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Democracy Center Reports on the Climate Crisis
More Climate Reporting from the Democracy Center
Climate Reporting from Across the Web

The Democracy Center has a long history of publishing investigations and articles aimed at helping activists understand complex issues. As we take citizen action on the climate crisis it is especially important that we inform ourselves with the facts. Here we offer a set of reports and articles aimed to help climate activists be as informed as they are passionate.

Democracy Center Reports on the Climate Crisis

Climate Change is About…Water

Far too often today, the crisis of global climate change is dismissed as something abstract, distant or off in the future. The people of Bolivia do not have that luxury. In Bolivia, as in many other “early impact” nations around the world, climate change is real, immediate and urgent. Today no story from Bolivia is more urgent than how climate change is changing the country’s destiny by altering, in deep and powerful ways, its fragile relationship with water.

Whether you are a citizen or activist looking to deepen your understanding of what climate change means, or an educator or journalist looking for powerful ways to tell that story to others, we think you will find something useful in the Democracy Center’s specially-created microsite, Climate Change is About…Water.

Cambio Climático es…Hablar de Agua (VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL)

Off the Market: Bolivian Forests and Struggles Over Climate Change

The Democracy Center’s report ‘Off the Market’ connects the dots between the global debate over forest protection and the complex realities on the ground in Bolivia.

It begins with a clear and accessible explanation of the issues on an international level, and then captures many differing voices in Bolivia – community leaders in the Amazon basin, government officials, farmers, social movement leaders, and others. It moves from the halls of global institutions to the floor of the forests themselves.

Fuera del Mercado (VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL)

Bolivia and its Lithium

Underneath Bolivia’s glimmering Salar de Uyuni lies the world’s largest supply of lithium, the metal that promises to change transportation as we know it. Governments and the auto industry are investing big so that some day soon electric car owners will be able to fill up their car’s battery at an electrical socket instead of filling up their tank at a pump. As the global North looks to electric cars as one of the solutions to our growing consumption of pollution-causing fossil fuels, this report from 2010 analyses the challenges Bolivia faces in trying to escape its historic ‘resource curse’, including the very real and serious environmental impacts exploitation of lithium could have inside Bolivia.

Bolivia y su Litio (VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL)

A Visit to the Cemetery of Glaciers

In 2010 Democracy Center researchers visited the area around Chacaltaya. Once home to the world’s highest ski resort, Chacaltaya’s life-giving glacier has disappeared in just a few short years. In this video you can hear from the residents of Khapi, one of the communities in the vicinity threatened by the loss of their main source of water.