Canada’s Tzeporah Berman Wins 2019 Climate Breakthrough Award

Canada’s well-known environmentalist Tzeporah Berman has been awarded the prestigious Global Climate Breakthrough Project award for this year. The award includes $2 million in funding and access to expert resources that will help her chalk out new climate campaign strategies.

Berman is currently the International Program Director at Stand.earth and has a long record of spearheading and winning major environmental campaigns. This includes negotiating significant government and corporate policy victories. She is one of the creators and also lead negotiations of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement, and helped protect 6 million hectares of old-growth forests.

She co-founded Stand.earth (previously known as ForestEthics), where she currently helps lead corporate campaigns against the cruise industry, the fashion industry, the toilet paper and tissue sector, and oil and gas industry expansion projects in Canada and the West Coast of the U.S. Previously, she worked as the co-director of Greenpeace International’s Global Climate and Energy program, which led to the the Arctic campaign and a successful “Unfriend Coal” campaign to get Facebook, Apple, and others to switch from coal to renewable energy for their data centers.

The Climate Breakthrough project zeroed upon Bremen for “she 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.”

“I am honored to receive this award at this critical moment in history. 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,” said Berman. “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.”

According to the official website, the Climate Breakthrough Project each year provides one to three outstanding individuals with large, multi-year, unrestricted awards to help empower promising leaders with powerful, high-risk, high-reward innovations in the climate space.

Last year, the award was presented to Tessa Khan, who is a co-founder of the Climate Litigation Network and Bruce Nilles, who is the founder of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.

The Climate Breakthrough Project funds extraordinary people who are in the process of developing innovative strategies in social, behavioral, economic, and policy change that will make a globally significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions over the next 5-10 years. In addition to funding, the Climate Breakthrough Project provide additional access to expert resources and assistance to help awardees scale their work.

“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,” says a statement on the Climate Breakthrough Project website. It adds that they expect her first pilot to launch by 2020.

According to Stand.Earth, with the latest funding, Berman will develop a strategic approach to limiting new oil and gas development globally to align with U.N. Paris Agreement goals for a safe climate. Her plan includes national and sub-national policy campaigns, corporate purchasing policy commitments, and public narrative and movement building components. She wants to engineer a large reduction in new oil and gas development that will ensure huge amounts of carbon stay intact or unextracted and out of the atmosphere.