A panel of explorers, scientists, journalists and experts explore the dark links between illegal wildlife trafficking and terrorism in the latest in the series of events in partnership with the Scientific Exploration Society (SES).

Chaired by Andrew Mitchell, SES chairman, forest canopy explorer and founder of the Global Canopy Programme.

The panel:

Dr Susan Canney of the Oxford Tracking Group has worked in conservation science in Africa, Asia and Europe, including living for several years in Niger and Tanzania, and being continuously engaged with the WILD Foundation’s Mali Elephant Project since 2003.

Richard Madden is a travel writer, ghostwriter, and online filmmaker who recently spent two years in the African bush reporting for The Daily Telegraph. He is particularly interested in the role responsible tourism can play in wildlife conservation.

Ian Redmond OBE, Explorer and Conservationist is renowned for his work with Mountain Gorillas and Elephants including undercover investigations and anti-poacher patrols, guided film crews and/or special interest tours into close encounters with wildlife.

Julian Newman is the campaigns director for the London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), he joined the organisation in 1997. EIA was established in 1984 to investigate, expose, and campaign against environmental crimes. During his time at EIA he has carried out field investigations into a range of environmental crimes, including illegal logging, smuggling of ozone-depleting chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as illicit trade in ivory and tiger parts.

Photo: Shutterstock

Across vast tracks of the world people are running short of a basic commodity: water. There are often many complex reasons that drive migration, but there is an undeniable relationship between water shortages and the large population movements we are seeing today.

For our fourth in a series of events in collaboration with the Scientific Exploration Society, we will be exploring how the effects of climate change are being seen across the Middle East and North Africa, the supply and control of water in the region, and the technologies that are being developed to combat the problem.

Chaired by the Guardian‘s environment editor, John Vidal.

The panel:

Roger Blench is a international development specialist and anthropologist. He has conducted research and evaluations of international development activities worldwide, notably in Nigeria and other regions of West Africa as a consultant and formerly as a research fellow of the Overseas Development Institute in London. He is now affiliated to the McDonald Institute of the University of Cambridge and is chief research officer for the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation.

Mikael Strandberg is a Swedish explorer and filmmaker. He has travelled solo through many parts of the world, including amongst communities in Yemen, through Africa and parts of Asia, and is currently working on a film project with migrants arriving to Sweden.

James Fergusson is an author and freelance journalist. He has written extensively on Afghanistan, Somalia and laterly used his degree in hydrology to write on water security in Yemen. His most recent book The Worlds Most Dangerous Place was nominated for the Orwell Prize.

Professor Tony Allan is based at King’s College London and SOAS London, he specialises in the analysis of water resources in semi-arid regions and on the role of global systems in ameliorating local and regional water deficits. He provides advice to governments and agencies especially in the Middle East on water policy and water policy reform. His is the author of The Middle East water question: hydropolitics and the global economy and Virtual water.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

The panel will discuss how knowledge and understanding of environmental impact, extraction of resources and geopolitical issues have moulded the region, and what the consequences are for those of us watching from afar. With oil firm Royal Dutch Shell having recently won conditional approval from the US Department of Interior to explore for oil in the Arctic, we will be asking what this kind of exploration means for the region.

This event will be chaired by BBC Science editor David Shukman, whose reports on research have taken him as far afield as the Antarctic ice-sheet, the Amazon rainforest and the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. Since joining the BBC in 1983, he has covered Northern Ireland, defence, Europe and world affairs. He is author of An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan: Reporting from science’s new frontlines and Reporting Live from the End of the World.

The panel:

Pen Hadow is an Arctic Ocean explorer and advocate. He is the founder and leader of the multi-award winning Catlin Arctic Survey (2007-2013), an international research programme on the Arctic Ocean, and the associated environmental research-sponsorship agency, Geo Mission. A decade on, Pen Hadow remains the only person to have reached the North Geographic Pole, solo and without resupply, from Canada.

