A group of Georgetown students and faculty are representing the university at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) summit on climate change in Paris running from November 30 to December 11.
Norah Berk (SFS ’16) and Alexandra Donovan (SFS ’17) are accompanying Professor Joanna Lewis, associate professor of Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA), Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center, and several local state officials to COP21.
According to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (UNFCC), the conference brings 196 countries together to craft a new international agreement aimed at keeping global warming below two degrees Celsius over the next century. This is the largest conference the UNFCC has ever held, attracting over 50,000 participants from around the globe.
“COP21 is the most important climate negotiation since COP 15 in Copenhagen [in 2009]. The agreement in Paris will not solve the climate change problem, but it needs to be a good first step,” Lewis said, in an interview on the university’s website.
Georgetown’s website also outlined the discussion panels led by Georgetown faculty at COP21: Lewis’s discussion, “Challenges and Opportunities in China-US Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change,” was held on December 1, and Arroyo is to moderate “The Subnational (State and Provincial) Foundation for Action” on December 9.
Berk and Donovan applied for two tickets obtained by Professor Lewis earlier in the year, and were selected to attend the conference.
Berk wrote in an e-mail to the Voice, “I have been interested in climate change for a decade now, but while I was working at the French Embassy [in the fall of 2014] organizing conferences in preparation for COP21 was when I fully understood how critical COP21 is to bringing accountability, financing mechanisms, and overall action to combatting climate change on a global scale.”
According to Donovan, the students chose specific topics to follow during the conference: she focused on climate finance and Berk concentrated on REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).
Both Berk and Donovan have been surprised by how slowly the new international agreement is being crafted.
“The negotiations move frustratingly slow most of the time because no one can agree on even the smallest of details,” Donovan wrote in an e-mail to the Voice. “I have really enjoyed getting to experience these negotiations first-hand, though, because it’s not really something you can imagine just by sitting in a classroom or reading about online.”
Despite the slow pace, Berk and Donovan agree that the cooperation of institutions and people from around the world at the conference has been inspiring. Berk said, “In just one meeting I heard questions from an Inuit from the Arctic, a Ugandan small-holder farmer, a Nepalese priest, a Dutch man who had been to every single COP, a Bangladeshi human rights lawyer, a french student, and an American technology developer.”
Both students hope to use their experience to make the issue of climate change a more prominent focus on Georgetown’s campus. Donovan commented how her real-life experience has illuminated the work she has done in her STIA classes, citing COP21 as an example of the intersection of international cooperation and politics that SFS students regularly hear about.
“I think Georgetown students learn about this kind [of] stuff all the time in class, but it’s hard to get really excited about it without experiencing it firsthand,” said Donovan..
Donovan and Berk hope that Georgetown students will take a leading role in the future of climate change.
“[Climate change] will affect every sphere students at Georgetown are interested in: journalism, politics, business, economics, security, physics, peace and justice, everything,” said Berk. “It is our generation that will govern the world in the coming decades and students should not consider any topic isolated from the environment if this mess is going to be solved. COP21 is just the beginning.”
