N.C.S.A. launches creative public relations campaign
National Capacity Self Assessment: it’s one of the technical terminologies that doesn’t define what it is and more importantly, the impact it has on your life. But tonight, the officials behind N.C.S.A. are adamant that you should care about their work… and to help their cause they’ve even come up with a creative public relations campaign. News Five’s Karla Heusner reports.
Karla Heusner, Reporting
This morning?s presentation of the National Capacity Self Assessment report included an information video and nine reports on Belize?s ability to implement three United Nations agreements: the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Convention to Combat Desertification, Land Degradation and Droughts. According to Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, Ismael Fabro, while certain areas in Belize?s protection programmes need strengthening, our problems are common to the rest of the region.
Ismael Fabro, C.E.O., Natural Resources and Environment
?I think Belize is recognised in the region, internationally as having very good environmental programmes. Our thing here now is to ensure the coordination between all of these activities that are existing on the ground, that are existing not only in government, but in N.G.O, in the private sector, to ensure that we are maximising the utilisation of these resources and to avoid duplication to ensure that what we are doing is supporting each other and sometimes not working, let?s say to the detriment of another programme; but really to ensure that all the activities are properly coordinated.?
?If we are going to talk about the three conventions then we could talk about specific issues for each one of the three and then, even at the level of the members of the general public, there is not enough information shared or given out there for them to really understand the relevance of these conventions to their daily life, to their livelihoods, to what they are doing.?
One man helping to translate the complicated jargon of international agreements into user friendly information is cartoonist Charles Chavannes. Following the success of a similar production on Biological Diversity a few years ago, G.O.B. and Chavannes have teamed up again to tackle land use, or rather misuse.
Charles Chavannes, Cartoonist
?In this book that we are working on right now, we are talking about land degradation and desertification. I think the salient points that I understood was that poverty and lack of knowledge, or basically ignorance, is what leads to a lot of the problems that we are experiencing in this world. And that to me seemed to be the bottom line problem that the United Nations arrived at. It?s poverty that causes this problem, but poverty is as a result of ignorance. So we need to inform ourselves and I would say that this is a part of letting us know that there are things happening now, in our own country that we can begin to do something about.?
?A lot of the technical stuff will flyover everybody?s head, including mine. If I am able to spend a little bit of time and to decipher some of the important stuff that needs to be understood, then I would have served my purpose.?
Karla Heusner for News Five.
According to C.E.O. Ismael Fabro, one of the setbacks of Belize’s environmental programmes is a lack of personnel trained in the specific areas to adequately deal with emerging issues, coupled with the slow adaptation of programmes, policies, and legislation in the relevant agencies.
