From Ben in Bolivia (Part6)

Once again it is probably way too late and I'm far too tired for writing anything especially coherent. However I feel I should at least try. Agnes and I had a meeting earlier to plan a collaborative blog piece about today but we ended up going from that straight into another two hour meeting so we didn't have a chance to actually sit down in front of a keyboard together.

A whole bunch of us squeezed into a cab this morning to get to the water forum which was far busier than yesterday. Sessions today included extractive industries and we heard for the first time public mentions of the '18th table' which is the unofficial 18th working group at the climate conference which will controversially focus on issues local to Bolivia itself and attempt to address the disconnect between the rhetoric of the Bolivian government on environmental issues and the on the ground reality of mining projects, massive damn schemes and their social impact.

We also got to check out the dozens of stalls, most of which were associations set up to provide water for small communities on the outskirts of Cochabamba. These associations are basically tiny community run, not for profit, public utility companies which typically provide running water for a couple of hundred households.

One stall of particular interest was extolling the virtues of composting toilets. Another was the Andean School of Water which seemed to be a sill sharing project on traditional ecological practises around water conservation, harvesting, use etc.

We had a number of interesting conversations, which I am too tired to attempt to relate right now, and made some relevant and potentially useful connections. Hopefully we'll find some time tomorrow to feedback in more detail.

Anyhow, it's half one in the morning and I can barely keep my eyes open so I'm going to call it a night now.

Oh, one last thing. Apparently the people who were going to do live streaming of the conference are stuck in Europe thanks to the volcano. That means it is likely that live streaming, from all the main sessions, will now not take place.

Posted via email from World People's Conference