Colombia Calling - The English Voice in Colombia

By: Richard McColl
  • Summary

  • Colombia Calling is your first stop for everything you ever wanted to know about Colombia. Colombia Calling is hosted by Anglo Canadian transplant to Colombia, Richard McColl and the Newscast is provided by journalist Emily Hart. Tune in for politics, news, reviews, travel and culture stories, all related to Colombia.
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Episodes
  • 558: Back to the (microscopic) Future: Using Palaeontology, Pollen, and AI to predict and protect our futures
    Mar 11 2025
    Today, we go back many millennia in order to protect ourselves for the coming centuries: Emily Hart speaks to two Colombian scientists, Carlos Jaramillo and Camila Martínez, time-travellers of the smallest imaginable time machines: fossilised pollen and tree cells.

    Climate change has been a constant feature of Planet Earth: at points in history, the planet has been both much cooler and much warmer than it is today - if we know which plants occupied an ecosystem the last time the Earth was a certain temperature or had a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can predict what our ecosystems will look like in the conditions that we will soon be living in.

    Using tiny fossilised clues, Carlos and Camila are doing exactly this.

    The climate change we are currently living through is unprecedented in speed – and water and rain cycles are a major concern for humanity’s continued existence on the planet, so one focus of this work is the Amazon rainforest – both Colombia’s slice of it and further afield.

    Predictive models currently disagree about where the Amazon is headed as the earth warms – some models predict it will get wetter, others say it will become grasslands or scrub. One way to find out is to work out which plants lived in the area the last time conditions changed in the ways they are currently changing, and look at how that ecosystem and its inhabitants changed and adapted during that time. Drilling deep into the earth to find fossil records from 12 million years ago, Carlos is now studying the fingerprints left by Amazonian life from that time – particularly pollen. Camila is studying fossilised trees, whose cells – frozen in time – can show us how much water was in the environment. But pollen and other microscopic clues are in such abundance in places like Colombia that there simply isn’t enough time in a human life to study and identify all of the species being found. Luckily, artificial intelligence is opening up huge possibilities – Carlos has been digitalising massive fossil collections and training AI to identify and catalogue samples. So today, we travel from the microscopic fingerprints of a distant ecological past resting in rocks and trees deep underground through to the futuristic methods made possible by new machine learning and digital processing. Carlos and Camila span multiple disciplines and vast timeframes, all in the hopes of getting us the information we need to survive the climate crisis which will change the face of the planet within our lifetimes. They'll be telling us how - and why it's so important.

    Support the podcast: www.patreon.com/colombiacalling
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    57 mins
  • 557: The Petro Presidency Meltdown?
    Mar 4 2025

    President Petro's Disastrous Televised Cabinet Meeting or The Petro Presidency Meltdown.

    Pause for breath if you can, but we've been experiencing a barrage of negative headlines surrounding Colombia's President Petro.

    This began with, at first, the online fracas with President Trump over the treatment of Colombian illegal migrants being returned to their homeland to, most recently, a total car crash of a televised cabinet meeting.

    Did you watch it? If not, the best bits have been put together here by El Pais for your viewing entertainment: COLOMBIA | Los momentos memorables del consejo de ministros de Petro | EL PAÍS

    Anyway, on this episode of the Colombia Calling podcast, we chat to Adriaan Alsema, director of Colombia Reports, about whether we can call this the "Petro Presidency Meltdown," and what we can expect from the Colombian premier for the remaining year and a bit of his tenure.

    We look at the cornerstone policy plans of Petro's administration and discuss if whether any will get through Congress before his time is up. What has happened to Total Peace (Paz Total), the Health, Pension and Labour reforms...is the Petro project doomed to failure? And, where does the political chameleon and survivor Armando Benedetti fit into all this?

    The Colombia Briefing is reported by Emily Hart.

    Tune in and subscribe!

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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • 556: The Colombia that is Silenced
    Feb 25 2025

    This week on the Colombia Calling podcast, we speak to Lorena Estupiñán-Pedraza, a professor of international relations and political science from Boyaca, but resident in the southern city of Cali.

    In a far-ranging conversation, we discuss Lorena's PhD studies public policy implementation in Boyaca, local problems with global impacts and all about what it means to be from Boyaca and to understand the Boyacense idiosyncrasy and culture.

    Tune in to this, the Colombia Briefing with Emily Hart and subscribe to the podcast.

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    1 hr and 11 mins

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