Six Women Climb the Shard to Save the Arctic Clipreel

Six women climbers from Greenpeace climb the face of the Shard, London’s tallest building, as part of the Save the Arctic campaign. The women, who are from the UK, Canada, Sweden, Poland, Holland and Belgium, chose to climb the Shard because it towers over Shell’s three London offices, including the oil giant’s global headquarters on the Southbank of the Thames. Shell is leading the oil companies’ drive into the Arctic, investing billions in its Alaskan and Russian drilling programmes. Shell has invested $5bn in its Arctic programme, but after a series of embarrassing mishaps – including a grounded rig and a fire on a drill ship - it was forced to abandon its plans to drill for oil off the coast of Alaska this summer. But the company has now signed a deal with Vladimir Putin and state-owned oil giant Gazprom to drill in the Russian Arctic, a region where regulation is lax and accidents are commonplace. Greenpeace is campaigning for the area around the North Pole to be made a global sanctuary, off-limits to industrialization. More than three million people have already joined the call at savethearctic.org.

The climbers are Ali from the UK, Liesbeth from the Netherlands, Sabine from Belgium, Sandra from Sweden, Victoria from Canada, and Wiola from Poland.