EcoPeace co-founder Gidon Bromberg describes the vision and accomplishments of this uniquely effective organization. EcoPeace Middle East (formerly Friends of the Earth Middle East) is a unique organization that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists. Their primary objective is to promote cooperative efforts to protect the shared environmental heritage of the region. In so doing, they seek to advance both sustainable regional development and the creation of necessary conditions for lasting peace in the region. EcoPeace has offices in Amman, Bethlehem, and Tel-Aviv. The organization is a member of Friends of the Earth International, the largest grassroots environmental organization in the world. EcoPeace approaches cross-border environment and peacebuilding issues by first developing a regional strategy. They hire local researchers – Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli – to gain a regional understanding of the root causes of problems, and then they develop a common vision of how to influence decision makers, the media, and the general public. A key to EcoPeace’s success is that once the common vision has been developed, staff from each office take the same vision and present it to their respective national audiences: Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli. http://www.foeme.org/ http://skoll.org/organization/ecopeace-middle-east/ Gidon Bromberg, Israeli co-director and co-founder of EcoPeace Middle East. Mr. Bromberg is an attorney by profession and previously worked in public interest environmental law. He is a member of the Israel Bar Association. He holds a Bachelor of Economics and a law degree from Monash University in Australia. As a fellow of the New Israel Fund, he completed a master's degree in international environmental law at the American University in Washington D.C. and has published over twenty academic and popular publications concerning Middle East environmental policy and water security issues. Mr. Bromberg speaks regularly on water, peace and security issues in various forums. He has presented before the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament and the advisory meeting to the UN High Level Panel on Security. In 2007, Mr. Bromberg was invited to join the prestigious EastWest Institute's International Task Force for Preventive Diplomacy. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship at Yale University on global leadership and was in invited by Yale University in 2009 to serve as an Advisory Board Member for the World Fellows Program. Together with EcoPeace’s Palestinian and Jordanian Co-Directors, Mr. Bromberg was honored by TIME Magazine as Environmental Hero of 2008. The three directors were granted the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2009. In 2010 they received the Euro-Med Award for Dialogue and the Aristotle Onassis Prize for the Protection of the Environment. In 2011 the International Development Committee of the Association for Conflict resolution awarded the organization their Outstanding Leadership Award and the Mount Zion Foundation honored it with their Award for EcoPeace's significantly contributing to understanding among the three Abrahamic traditions. In 2013, the organization was named one of the Top 100 NGOs in the world by The Global Journal. Video Credits: Director/Editor: Gabriel Diamond Camera: Daryl Higgins Interviewer: Joony Moon Executive Producer: Phil Collis Additional Edit Assistance: Erin Falah & Jake Wadland http://skoll.org/

• published: 26 May 2016
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