Saurav Dhakal, moderated  two Idea Sharing workshops

The workshops were held in April 2011 in association with Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media with support of the British Council ,Nepal infopark Pvt. Ltd and Neti Wichiansaen, Photographer from Thailand.

Sean Ang, Executive Director, Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media facilitateds the workshop and the participants were 3 prominent media representatives, 15 communication officers form different development agencies and 15 bloggersl.

The sharing workshop focused to introduce the participants on the emerging trend in media business. It  helped participants to understand ways of enhancing story telling through multimedia, Mapping tools SMS and MMS.

Sunita KC produced a documentary  - "The Silent Sufferers of Climate Change", which shows how women suffer more from the impact of climate change.

The documentary is mainly within the periphery of the problems being faced by women during farming, fetching water, collection of fire woods in woods and forest, handling family and other obstacles they need to bear in working place and society due to Climate Change. This documentary has tried to put this in picture highlighting the issue that until and unless this is studied deeply, the effect of this can not be understood. The Climate Change debate has to mainly focus on giving opportunity to the gender issues and give it a platform.

She released the documentary at the British Council on 22 March 2011. Find out more.

You can view more photos from here.

Saurav Dhakal developed a  forum where common people can put forward their point of views.

Saurav developed a website (www.storycycle.com story cycle) with a view to develop, disseminate and improvise the stories from the community. He organised a story camp with local bloggers, young journalists and community people to collect stories for promoting voices of people giving more focus on their livelihood affected by climate change, and help them to promote local tourism product via online platform (Wikipedia, Geo-tagged and Social media integration-Facebook, twitter ). He not only published the collected stories on  www.storycycle.com but also made videos in communities and passed the message of those communities through print and TV media for those who don’t have online access. He also organised a public event in communities and showed the story.

Abhimanyu Magrati raised awareness through radio drama

Abhimanyu produced an effective radio drama on different issues of climate change through creative & skilled professional theatre and audio professionals and aired on different FM stations in Nepal. Through his drama, he was able to reach marginalized and vulnerable people on climate change issues. You can read script of the drama from here.

Climate Champion raised awareness through Forum Theatre

Ram Babu Regmi, one of the climate champions has raised awareness on climate change issues through Forum Theatre. He educated over 1000 audiences at five prime locations in the Kathmandu valley about the causes and effects of Climate Change through his interactive drama sessions . The play started with characters enacting as various agents of Climate Change suffocating Mother Earth. This was followed by two individual characters (one acting as a Sherpa from the mountains and the other as a Madhesi from the Terai belt) sharing their stories of having to migrate to Kathmandu for a living due to the impacts of glacial lake outbursts and regular floods. The play stopped at an interesting point when their employer decides to sell his agricultural land to build brick kilns offering five times more money than its real value. At this point, Ram Babu invited his audience to join his troop and enact suggestions to solve the problem.

This programme was not just showing a drama but also gave chance to public to discuss the issues further in the form of acting so was more interesting and more educative.  “We wanted to engage the audience in our play and make them think and talk about climate change. This is the primary reason we chose forum theatre to open the door for discussions.” said Ram Babu Regmi.

You can view a glimpse of drama from http://www.flickr.com/photos/53751488@N05/sets/72157626208465420/

Climate Champions to Goa Camp

Sunita KC and Khising Chandra Rai attended Goa Camp from 15 - 21 January with 35 British Council Climate Champions from 17 countries. They were exposed to various facets of the fragile ecosystem of Goa where they learnt, network, share and better understood environmental impacts due to climate change and current mitigating initiatives undertaken.

They got chance to interact with scientific and social experts and visited scientific Institutions like the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) and Goa Science Centre. Find out more.

Climate Champion from Nepal spreading words through Climate change TV

“The moment I spoke about the concern of Nepal to the world (through the interview) in terms of climate change gave me tremendous happiness and pride in its own. I felt the world now knows Nepal’s himalayas are melting and needs attention.” said Jony Mainaly, one of the British Council Climate Champions of Nepal.  She was endowed with the opportunity to be interviewed by the Climate Change TV, first internet broadcaster that is exclusively dedicated to climate change affairs which interviewed world leaders, climate change experts, decision makers in climate affairs, when she attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), Cancun, Mexico. The interview focussed on her project Empowering lawyers for climate justice that awarded her the brand of International Climate Champion in Nepal.

The interview is available at http://unfccc.int/side_events_exhibits/items/5833.php an official website of UNFCCC secretariat.

