Lord Gardiner meets with young environment advocates as part of the #iwill campaign.

Over 50 young people from around the UK have today been announced as environment ambassadors as part of the run up to the government’s 2019 ‘Year of Green Action’.

The inspiring group, which includes two teenage sisters who founded Kids Against Plastic to cut the single-use packaging, will encourage more young people to get involved in green projects through their school, youth group or local community.

The #iwill4nature initiative, part of the #iwill campaign which aims to embed social action into the lives of 10-18 year olds, was formally launched at a celebratory event at Kew Gardens. It comes as the government prepares for its 2019 Year of Green Action, a year-long drive to see more people from all backgrounds involved in projects to improve the natural world.

Defra Minister Lord Gardiner, at Kew Gardens today to congratulate the new ambassadors, said:

Our children and young people have a huge role to play in ensuring the next generation is motivated and equipped to protect the precious natural world.

It was inspiring to meet this group of young ambassadors who are so passionate about environmental protection and I look forward to seeing all they achieve over the coming year.

Launched in 2013, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is patron of Step Up to Serve, which coordinates the #iwill campaign. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has worked closely with the campaign team to develop the 2019 focus on the environment, which was outlined in the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan.

Many of this year’s ambassadors have been selected because they are already involved in environmental projects.

Joining 15-year-old Amy Meek and her 13-year-old sister Ella, who together launched Kids Against Plastic to stem the global use of single use plastic, as an ambassador is Emily McDonald. The 18-year-old has been made an ambassador after she founded a Bio-Eco Society at her school, bringing together peers to take positive action against climate change.

Bradley Gwin-Barrett has also been selected as an ambassador after he helped create a community garden in Anfield and went on to become a Community Engagement Officer.

Engineers from some of the world’s biggest tech firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snap and Twitter, worked for 2 days at a hackathon in the United States co-hosted by the Home Secretary and Microsoft, which tasked industry experts to come up with tools to identify online child grooming.

A prototype tool has been developed that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said:

We all have a responsibility to tackle online child sexual exploitation and the new tool developed during the hackathon is a positive step forward.

Once complete, it will be rolled out for free to other tech companies that want to deploy it.

This is just one thing we can do together to combat this appalling crime.

Hackathon participants analysed tens of thousands of conversations to understand patterns used by predators. This enabled engineers to develop technology to automatically and accurately detect these patterns.

Potential conversations between a groomer and their victim will be flagged so a moderator can investigate further.

Further work will take place on the prototype. Once completed it will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.

During his trip to the United States the Home Secretary met major tech firms so he can be updated on their efforts to tackle the crime. He used the meetings to explore how companies could make greater use of technology to proactively find and remove abusive content from their sites.

He noted that, while some progress had been made, companies still had to go further and work faster to tackle online child sexual exploitation (CSE). The Home Secretary was thanked for his leadership and commitment to the issue of CSE.

Online child sexual abuse will be the focus of the next Five Country Ministerial meeting in London in summer 2019, bringing together interior ministers and attorneys general from the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Last week the government announced a package of measures to tackle online CSE. This included:

• commissioning the Internet Watch Foundation to investigate how advertising is funding CSE activity
• a taskforce, chaired by the Home Secretary, bringing together representatives from ad agencies, trade bodies and brands to ensure criminals don’t have access to this funding stream
• a £250,000 innovation call for organisations to bid for funding to assist them in developing innovative solutions to disrupt live streaming of abuse
• new tools to improve the capabilities of the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) – the database used by the NCA and UK police forces to search for indecent images of children and increase the ability to identify victims

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Published 13 November 2018