A television campaign commissioned by UN Environment, showing how organic food is the natural choice for people and the environment has been crowned a winner at the Deauville Green Awards.

The series of ads feature a doe, badger and rabbit choosing organic over conventional food and was prized with the Golden Green award under the competition’s Responsible consumption and eco-labels category. The ads were produced for UN Environment by the Geneva-based Pointprod company.

The Deauville Green Awards is an international festival involving films, documentaries and ads on sustainable development and ecology assessed by an international jury of communication and environment specialists. The fifth edition of the event took place in the Normandy town on 16-17 June.

Choosing to eat organic means opting for a healthier and more varied diet, and helps look after the environment - organic produce is free of synthetic or chemical fertilisers, is almost free of antibiotics and helps foster natural biodiversity.

The videos were launched in the framework of the 'Greening Economies in the Eastern Neighbourhood' (EaP-GREEN) programme, which is funded by the EU and implemented jointly by UN Environment, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation.

UN Environment’s work on organic agriculture in the EU's Eastern Partnership countries includes expanding domestic agri-food supply chains and fostering trade exchanges, training farmers to switch from conventional farming and awareness-raising campaigns. UN Environment has furthermore given organic producers a foot-up by supporting their participation in the major organic trade fair Biofach, leading to sales agreements being reached worth millions of euros.

To view the set of ads in English or Moldovan please click here.

Two cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have meanwhile joined the UN Environment -led Global District Energy in Cities Initiative. Banja Luka and Sarajevo form part of the programme, which supports national and municipal governments in their efforts to develop, retrofit or scale up district energy systems - one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A project launched by Banja Luka with UN Environment in January will modernize the city’s heating network and could reduce fuel consumption by 27 per cent, leading to a reduction of 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and €4.5m in fuel cost savings.

The main culprits behind Bosnia's air pollution are emissions from traffic, household stoves and local heating using heavy fuel oil, and high-intensity energy used to power industry. Air pollution has since been identified as one of the two greatest health threats in the pan-European region together with climate change by UN Environment’s sixth Global Environment Outlook report.

For more information write to isabelle.valentiny@unep.org