Green Cross Australia's "Extreme Weather Heroes" campaign has won an "Outstanding Achievement" Interactive Media Award from the "Interactive Media Council", a prestigious global network of web professionals based in New York.

 

The website www.extremeweatherheroes.org received an impressive score of 464 out of 500 for its outstanding achievement in the "community" category.

 

The site is judged for design, content, feature functionality, usability and standards compliance and cross-browser compatibility.

 

The selection for this prestigious global award is done by a judging panel of experts from large and innovative companies.

 

The panel includes the President of the Producers Guild of America, the Web Content Manager from CBS Radio, and the Worldwide Marketing Director of OgilvyOne.

 

Green Cross Australia had recently launched the Extreme Weather Heroes campaign to inspire a new generation of young emergency services volunteers motivated by environmental values.

 

The campaign is designed to respond to the need for more emergency service volunteers in Australia, as the current force is aging and shrinking.

 

The need for a strong emergency service force is even more crucial as Australia is experiencing an increase in floods, fires, storms and droughts.

 

This experience is not anomaly but rather fits into a trend predicted by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The frequency and intensity of weather events are expected to grow as the planet warms.

 

The Extreme Weather Heroes campaign seeks to educate young Australians about the science of extreme weather and the building evidence of a changing climate.

 

By drawing a connection to emergency volunteering, GC Australia aims to inspire 20,000 Australians under 30 to become active emergency volunteers with one of Australia's 18 agencies over the next three years.

 

To kick-start this campaign, GC Australia selected five outstanding active volunteers from the Australian State Emergency Service (SES), the Red Cross and the Australian Rural Fire Service to be Extreme Weather Heroes.

 

These five Heroes document their experiences over live interactive blogs, thereby encouraging and inspiring their peers to respond at any one of their local emergency volunteering agencies.

 

The website and activities of the Heroes are all connected with a pathway towards volunteering that has been carefully developed to encourage skills development as well as provide 72 hour survival information and volunteering opportunities.

 

Not only does this project highlight the link between greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and extreme weather, it will hopefully inspire communities of young people to get active, skilled and prepared to do their part for the future security and sustainability of our environment.

 

Green Cross Australia would like to thank Phil, Margaret, Chris, Phillip, Anthony and all the ZeroSeven team for helping to turn this vision into a reality in the form of the spectacular www.extremeweatherheroes.org website!

 

Thanks also to all those individuals and organisations that contributed their time and expertise to launching this initative, and continue to support us to this day.