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Nature & Environment
Energy efficiency: hospitals
What strategies can hospitals adopt to reduce their impact on the local and global environment? How might they reduce the carbon footprint of vehicles transporting patients, visitors and goods? This album visits three hospitals which have adopted green approaches to energy efficiency, by cutting electricity consumption, reducing traffic volume,...
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Nature & Environment
Reducing your ecological footprint
Concerned about your impact on the environment? Interested in learning how to shape a more sustainable future? This album shows you simple ways to adapt your lifestyle and how to think globally. Five video tracks demonstrate how to assess the ‘ecological footprint’ of your household, examine the effects of personal transport on the environment, ...
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Nature & Environment
Environment: journeys through a changing world
Genetically, mountain gorillas are amongst our closest living relatives, and also one of the world's most endangered species. Half the world's remaining population survive in the forests of Uganda. This album explores the challenges facing conservationists at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Known for its exceptional biodiversity, the Park ...
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Nature & Environment
Environment: Lake Baikal
Should natural resources be exploited to support economic development? In Siberia, Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world and contains one fifth of the world’s freshwater. It has developed over 25 million years to be a truly unique eco-system - yet this lake is now an environment at serious risk. This album focuses on the growing ...
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Nature & Environment
World in transition: Managing Resources
Do you take your access to water for granted? The Peruvian and Tanzanian communities featured in this album certainly don’t. This album examines how development agencies can empower communities to help themselves by introducing simple technologies, and facilitate the sharing of ideas through education. In the Andean mountains, scarce supplies of...
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Nature & Environment
World in transition: Migration and Trade
What does it mean to be poor, or an immigrant? What form should Aid take? This album begins to explore the complex issues of international development in a globalised world, starting with a look at schemes which attempt to alleviate poverty. Small business owners are empowered by micro-financing in Glasgow, while in Argentina a disastrous ...
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Nature & Environment
Biodiversity
What is biodiversity and why does it matter? How can everyday observations and online databases help to increase our knowledge about the diversity of species? On this album, Jonathan Silvertown, Professor of Ecology at The Open University, presents a guided tour of iSpot, a nature website that gives anybody and everybody a chance to share their ...
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Nature & Environment
Environmental Ethics
To what extent does Man have a right to exploit nature in order to live? Do animals have rights? Should we modify the genes of crops if it allows us to increase production, and even alleviate poverty? This album explores the arguments for and against genetically-modified crops, hearing the views of a dairy farmer competing in the global market, ...
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Nature & Environment
How 'green' are you?
What shade of green are you? Take our green quiz to find out.
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Nature & Environment
Hope in a changing climate
What is ecological restoration? How will it change lives in the developing world? Leading Open University academics Joe Smith and Vince Gauci introduce this three part film ‘Hope in a Changing Climate’ which focuses on restoration projects in China, Ethiopia and Rwanda. Local villagers work together to rebuild the ecosystem which in turn has ...
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Money & Business
Capacities for managing development
The way forests around the world are managed is undergoing radical change. In the UK, local communities are buying forested land, to preserve forests for the greater benefit of society. In the developing world, forestry commissions are actively empowering villagers to engage in forest management and conservation. The video tracks on this album ...
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Nature & Environment
Introducing environment
Have you ever thought about how far the contents of your supermarket basket have travelled to get to you, how this impacts on our planet’s systems? It's no secret that climate change is caused by our over-dependence on fossil fuels...so what can we do about it? This is an album with a difference; YOU get the chance to find out how YOUR ...