Being a part of Local Adaptation Plan of Action (LAPA), she also shared to the audience about the local adaptation programs that are being piloted also for mainstreaming in the development planning framework of Nepal which has the opportunity of gender mainstreaming in climate adaptation programs as identified by National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA).

Through her local project, she is empowering lawyers and student lawyers and lobbying for climate policies and laws to the policymakers (at present, Constitutent Assembly members) with its implication to the wider public at large. She has completed initial talks to establish Climate Change Units (CCU) in six different bar associations of Nepal and a workshop has been delivered to students and faculty of Nepal Law Campus and Kathmandu School of law. She will now be announcing the topics for the Moot court competition which is an open debate competition to be held among students of Kathmandu School of Law and Nepal Law Campus in the last week of January.

Talk Show

British Council in partnership with Sagarmatha Television hosted a talk show on climate change at the British Council on 21 June 2010. The programme was attended by Honourable Mr. Deepak Bohra, Minister of Forest and Soil Conservation and Mr. Batu Upreti, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Environment. There were 3 more panellists; Ms Paula Middleton, Country Director, British Council, Mr. Pradeep Mool, Specialist, ICIMOD and Mr. Laxman Datta Pant,  environment  journalist. The show kicked off with a short documentary on the major risks at Himalaya region, the Glacial Lake Outburst  Flood (GLOF) (Imja Tsho). After the documentary, the anchor took opinions from the five panellists and later took questions from the audiences which included British Council International Climate Champions,  environment  journalists and  post  graduate students of  environmental  science.  Apart from the GLOF and vulnerability of the Himalayas ,  also  discussed was Nepal’s stand on Climate Change Issues, COP 15 outcomes and Nepal Governments future plans and policies. Honourable Minister and Mr Uprety answered most of the questions and emphasized that the government as well as world (through COP-15) is aware of the problems faced on glacial lakes and associated floods at Himalayan region, and they are trying to solve this issue from Government side. He also mentioned that various developed countries including the UK have  committed certain funding to solve this problem.  The documentary and the talk show was aired at Sagarmatha television on 22 June 2010.

Mini Exhibition of Rojesh's story at United Nations in Newyork

Rojesh Shrestha's story was featured at a Mini Exhibition of selected British Council International Climate Champion's stories at the UN Headquarter in Newyork in June 2010. You can read story of Rojesh from here.

Concert for Climate Change

The British Council International Climate Change Champions Network of Nepal organised a concert on 10 April at the historic Basantapur area to raise awareness about the Climate change. Theme of the concert was “Climate Change Mero Bhawishya, Mero Chaso” which means “Climate Change My Future, My Concern”. This event was marked as the first carbon neutral concert in the South Asia region and there were over 30,000 audiences.

British Council Acting Country Director, Ewan Davies released a song by Rojesh Shrestha and a website by Sushila Pandit.

Rojesh, one of the Climate Champions wrote a special song on the impacts of climate change in Nepal and all over the world.  Title of his song is “JAGOU” which means “Wake up until it’s too late”. The song is about the  the story of how people are suffering from Climate Change and its impact. He sang the song along with female singer Ciney Gurung. He is also preparing a music video with more than ten sequences.

Sushila Pandit, another Climate Champion from Nepal launched a digital library on climate change, a website called www.thegreenwatch.net also part of her social action project.

Besides Rojesh Shrestha there were altogether eight band performances and each one of them spoke about Climate change providing the message of making a practice in our behaviour for limiting the effects of Climate change.

The concert also had awareness stalls from different I/NGOS namely ICIMOD, WWF, Nepal Tourism Board, Tourism development Endeavours (TUDE),  The Small Earth Nepal (SEN), Youth Engagement in Sustainability (YES-Nepal), Voice Action Vision (VAV) and other organizations. There was also British Council stand setting out the work of our Climate Generation project. These stalls carried the messages on what’s happening and how people are getting affected with Climate change. British Council's stall consisted of information on what the Climate Champions had been doing in their community for the cause of Climate change.

The crowd enjoyed these performances and were singing along with the performers. There was around 30,000 plus people who had gathered to view this event. This programme was shown live in one of the Nepali Television.

With the success of the concert, work is yet not over, now the champions estimated that there was an emission of 1 ton of Co2 due to the concert and now they are planning the ways for carbon sequestration. This can be done by either planting or adopting the trees for which, they are working with school children who will also be provided with the carbon emission awareness.