / Source: Bastamag
Documentaries have an incredible power to raise awareness and create transformative changes in consciousness both at the personal and global levels.Since 2006, we've watched hundreds of social change documentaries and cataloged the best of them in this library.
Most colleges prepare students to read a map of the world that's both outdated and distorted. From economics to history to politics to ecology, modern schools are failing to prepare students for the future on a fundamental level.To put it simply, most colleges are still running on a set of assumptions that were developed during the 20th century.
There are over 6,000 videos on Films For Action, hand-curated for their potential to inspire action and raise awareness on just about every topic related to making the world a better place.You've probably already seen our top 100 documentaries feature. Here are our 100 favorite short films.
GDP is a terrible way to measure economic progress. A post-growth future is about growing things that actually matter: happiness, health and social well-being.Every day on the TV, belt-way politicians and economists tell us the answer to our problems is more econcomic growth. And yet, a growing number of indictators show that this kind of "progress" isn't progress at all.
Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future.As the late Mark Fisher said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever.
Pachamama, our dear Mother Earth, is 4.5 billion years old. She is home to an estimated 8.7 million species of life! This wondrous web of relationships is truly a gift to be a part of, and we can thank our growing and evolving Mother Earth for the eyes and mind we have to appreciate our relationship with her. Just think - we evolved to have a form of consciousness that would eventually see that, as Earth is one meta-organism, we are the consciousness of that organism.
There are over 800 documentaries now cataloged in our library of social change films.That's probably way too many for any mortal to ever watch in a lifetime, let alone a few years. Surely some will attempt it, but for the rest of us, we thought it'd be great to highlight 93 of the best of them.
About eighteen years ago, watching The Corporation inspired us - a few friends from Lawrence, KS - to launch Films For Action and “be the media” in our home town.We hosted dozens of film screenings, launched this website, and started to curate the best docs and videos in our library. Over the years, millions of people started coming here to watch “films for action,” thanks to people simply sharing these films on social media with their friends. That's it.
Starting with the most relevant at the top, these are the best documentaries that capture the spirit and motivation of the #OWS movement.What was Occupy about? These documentaries give a deeper voice to the slogans and chants.
Regenerative living is a revolutionary philosophy rooted in reciprocity, creativity, and care.At its core, it asks not just how we can reduce harm, but how we can restore, heal, and actively give back to the world around us.It's a shift from extraction to participation, from passive consumption to conscious co-creation.
Now that there are thousands of films on Films For Action, we realized the very best gems have really become buried all across our library, and for people new to this information, we needed a more guided way to dive in. Spread across 15 core themes, this collection aims to be that entry point. It is our attempt to curate the kind of crash-course curriculum on the state of the world we wish we had all got growing up, especially during high school and college, but didn't.
These documentaries expose the ugly truth about war and the governments who wage them. The US government is focused on in this collection because I am based in the US, and it is every citizen's duty to call out and name the crimes of their government.It's all too easy to decry the injustices of other countries while remaining silent when those crimes are committed by our own. But nothing good has ever come from silence when the truth is marginalized and lies are amplified.
The world today is in crisis. Everybody knows that. But what is driving this crisis? It's a story, a story that is destroying the world. It's a story about our relationship to the world and to other humans, but we take this story for granted.
What is this "new story" revolution?What follows is a collection of over 75 films and articles that touch this space.It's a digital library dedicated to exploring this new frontier in human consciousness - where we live into creation new & ancient ways of being, where we redefine our relationship with ourselves and the world, and where we remember all that we have forgot.
How does government really operate behind the scenes? Beyond all the slogans about freedom and democracy, how does our political system really work?Pretty much everyone is aware to some extent how corrupt and dysfunctional the US political system has become.
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