Professor Martin Siegert FRSE is co-director of the Grantham Institute. Previously, he was director of the Bristol Glaciology Center at Bristol University and head of the School of GeoSciences at Edinburgh University. His particular field of expertise is to use geophysics to measure the subglacial landscape and understand what this tells us about changes to the environment. In 2013 he was awarded the Martha T. Muse Prize for excellence in Antarctic science and policy, and in 2007 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Charles Emmerson is a writer and historian based in London. He is the author of The Future History of the Arctic, exploring the past, present and future of our relationship with the Arctic, from past mythologies of the north to the modern emergence of the Arctic as a zone of geopolitical interest and massive environmental change. He is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House.

Frank Hewetson has worked for Greenpeace for over 25 years. He has particular knowledge of protest against the off-shore oil industry, he has spent many months at sea and worked consistently on the Arctic campaign for the last 5 years, and was one of the ‘Arctic 30’ detained by the Russians in September 2013.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Sao Paulo, one of the largest cities in the world, may run out of water in the next few months leaving 20 million people high and dry. Who is to blame? Incompetent politicians, unpredictable weather patterns or the wholesale destruction of Amazonia’s rainforests?

How does a country that produces an estimated 12% of the world’s fresh water end up with a chronic shortage of this most essential resource?

Join us for the second in a series of events held in partnership with The Scientific Exploration Society, as we bring together explorers, scientists and journalists to examine the water shortage in Brazil and debate the wider questions about global water security.

Chaired by Andrew Mitchell, a rainforest explorer & advocate. He is the chairman of the Scientific Exploration Society, a forest canopy explorer, founder of the Global Canopy Programme, co-founder of Earthwatch Europe, and Personal Advisor to HRH The Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project.

The panel:

Peter Bunyard is an author, journalist and founder of The Ecologist. He spent many years exploring and lecturing on the subject of indigenous responsibilities in the Colombian Amazon. More recently, having been alerted to the Biotic Pump theory, he carried out studies in Costa Rica and back home in Cornwall to test the physics of the theory, amassing evidence to challenge current climate modelling on the impact of deforestation in the Amazon Basin.

Sue Cunningham is a photographer, author and trustee of Tribes Alive/Indigenous People’s Cultural Support Trust. She and her husband Patrick Cunningham were awarded the Neville Shulman prize by the Royal Geographical Society for their Heart of Brazil Expedition travelling on the Xingu river by boat, visiting 48 tribal villages and documenting the affects of climate change and man’s dramatic impact on the rain forest.

Rogerio Simoes is a Brazilian journalist based in London. He is a former head of the BBC’s Brazilian Service and has written about Brazil for the CNN website. He was also executive-editor at Brazilian weekly news magazine Epoca and opinion editor and London correspondent at Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.

Nixiwaka Yawanawa, represents the 900 strong Yawanawa tribe, the ‘People of the Wild Boar’ of Acre within the western Amazon rainforest of Brazil, an area recently decimated by terrible flooding. He is currently working for Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights

Dr Friederike Otto is a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, leading the distributed volunteer computing project climateprediction.net. Her main research interest is the attribution of extreme weather events to external climate drivers. A major focus of this work is to explore the propagation of uncertainty from external drivers to actual impacts of climate change and assess associated risks.

Members of the Frontline Club, the Scientific Exploration Society and all those with a wish to add value and purpose to their travels are invited to a special evening to introduce a new collaboration and to meet some of the foremost pioneering explorers of our time.

With both journalists and explorers operating in high-risk environments with the shared objectives of investigating issues and reporting findings, these two communities, represented by The Scientific Exploration Society and the Frontline Club, are launching an exciting new initiative to begin working more closely together.

The evening’s panel discussion and audience Q&A, identifies the mutual risks, priorities and opportunities for journalism and exploration. Panelists include leading lights from both communities with explorers Andrew Mitchell and Pen Hadow joined by Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith.

In the months ahead, the initiative will bring together the two communities in a series of presentations, debates, skills workshops, and social events to enhance the safety and productivity of all parties.

Chaired by Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, an award-winning independent cameraman and a member of the board of representatives for the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR).

The panel:

Andrew Mitchell is a rainforest explorer & advocate. He is the chairman of the Scientific Exploration Society, a forest canopy explorer, founder of the Global Canopy Programme, co-founder of Earthwatch Europe, and Personal Advisor to HRH The Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project.

