Tobias Weber-Andersen and Oke Carstensen have found an innovative way to make trash collection fun! Rent a kayak for free, visit the river, the coast, the city, while collecting trash and share your experience on social media: this is what the GreenKayak initiative proposes. It can be done anywhere and generates a collective dynamic for the fight against river and ocean pollution.
GreenKayak started cleaning Copenhagen´s canals on events but soon realized that in the following days, there were pollutants floating around again. A more durable solution was needed and this is how the initiative was born.
Since GreenKayak started back in 2017, it has had more than 25 thousand volunteers paddling for the oceans collecting a total of well above 42 tons of waste from the waters. GreenKayak engages people at eye-level, connects them across generations and gives them the feeling of being in the same boat around a good cause.
Local aquatic environments have been cleaned by thousands of people from all genders, age groups and nationalities. The cities where this initiative have been implemented are all located in Europe, in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway or Ireland.
GreenKayak offers a free of charge opportunity to volunteers who want to help clean the waters. Doing so, the funding has been the main challenge and GreenKayak started to work with private companies to tackle this issue. This has been a successful approach in order to increase the reach and impact of GreenKayak.
In the future, Tobias Weber-Andersen and Oke Carstensen want to expand GreenKayak’s operations to various countries across Europe but also in other regions of the world. For the next years to come they envisage at least 100 GreenKayaks placed thanks to local partners across the globe.
In order to save biodiversity, Djibone Sissoko mobilises young people to stop bushfires from spreading in Mali and educates inhabitants from his commune Kita-Ouest about the dangers these fires pose for animals and for the environment. He acts to raise awareness among small farmers and their families about the harmful effects that bushfires can have if poorly managed, devastating fauna and flora in their path.
Friends Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern have co-founded Coral Vita, a high-tech coral farming solution to protect the dying reefs in The Bahamas and around the world. Through high-impact coral reefs restoration, Coral Vita helps preserve reefs for future generations while spurring the blue economy’s growth locally and globally.
Coral Vita’s land-based farms integrate breakthrough methods to accelerate coral growth up to 50x (micro fragmenting) while enhancing their resiliency to warming and acidifying oceans (assisted evolution). Coral Vita’s model scales: one land-based farm can potentially supply an entire nation’s reefs with sufficient capital investment.
Alongside this novel form of high-tech coral farming, Coral Vita is deploying an innovative for-profit model to sustain large-scale restoration. Given reefs’ tremendous value, they are working to transition restoration to a commercial industry. This unique model facilitates revenue generation and better scalability than any current restoration practitioners. Coral Vita sells reef restoration as a service to customers that depend on reefs’ benefits. As the farms grow diverse, resilient, and affordable coral for restoration projects, they also function as eco-tourism attractions and education centres. Guests pay to visit the farms, where they learn about the importance of protecting reefs, and how they can help, including by adopting coral or planting them with Coral Vita’s teams and local dive shops. Students, fishermen, and community members also visit the farm to build local capacity for future jobs in the blue economy, and Coral Vita emphasizes hiring locally as much as possible.
Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is acting to tackle a fundamental problem: water scarcity in wildlife zones!
The project is all about water for wildlife as one way of conservation and reducing human-wildlife conflict for competing for the same water resource. Indeed, as the number of conflicts between humans and wild animals started to rise due to water scarcity, Patrick decided to bring in an efficient solution through re-watering the dry wildlife zones. Moreover, Patrick is also looking for innovative methodologies to make sure that animals have plenty of water into the wildlife zones.
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