Green Guardian: Our patrons

We are delighted to announce that this year, we have signed up two outstanding patrons for our Green Guardian campaign - polar explorer Pen Hadow, and meteorologist and former TV weather presenter Helen Young.

Both care passionately about the environment, each working to protect the world around us in very different ways.

Pen will be spending the first half of 2009 skiing and swimming his way to the North Pole, dragging a high-tech sled which will accurately measure the thickness of the remaining fragile sea ice using a specially-designed ice-penetrating radar. Helen, who was lead presenter at the BBC Weather Centre until 2005, is continuing her environmental education work with young people and communities, including a role as ambassador for green travel plans for Sutton schools.

Pen and Helen came into contact with the project through the annual Green Guardian Awards, which has run in South London for the past three years. Impressed with the commitment and professionalism of the awards they were delighted to do what they can to support the project, which reaches over 1.8 million people a week with local environmental news and information in the Your Local Guardian, News Shopper and Richmond and Twickenham Times newspapers and through its dedicated website www.greenguardian.co.uk.

Pen said: "I'm very honored to have been asked to be the patron of the Green Guardian campaign. Having attended the Green Guardian Awards I have seen first-hand the good work that it promotes. This initiative is a fantastic example of local communities coming together to tackle global environmental issues".

Helen said: “I am delighted to be involved as a patron for the Green Guardian Campaign. I am a great believer of the ripple effect; you need to start changing people's perceptions locally before you can change nations.”

A bit about our patrons:

In May 2003, Pen was catapulted to international fame when he became the first person to complete one of the last great polar challenges - solo, without re-supply, from Canada to the North Geographic Pole. This feat is thought by some to be harder than climbing Everest solo, without oxygen, and demands such a level of skill and endurance that all before had tried and failed. Even polar experts were beginning to think the challenge was perhaps impossible.

It had taken Pen 15 years, three attempts and an exceptional degree of commitment to achieve his dream. Indeed the undertaking had almost cost him his life on more than one occasion, when he broke through the ice and found himself swimming in the sub-zero waters of the Arctic Ocean, many hundreds of miles from the nearest help.

Pen has more experience than most of the Arctic sea ice, and he has watched with dismay the changes taking place there over the past two decades – open water where there was none, seals and bears in places where they never used to be, changes in the thickness and colour of the ice itself.

The result is that Pen has now become a leading exponent on the need for change, with a genuine first hand view of what has been going on at the ends of the earth, and an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the implications for our and for our children’s futures.

Pen is working with NASA, ESA, the UK Met Office, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, and other research and campaigning organisations dedicated to global climate change issues, to see how he can use his unique first-hand experiences on the Arctic Ocean to promote understanding amongst policy-makers and the public of these life-threatening issues.

He is currently leading the Catlin Arctic Survey team collecting data that will help scientists to more accurately assess the state of the rapidly receding Arctic sea ice in a fragile region already affected by global warming. It is hoped the information will help fill the current gap in existing measurements from remote sensing techniques, such as using satellite.

The Catlin Arctic Survey which the Green Guardian is an official sponsor of, has been advised by some of the world’s leading ice modellers and climatologists including scientists from the US Naval’s Department of Oceanography, the NASA ICESat Mission and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

The rest of the arctic team carrying out the exploration with Pen includes photographer Martin Hartley and female explorer Ann Daniels.

For more information on Pen Hadow, visit his website www.penhadow.com

Helen Young had been the Lead Presenter at the BBC Weather Centre since August 2002, until 2005.

She was born in Crawley, Sussex and attended the Old Palace School in Croydon, where she is now a Governor. She first became interested in meteorology whilst studying Geography A level and went on to gain a BSc (Hons) in Geography from Bristol University in 1990.

Helen joined the Met Office in September 1990, working in the Commercial Services Division as a consultant providing climatology reports for the building and transport industries. She began training as a forecaster in November 1992 and moved to the Bristol Weather Centre 3 months later, appearing as a regional weather presenter for BBC West.

In 1993 Helen joined the BBC Weather Centre team in London and was appointed its Deputy Manager in April 1998. In January 2000 she became the Broadcast Manager responsible for the work of Broadcast Meteorologists at the BBC.

Helen was one of the main presenters on The Weather Show and has also presented two series of Strange Weather Days for Radio 4, a weather series for the children's programme Zig-Zag and the 2000 Today millennium programme.

She was also a presenter on BBC2 Airshow where she had to show off her flying skills. She has written a children's book on weather, which was published in France, Poland and America.

Helen is now working with Sutton Council and the Smarter Travel Sutton scheme run by Tfl to promote travel plans in local Sutton schools and in April 2009 visited the Amazon rainforest while taking part in a seminar on climate change.