Community Conversations on Climate Change

Tebtebba and LifeMosaic, working closely with communities, civil society and other key players in South-East Asia and Latin America, will produce and widely disseminate a climate literacy film for indigenous communities in the humid tropics.

This film will be based on community testimonies from indigenous peoples in the Philippines, Indonesia, Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, as well as interviews with key players working internationally, drawing on a wide range of experiences to develop a global perspective. The film will be in language and imagery accessible to forest dependent communities. It will provide communities with basic building blocks of information around climate change and its relationship to forests; climate mitigation projects and how they relate to rights; community organising and negotiating tools; and positive examples of self-determined adaptation and mitigation such as traditional forest management and conservation, and smallholder agro-forestry systems that store carbon and sustain livelihoods.

The film will help communities in forest areas across the humid tropics to build their learning and knowledge and to develop their negotiating positions; support them in exercising their right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent; and help them to be genuinely involved in dialogues around emerging international, national and local climate policy-making, with particular emphasis on how these relate to forests and rights. The climate literacy film will also be a tool for civil society actors to build their capacity, strengthen their networks and complement their work on these issues. A dissemination strategy will be developed and implemented in partnership with indigenous peoples networks and other actors in the humid tropics, focusing on several Latin American and South East Asian countries, to ensure that the climate literacy tools reach dozens of local support networks, hundreds of policy-makers and thousands of communities. A particular focus for dissemination will be to forest dependent communities in areas where REDD projects, biofuels expansion, logging, and fossil fuel extraction are planned.

In addition, audio-visual case-studies, and a full policy advocacy film, which relate to the emerging international climate policy framework (including a strong focus on REDD) will be produced. These will be shown during national and international climate policy negotiations leading to Copenhagen and beyond, bringing community voices to the negotiations, helping to ground discussions and informing the design of REDD and other mitigation mechanisms as well as climate change adaptation policies.

For the initial sets of films released in time for the UNFCCC COP15 in Copenhagen, please click here.