Pen Hadow is an arctic ocean explorer & advocate. He is the founder and leader of the multi-award winning Catlin Arctic Survey (2007-2013), an international research programme on the Arctic Ocean, and the associated environmental research-sponsorship agency, Geo Mission. A decade on, Hadow remains the only person to have reached the North Geographic Pole, solo and without resupply, from Canada.

Ryan Burke is the SES Explorer 2014. Canadian born Burke is a 2nd year DPhil Candidate at Oxford, who is carrying out a detailed study of the Gelada monkey in the Ethiopian highlands to establish their potential role as a keystone species in the Afroalpine ecosystem.  He will tell us about the challenges and benefits of using drones to capture and classify imagery of this stunning ecosystem, and will show some of his fantastic images, a sneak preview of which can be seen at http://ryanjburke.ca/.

Oliver Steeds is an investigative journalist and adventurer. He’s reported for Channel 4 (Dispatches, Unreported World, News), ABC (Nightline), NBC (Today), Al Jazeera (People & Power, Witness, Earthrise). He has led numerous expeditions, hosting 4 series for the Discovery Channels worldwide and the Travel Channel in the US. Steeds is also a director of the educational social enterprise – Digital Explorer – that brings the front lines of journalism and exploration to the classrooms of the world.

Photographer Toby Smith recently spent two months in China producing his latest project, China’s New Energy Pioneers. He will be presenting his photography and discussing China’s environmental record in an event moderated by Jim Footner of Greenpeace.

Covering 11 provinces, Toby Smith‘s work took him to coal mines, wind farms and hydro-electric plants while capturing the landscapes and people implementing the Communist Party’s latest Five Year Plan.

Announced in March 2011, the new Plan is significant in its attempts to address escalating energy and environmental problems. A cap on coal dependency, ambitious targets for non-fossil fuel energy sources and a drive towards more renewable sources of energy reflect the Communist Party’s intentions to aim for a cleaner, greener kind of growth.

With new power stations connecting to the grid in the People’s Republic of China at a rate of one per day, how China chooses to fuel its booming economy is one of the most important questions for the world of today, and of the future.

Toby Smith is a contemporary reportage photographer and director of Roof Unit, a collective of photographers based in East London. He specialises in environment and energy matters.

Smith’s feature stills and video work has been published by National Geographic, the Guardian, TIME, the New York Times and the BBC among others.

Moderator Jim Footner manages the Climate Change Team of Greenpeace UK. Over the past nine years, he has worked on climate and energy issues for Greenpeace in various parts of the world including Asia. He led the Greenpeace campaign against new coal fired power stations in the UK, and co-ordinated the use of the Rainbow Warrior as part of an oil spill response team in Lebanon after the most recent conflict.

Footner is also a trustee on the UK board of the French charity Development Workshop France, which specialises in resilient architecture and design in some of the world’s most hostile environments.

The world’s oceans are in a state of crisis and decline, with the continuing affliction of climate change, overfishing and other pressures.

The Oceans have a vital role as the earth’s circulatory system. But if the current state of decline continues it will reach a point where it can no longer function effectively and our planet will be unable to sustain the ecosystems that support humankind.

The Fish Fight campaign fronted Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Sir David Attenborough’s Horizon on The Death of the Oceans? have put the spotlight on the state of our oceans.  To ahead of the release of new scientific findings from IPSO the Frontline Club will kick off the first of a series of events with a panel of experts discussing what is happening to our oceans and what can be done about it.

In association with Communications Inc

Chaired by Fiona Harvey, the Guardian environment correspondent.

With:

Don Hinrichsen, award winning writer and editor and author of Our Common Seas and Coastal Waters of the World, Trends, Threats and Strategies. He is currently the senior development manager for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London and writes frequently on environment, population and resource issues for a variety of publications in the US and Europe.

