Veteran Canadian climate hawk Tzeporah Berman of Vancouver-based Stand.earth has received a US$2-million, multi-year grant from the philanthropically-funded Climate Breakthrough Project “to develop new climate campaign strategies that will help make a globally significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions over the next five to 10 years,” Stand announced this week.
Berman, Stand’s international program director, “exemplifies a campaigner with the capacity to be bold and visionary while also staying committed to getting real-world results and finding opportunities to negotiate lasting victories,” the project said in a release.
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Past Climate Breakthrough Project award recipients dating back to 2016 include Tessa Khan of the UK Climate Litigation Network, Bruce Nilles of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Yang Fuqiang of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China office, Unfriend Coal co-founder John Hepburn of Australia, and May Mei of China’s GoalBlue NGO.
“Each year, the Climate Breakthrough Project provides one to three outstanding individuals with large, multi-year, unrestricted awards to help empower promising leaders with powerful, high-risk, high-reward innovations” to bring about social, behavioural, economic, and policy change on climate, Stand explains. “In addition to funding, the Climate Breakthrough Project provide additional access to expert resources and assistance to help awardees scale their work.”
“I am honoured to receive this award at this critical moment in history,” Berman said. “This summer’s fires in the Amazon and the Arctic are a wake-up call for all of us—and yet even wealthy countries such as my own continue to expand oil and gas production.”
She added: “If your house is on fire, you don’t add more fuel. We need new global strategies to stop the expansion of the oil and gas industry and build a safer future.”
“Tzeporah’s work on fossil fuel supply reduction is a powerful and promising approach that can and should be paired with demand-side advocacy in order to minimize global fossil fuel production and consumption as quickly as possible,” the Climate Breakthrough Project said in a statement. “We are excited to help a leader like Tzeporah get the time and resources she needs to develop a bold global strategy with huge potential to reduce emissions on a historic scale.”
