Introduction

Since I rafted down 6,000Km on Amazon River in 1983, I have experienced the owe inspiringbeauty and the power of this planet through my expeditions such as the Solo-Walk Across the Arctic Ocean in 1997, also the Solo-Walk Across the Antarctic in 1999.

After these solo expeditions, I gradually started to think that I wanted to share these incredible experiences the Earth could offer us with more people as a team, and convey the things we saw and learned to as many people as possible.

Then we crossed Greenland in 2004, and went to Canadian Arctic in 2005.
In our last Canadian Arctic Expedition, however, we were compelled to make significant changes to our plan due to changes in route and physical problems of our team members under difficult natural conditions. The need to charter emergency flights for this purpose put us in a financially difficult condition. We decided to pull out, based on judgment that it would be difficult to complete the entire expedition.

This time, we decided to challenge one more time, after having reworked on our plan. In addition to the team members ;Tetsuji Nagagtani and Noriko Miyazawa, who participated in the Greenland expedition, we now have Izuru Toki in our team, and 4 of us will challenge the newly planned Edventure in Canada�fs Arctic.

The themes of this Edventure will remain the same; 'Adventure' , 'Environment' and 'Education' . We will walk across the places where not too many people visit, and report what we see about the natural environment, wildlife, ethnic people and their culture in this extremely cold part of the world , sharing it with young people whose generation on which the Earth�fs future will depend.

Expedition team members will be carrying Iridium satellite phones that will allow us to talk with children in schools about the land, flora and fauna, everything we see with our eyes in Canada�fs Arctic. With the help of experts of meteorology, geology, anthropology and biology of the Arctic, we plan to answer to young people�fs questions as well.

Experience and study reports of our members will be uploaded to our website. We also have experts to answer questions that are posed. Children can learn many things about the ecosystem of the Arctic Region via the Internet right in their classroom.

We will approach schools, experts, expedition members and other universities�f research institutes as well as governments and United Nations (including UNEP) for cooperation and build a wideranging and powerful network of environmental education in order to make our efforts effective.

Today, global warming trends are observed everywhere on the planet and climate change is clearly in progress. We would like to convey this reality to children and general public in a manner that they can see this with their own eyes and understand it easily so that they will have awareness about global warming. We will appreciate your guidance and support for our steady efforts in attaining our goal.

October 19, 2007
Mitsuro Ohba
Project Representative/Global EdVenture Secretariat