We’ve worked closely with Bedford High School to create Arctic Home, a touching and hopeful story raising awareness of the impacts of climate change and how young people in our borough can be part of the solution, looking towards a brighter future.
The video which premiered in July 2025, will now be used by our climate education team to help get messages about climate change to young people in schools across the borough, shared through social media channels and showcased at 2025’s Youth Climate Summit.
The focus group felt strongly that young people should be seen as leaders, not just participants, in the fight against climate change. As a result, the film features confident, decisive characters who inspire others to act.
The process
The song originally was performed at the Youth Climate Summit in 2024. Following the summit, a dedicated focus group of Bedford High School students worked closely with our PR and climate education teams to shape the video’s key messages, storyline, and overall style.
These students played a central role in the film’s development from driving the narrative to taking on key acting roles. The video also features a beautiful, bespoke song performed throughout by the Bedford High School choir, adding emotional depth and unity to the message.
A local creative film production company, Voxy Media House (external link), then took on the brief developed by the focus group to design the film’s storyline, which was approved by the school before being created.
Young actors from the school then played the three main roles and other performing arts students supported them by playing extras.
The video's messages
The students were clear that the video's message needed to focus on actions that young people can take themselves.
Too often, climate change messages can be too focused around adult-led solutions like home insulation or switching to electric vehicles. The students wanted something different which was practical, everyday actions that feel achievable for the younger generation.
They chose to highlight two impactful steps to reduce their environmental footprint:
- Avoiding fast fashion
- Turning off electrical items at night.
Climate change statistics
Fashion waste
- It's estimated that the world now uses around 80 billion pieces of clothing each year
- Around 40 million tonnes of clothes are burned or buried in landfill each year. The equivalent of one bin wagon every second
- Only 1% is recycled, meaning 99% of clothes and textiles are wasted.
Biodiversity
- Just 4% of all the mammals on the planet are wild (34% humans, 62% livestock)
- 1 in 4 species are at risk of extinction
- Consumption - the things we buy for example food, clothes, electricals and cars, contributes to 50% of the world’s biodiversity loss. This is due to how we find the resources (for example mining or deforestation), how we make them (for example pollution caused by production/factories, use of toxic materials that poison the environment or use of plastic to make clothing, plastic packaging) and how we transport them (pollution)
- The UK has lost almost half of its biodiversity since the 1970s, and is considered one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.