ActNowFilm: youth climate leaders in conversation with climate experts is an international youth voices in climate change project, selected to showcase at COP28. The film is based on 1-2-1 conversations between 30 pairs of youth climate leaders and world leading climate experts.
Dawda Cham holds a BSc in Biology from the University of The Gambia. He is a Gambian environment and climate change activist and the Deputy Executive Director of HELP-Gambia, an NGO that seeks to reduce communities’ vulnerability levels to climate change and extreme weather events.
Dawda has extensive experience in movement-building, advocacy, project conceptualisation and implementation and has registered over 2000 HELP-Gambia volunteers. He mobilises civil society organisations and facilitates multi-stakeholder partnership arrangements with public and private sector entities to co-design and implement climate change, environmental, and disaster risk reduction projects, especially in the most vulnerable communities.
Dawda is an active member of YOUNGO, where he is part of the NDCs and Adaptations Working Groups. He is the Co-Lead of the Partnerships and Fundraising Working Group of Africa Youth Mobilisation for COP (AYM4COP), which is a YOUNGO campaign that seeks to increase the participation of African youth in global climate events like the COYs and COPs.
Additionally, he was the Lead of LCOY The Gambia, and he and his team staged the first-ever LCOY in The Gambia, which created a crucial space for young people to share ideas and exchange expertise in environmental processes. He was Country Coordinator for The Gambia during COY16 and has contributed to authoring the Global Youth Statement. Dawda is also The Gambia’s sole delegate in the International Youth Climate Delegates Program of the COP28 Presidency, where he’ll be following climate negotiations at COP28.
Sir David King was the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s permanent Special Representative for Climate Change from September 2013 until March 2017. Previously, he was the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007, during which time he raised awareness of the need for governments to act on climate change and was instrumental in creating the Energy Technologies Institute.
Sir David is the founder and chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), an independent group of international experts created in response to the climate crisis, and the founder and former chair of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. He also served as the Founding Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford, was Head of the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University 1993-2000, and Master of Downing College at Cambridge 1995 -2000.
He has published over 500 papers on science and policy, for which he has received numerous awards, and holds 22 honorary degrees from universities around the world. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991, a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and knighted in 2003, Sir David was also made an Officier of the French Legion d’Honneur’ in 2009, for work which has contributed to responding to the climate and energy challenge.