The 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival organizes the panel discussion The Earth After Copenhagen in order to address vital environmental issues and actively participate in the fight for restoring the planet’s climate. The panel coordinator is Elias Kannelis, journalist and publisher of prestigious magazine The Athens Review of Books, while the participants will be announced at a later date.

In addition, a new thematic section in the film program, Planet In Peril, is instituted this year. The section will showcase documentaries such as The Mermaid's Tears: Oceans Of Plastic by Sandrine Feydel (France), about the Earth’s ocean as dumping ground for plastic materials that disrupt the ecosystem in numerous hazardous manners. The Planet in Peril section will present films that embody the urgency with which the Earth’s problems need to be recorded, addressed and solved.

Both the panel and the Planet in Peril film section have been motivated by the world summit on climate change that was held in Copenhagen between the 7th and 18th of December 2009. The goal of the Copenhagen Climate Conference was to bring the worldwide community together, in an effort to successfully counter and react to the effects of global warming and climate change.

The Climate Conference was unable to reach a new, global and legally binding agreement that could be swiftly enforced. This failure can be attributed to a variety of political, social and economic reasons; not all of them can be readily defined, but all of them need to be summarily investigated. Several questions arise: How much truth is there in the arguments put forward by climate change deniers? How urgent is the need for shared global understanding in regard to climate change and how can it be achieved? What political requirements could guarantee it? What role could organized social groups, non-governmental organizations, artistic creation and the documentary play towards this goal?