By Kim Se-jeong
Staff Reporter
Amid the freezing climate of global finance, the British government is showing the world that it won't drag climate change to the backseat.
The British Embassy in Korea has made public its first hybrid car last week. Its Japanese Honda Civic, in glossy silver, had its ``hybrid'' tag on the back.
``We've tried (to buy a Korean car.) But they are only for the government,'' British Ambassador Martin Uden said, explaining his endeavor to find a made-in-Korea hybrid car to no avail.
What made it significant was that the British Embassy is setting an example for nearly 100 foreign embassies, he said.
The decision shows what the British government will do to combat global climate change as part of its foreign policy strategy.
The ambassador said climate change is certainly on the list of priorities of its foreign policy canvas, leading many small internal changes in British embassies around the world. Uden said that the British Foreign Service now distributes ideas and instructions on how to make them greener.
One thing the British Embassy in Seoul did was measure greenhouse gas emissions generated by buildings, diplomats' domestic trips and such through a local CO2 auditor.
``And we found out the carbon footprint covering travel, general usage amounts to 508 tons of CO2 in 2007,'' Uden said.
Based on the data and a self-set target ― 12.5 percent reduction by March 2012 ― the embassy is pushing to encourage staff to go green.
Although it purchased the hybrid car, the ambassador said, ``We are trying to encourage staff actually not to use cars but use the subway. So we bought a whole stack of T-cards.''
Opening up the climate change office in the embassy was an external approach. The office is to raise awareness of climate change and its consequences and to share the British experience in climate change with our host countries, preventing them from making the same mistakes Britain made, the ambassador said.
The climate change office in Seoul is an independent office with three staff members.
``London sees Korea as an important `swing state' as it were in US political terms,'' Uden said, and if you persuade Korea to meet the stringent target, it will be easy to persuade Mexico, Brazil, India, and China, he added.
Breaking a deliberate silence on reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the Korean government announced that it would come up with a voluntary emission target post-Kyoto Protocol that will expire in 2012, and it has received a positive response from the international community.