Santa Cruz: Seminar for journalists on climate change, organised by the National Programme for Climate Changes and the British Embassy.

Climate change is the great challenge facing all the countries of the world, both in the developed and the developing world.  The British Government has made facing this challenge one of its main strategic priorities.  This includes in Bolivia, but the lack of a large bilateral assistance budget has meant that we have had to consider closely how we can best assist.

As climate change is something that affects us all, from all levels of society, we decided last year that we would concentrate on projects which looked at education and getting out the messages about what causes climate change, and what each individual can do to help.  Bolivia is not a large emitter of greenhouse gases, but has suffered from the effects: flooding, drought, melting of the glaciers.  The majority of the greenhouse gases emitted in Bolivia are connected to changes in land use; not only burning down forests to plant crops, but these lost trees then reduce the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed in the atmosphere.

One of the most influential pieces of work on this subject has been the Stern Report, a report commissioned by the British Government which set out the economic costs of climate change.  We invited Dimitri Zenghelis, one of the report’s authors in October 2007 to visit Bolivia to talk about the report, and its implications.  He gave two talks, in Santa Cruz and in La Paz, during which he set out clearly the scientific basis for the findings.

Much of our work is done with local partners.  We have been involved with the Programa Nacional sobre Cambios Climaticos in meetings with journalists to give them accurate information, so that they will be more informed when writing about this important issue.  The DVD that we prepared last year, designed for a Bolivian audience and dubbed into Aymara, Quechua and Guarani, has been handed out to educational establishments and other groups.  We also repeated our successful climate change theatre at the EU Fair, which attracted many hundreds of people, especially students.

We also assisted the NGO “Reforesting the World” in their educational campaign in la Paz and El Alto, in which they worked with media outlets and schools to get the message across.  The NGO also handed out free trees to visitors to the EU Fair, which proved very popular.

Oliver Campero, from "Tecnologias en Desarrollo", approached us with an interesting project for using renewable energy sources, such as solid waste.  We helped him set up an urban pilot project near Cochabamba, based on previous work in Achacachi, which has been so successful that it won a prestigious award from the European Parliament.

We will be looking for more regional projects in the future, to work with other countries in the region.  This topic will remain one of the priorities, not only for the Embassy but for the British Government as a whole.