Dr Alex David Rogers, professor in Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford and senior research fellow at the Institute of Zoology, London. His research focuses on the diversity, ecology, conservation and evolution of marine species. A founder member of the IPSO project (International Programme on the State of the Ocean), bringing together world leaders in ocean science with the aim of winning policy change to save the health of the global ocean;

Richard Page, one of Greenpeace International’s leading oceans campaigners with primary responsibility for coordinating the organisation’s campaign for a global network of marine reserves covering 40% of the oceans.  With Greenpeace for 18 years he has been heavily involved with the marine reserves campaign since its inception in 2003, both helping develop policy and implementing political and active campaign work;

Professor Charles R C Sheppard, professor at the department of Biological Sciences University of Warwick and tropical/marine environmental adviser for Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Commissioner for UK Overseas Territories. He has been a participant on Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change since 2002, fellow of Linnean Society of London, Conservation Fellow of Zoological Society of London and advisor to several tropical country governments on marine environmental affairs.

What will be the impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people? Floods, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and seasonal unpredictability, have all linked to excessive carbon emissions. The resulting failed harvests, destroyed homes, water scarcity, and deepening health crises are undermining millions of peoples rights to life, security, food, water, health and shelter.

The relationship between the enjoyment of these basic human rights and the quality of the human environment was first recognised by the UN General Assembly in the late 1960s.

As the formal UN Review Meeting of the Millennium Development Goals approaches, join us at the Frontline Club discuss the impact of climate change on them being realised.

At this third and final event in a series in association with Communications INC we will also be discussing whether climate change rights violations can be remedied in courts of law and if human rights principles should be put at the heart of international climate change policy.

Chaired by Julian Rush, Channel 4 News science correspondent

With:

Lawrence McGinty, health and science editor ITV news

Colm Ó Cuanacháin, Senior Director of Campaigns at Amnesty International

Christoph Schwarte, Staff Lawyer, Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development (FIELD)

Marine Destrez, researcher at Leadership for Environment and Development International (LEAD)

Picture credit: Brendan Cox/Oxfam

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The Gulf of Mexico spill has put the spotlight on the oil industry and its practices to an unprecedented degree.

Join us at the Frontline Club where we will be discussing BP and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that has resulted in between 67 and 127 million gallons spilling into the sea: what are the implications not only for BP’s future but also for the oil industry?

What does the "worst US environment disaster" tell us about the oil industry and our continued reliance on this dwindling natural resource? Have the risks the industry – and politicians – have been prepared to take to sustain the supply of oil been too great?

The discussion will also reflect on Nigeria’s experience: there have been ten oil spills in the Niger delta in the past two years that have been largely ignored. Two weeks after the Gulf of Mexico explosion, an ExxonMobil pipeline burst in Akwa Ibom, spilling more than a million gallons into the delta before it was repaired. Media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon spill, along with the daily speeches by President Barack Obama, who insists he will hold BP to account for the disaster, has been in sharp contrast to the experiences of Nigerians.

Should there be a global strategy to rein in the oil companies to protect further devastation to the planet?

With:

Dr Simon Boxall, lecturer in Oceanography at the University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre (UK) who has been involved with oil spill monitoring and impact on a number of major European spills including Braer, Sea Empress, Prestige and Erika;

Dr Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry who had an almost 25 year career in BP, during which time he held a number of technical and commercial positions;

John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor;

Ben Amunwa, a campaigner with PLATFORM, an arts and campaigns group that focuses on the oil and gas industry;

Chris Skrebowski, founding director of Peak Oil Consulting and the consulting editor of Petroleum Review, he has 38 years experience in the oil industry, starting work in 1970 as a long-term planner for BP.

Picture credit: [ Mooi ]

What are the new government’s policies on climate change and how do they match up up to the global challenges of the next five years?

Join us for a discussion at the Frontline Club in association in with Communications INC that will look at the coalition government’s policies and the challenges that lie ahead during the new parliament’s fixed term.

Looking ahead to key events such as Rio 2012 and the 2015 Millennium Goals we will be examining the coalition government’s policies and approach to climate change and asking if it meets the scale of the challenges that lie ahead. What role will NGOs and journalists need to play holding the coalition to account?

Are more natural disasters around the world likely as a result of climate change and if so what role will NGOs need to play as the world begins to change? What challenges will the media face as they are confronted with human tragedy as a result of climate change?

With Mark Maslin, director of the Environment Institute, UCL, a leading climatologist with particular expertise in past global and regional climatic change; John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor; Matthew Spencer, director of Green Alliance and Fiona Harvey, The Financial Times environment correspondent.

Chaired by Lawrence McGinty, health and science editor ITV news.