At this year’s annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, a special editor’s cut of Life on Our Planet was shown to world leaders as part of the Centre for Nature and Climate gala dinner.
The session comes at a critical moment in time as the 6th mass extinction gains pace. Our 8-part series offers a new take on the extinction narrative for audiences, and for global decision-makers as they take stock of where we are, and what’s needed to ramp-up action at scale. The evening featured opening remarks from Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace and closing remarks from Al Gore , Vice-President of the United States (1993-2001); Chairman and Co-Founder, Generation Investment Management, USA; Member of Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
Six years in the making, Life on Our Planet combines extraordinary wildlife scenes from today with VFX of extinct creatures from the past. Connecting the present with the past in a way that has never been seen before. Spanning 4-billion years, viewers see life’s journey from its almost miraculous beginnings through the ages of fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, and birds. Understanding that millipedes or lichens, amphibians or dragonflies have been on our planet for hundreds of millions of years is not just astonishing, it highlights why humanity must value them and do all we can to conserve their existence.
The series is organised around the mass extinction events that have forever shaped the planet, plus the sixth we’re facing today – it tells the story of life on Earth. Today there are 20 million species on our planet, yet what we see is just a snapshot in time – 99% of earth’s inhabitants are lost to our deep past.
While Life on Our Planet is an educational, entertaining drama of the story of life, at its heart it’s a series about conservation. It carries with it a message. A call to action and a very powerful one at that. “How we act now will determine the next chapter in the story of life.”
