INTERVIEW: Roadshow raises awareness about climate change

Written by Eugene N. Nforngwa

Tuesday, 22 June 2010 13:21

Abel_Akara_Ticha_BHC Performances in four towns is the latest effort by the British High Commission in Yaounde to combat a “monster”

Garoua—Members of a theatrical troupe that arrived here this week complained of the scorching sun, as they prepared to stage a play to raise public awareness and incite authorities to act against climate change. “Combatting the Monster, Combatting Climate Change” will be performed here for the first time on Wednesday and later on in three other localities. The Cameroon Climate Change Road show, as the initiative is called, is organised by the British High Commission in Yaounde. Ahead of the first stage performance, Abel Akara Titcha, communication manager at the British High Commission sat down with the Standard Tribune. Excerpts:

What’s the road show about?

The Cameroon Climate Change Roadshow is a theatrical campaign designed to stimulate concrete action by local councils in Cameroon to adapt to and ultimately mitigate climate change. The UK is a frontline campaigner for urgent global action to remove the spectre of unbearable increases in temperature that may make life impossible for living species on earth in future due to the corollaries of climate change such as floods, hurricanes, diseases, drought and human conflict. The UK has been pushing this agenda worldwide especially through the various conferences of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate change and through political lobbying.

What motivated it and what do you hope to achieve?

A lot of such lobbying has been done at a high level in Cameroon but the High Commission noticed that though grassroots people all over Cameroon acknowledge experiencing climate change, the majority of them do not feel they can do anything to help offer a solution to the problem.

We want therefore to use the soft method of theatre to reach these people but most importantly to prod local council authorities to take advantage of the decentralisation process in the country to develop a structured approach to address climate change. Tackling climate change is crucial to the extent that councils now need to clearly include it in their yearly development budgets. The theatre piece titled Combatting the Monster, Combatting Climate Change will sound these message continuously. It is an opportunity to show these councils examples of concrete work done to help communities contribute to fighting climate by the High Commission in partnership with the Government of Cameroon and civil society. These councils will be called upon to make use of such tools.

We also want to use the theatre piece to remind central and local government officials, communities and civil society that the international regime addressing climate change has developed funding mechanisms for countries like Cameroon to tap into and fight climate change. The Congo Basin Forest Fund, for example, is an important funding window that Cameroon still needs to take full advantage of. And of course, we are using the Roadshow as a gentle reminder to Cameroonian authorities to complete the good work they started with other COMIFAC countries at the Copenhagen summit of December 2009 by formally associating the country with the declaration of the conference in anticipation of more action in Cancun – Mexico later this year, so that the country can benefit from the important financial package that industrialised countries are putting together to help poorer nations deal with a problem for which the developed countries are mostly responsible.

When and where is it taking place? What guided the choice of locations? Is anything planned for other parts of the country?

The campaign is already on but the theatre performances will take place in four stages: on the 23 June, our troupe will perform to the Garoaua II Council at the Alliance Franco-Camerounaise at 15:00. The show will move to the Santa Council Hall on 29 June at 11:30. Straight from Santa, the troupe will move to Kribi where they will perform at the Salle des Fetes of the Kribi I council on 2 July at 14:30. A week later, on 9 July, the play will be performed in the Council Hall of the Limbe I municipality. Since it has not been possible to take the roadshow to every council of the country, we have chosen these four councils that broadly represent the geographical map of Cameroon – Garoua in the arid north that is threatened by desertification, Santa in the grasslands where climate change is already inducing water problems and Kribi/Limbe along the coast where forests are being depleted for fish-smoking in a manner that would not only contribute to climate change but ultimately affect the fish population that rely on the mangroves for their habitat.

These councils may not represent the most glaring examples of areas highly threatened by climate change but they were also chosen as a way of spreading our climate change work across the country. Many other areas in the Far North and the East, for instance, have benefitted from projects funded by the High Commission to tackle climate change. We hope to use this campaign to create a coalition of councils fighting climate change as a way of snowballing the discussions and actions to other parts of Cameroon.

What should the selected municipalities expect?

Our goal is to make the councils own the agenda by continuing to exploit the useful messages that will come out of the show to design projects that will help their communities adapt to and mitigate climate change. It will be incumbent on these councils themselves to design future projects that could have more impact and make use of the several funding windows available internationally through initiatives such as the Congo Basin Forest Fund and the UNDP’s Global Environment Facility grants.

How vital is local participation in fighting climate change?

Local participation is crucial in addressing climate change because the local peoples are most affected from the consequences of climate change. Do you know that about 30 million people across Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria used to depend on the waters of Lake Chad for their livelihoods through fishing and the related trades? Due to climate change the lake has receded to one 25th its size of the 1960s bringing pain and suffering to many of these people. Don’t they need to adapt to such a change in practical ways?

Now, a mechanism for carbon credit has been developed to help communities that protect their forests benefit financially in just the same way or much better ways than they would from logging royalties. This market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year and communities in developing countries endowed with forests need to know so they won’t be cheated.

Through a British High Commission funded project in the East region of Cameroon, some pygmies have been equipped with GPS tools to track logging activities in areas and feed back that information to the Ministry of Forestry.

In the Northern regions of Cameroon, thousands of families have been provided with locally fabricated cooking stoves that consume about 70% less wood than their traditional firesides, thanks to a project run by the Ministry of Environment and Nature Protection with funds from us. The local peoples have received training in fabricating these stoves. Within a few years, this should greatly reduce the demand for wood in these areas that are in dire need of re-foresting in order to help mitigate climate change. And the people know exactly why they have to resort to such new methods. These are practical ways in which local communities tackle climate change.

What else if the British High Commission doing in fighting Climate Change in Cameroon?

Aside from the forest mapping and improved stoves projects, the High Commission has done considerable high impact work tackling climate change in Cameroon within the last four years. We have worked with various communities across countries of the Congo basin to improve their practices in forest governance thanks to the expertise of the Bio-resources Development and Conservation Programme – Cameroon (BDCP-C). This has resulted in the publication of a document on Environmental Impact Assessment for all kinds of development initiatives. With our partners, a guide has been developed for parliamentarians involved in fighting climate change.

Recently, we provided funds the Cameroon English Language and Literature Teachers’ Association – CAMELTA to develop a climate change language teaching manual for secondary schools. They produced a master piece which will help our young students master the issues in daily life.

We have sponsored several capacity building initiatives in this area for both communities and journalists. I am sure you still have fresh memories of the three climate change journalism awardees whom we sponsored on a climate change study trip to the UK – they produced such valuable media content from their trip and are able to communicate the issues better to their audiences and readership.

The initiatives are too may for me to enumerate here, but I need to make the important point that Her Majesty’s Ambassador has regular conversations with Cameroonian authorities to encourage Cameroon to play an active role in the concert of nations tackling climate change and in exploring ways in which the country should emerge as a low carbon but high growth economy.

We can never say it enough that to the UK, tackling climate change is not just a livelihood/ economic issue, it is a security issue and an issue of being fair to developing countries that have contributed so little to the problem but are more vulnerable to it consequences. Therefore, besides helping to fight corruption, as well as promote the respect of human rights and democratic practices in Cameroon, climate change will remain high on the UK’s agenda for its bilateral relations with Cameroon.