As debate at the climate change COP21 in Paris warms up, thoughts bring us back to No Strings’ visit to the COP13 conference in Bali, 2007, where we showed our Tales of Disasters films, then just newly launched around Indonesia.

In the audience was the Disaster Risk Reduction Director at Plan Philippines, who immediately persuaded us to partner with the DRR cluster group to dub the films into five Filipino languages and run a series of workshops. We’re so glad we did – the films and accompanying programme have had a huge impact in this country.

One particularly memorable anecdote is how a single elementary school principal in Rodriguez, Rizal, worked with pupils and parents to plant 2,000 trees on a landslide-prone mountain after watching our Flood / Landslide film.

Rizal, like much of the Philippines, has for some time been experiencing higher intensity typhoon and flooding events, thought to be caused by global warming.

We’ve now dubbed both our Flood and Cyclone film into Malagasy and delivered two in-country workshops in Madagascar; again, a significant amount of local focus has been on the preservation of trees and planting of new ones to protect and mitigate against disaster.

No Strings is now working with partners in Madagascar on a new film on environment protection, championing more effective, less damaging land management practices.