Studio Silverback are proud to have a long-standing relationship with Sir David Attenborough. In late 2021, as official People’s Advocate, Attenborough was asked to deliver a speech during the Opening Ceremony of the UN’s COP26 in Glasgow, billed as the most important meeting humanity has ever had.
Attenborough approached Silverback to seize the opportunity to make this more than a speech – with the ambition to create a highly engaging, audio-video presentation that would capture the attention of the Heads of State in the room and represent the needs of people around the world. We collaborated on the editorial and the AV content, creating a film that illustrated 300,000 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, along with accompanying increases and decreases in average global temperatures. We brought together video of the natural world and voices of young people to warn that, because of rising carbon dioxide levels, “the stability we all depend on is breaking”.
Within hours the speech had been shared millions of times by hundreds of news outlets and influencers, and it came to be regarded as the “moment” of COP26.
Delegates included U.S. President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Angela Merkel with Attenborough stating the climate emergency “comes down to a single number: the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.” He appealed to those in attendance to hold global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the lower of two limits set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Read more:
David Attenborough’s Powerful Speech To COP26 Leaders: ‘The World Is Looking To You’ – Forbes
‘Rewrite our story’: David Attenborough calls on world leaders to act at Cop26 – The Independent
COP26: ‘Not fear, but hope’ – Attenborough speech in full – BBC
David Attenborough urges leaders at Cop26 to be ‘motivated by hope not fear’ – The Guardian
‘Is This How Our Story Is Due to End?’: David Attenborough Kicks Off COP26 With Desperate Plea to Leaders – Global Citizen