CSB and SJU students observe United Nations climate conference

CSB+SJU students traveled to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt to attend COP27, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place from Nov. 6 to Nov. 18.

Students enrolled in the environmental studies course ENVR 305: Global Climate Policy had the opportunity to attend the largest annual gathering on climate action among world leaders, climate activists and nongovernmental organizations.

During the two-week conference, nearly 50,000 people were registered to attend, including President Biden and over 100 heads of state. Those in attendance took part in the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aid countries in dealing with the effects of climate change and push for financing climate action in developing countries. COP27 is the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Amid a global energy crisis and an increase in extreme weather events, COP27 seeks to find solutions to the global climate emergency and establish legally binding obligations for participating countries to reduce climate impacts.

Another goal of COP has been to deliver on the 2015 Paris Agreement, a global treaty that requires all signees to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celcius. Global temperatures have risen 1.1 degrees celcius since the pre-industrial period. CSB+SJU students engaged in discussions for the future and experienced first-hand the process of global climate negotiations.

Corrie Grosse, assistant professor of environmental studies and instructor of ENVR 305: Global Climate Policy, said the course is one in which students prepare for research at COP. Students are required to apply for the class through a competitive application process. Once accepted, they develop an original research project on a facet of climate change.

“While they’re at COP, they are required to conduct three, in-depth interviews and do participant observation at all of the events that are happening there,” Grosse said. “When they come back, they put this all together in their final paper, and they’re also required to present their research in two venues, both in their home community and in the CSB+SJU community.”

Grosse says that a lot of students will also be writing short news articles for the online publication “The Optimist,” a newsletter that focuses on climate solutions in central Minnesota. In the course, students actively discuss solutions to climate change and cover topics in relation to what will be addressed at COP.

“We discuss market-based solutions to climate change like carbon taxes and carbon trading,” Grosse said. “We talk about Indigenous resistance to these types of solutions and calls for climate justice, youth climate activism and the general progress of UN treaties to address climate change over time.”

With the course’s emphasis on climate justice, Grosse said that one of the biggest themes of COP27 is loss and damage, specifically climate impacts in poor, developing nations, most of which have contributed the least to climate change.

“Loss and damage is basically creating some kind of funding stream so that countries of the Global North have to pay the Global South when they suffer from disasters caused by climate crisis,” Grosse said.

Students who attended the conference felt motivated to take the environmental course with interest in looking at climate change from different perspectives.

“Being somebody that’s really interested in politics and social justice and the future of the world, it seemed like a natural class,” SJU senior Sam Rengo said. “I wanted to utilize this opportunity while I was at St. Ben’s and St. John’s to go experience something that I would just likely not be able to do in another capacity.”

Rengo’s research project is centered on Indigenous knowledge and how Indigenous worldviews can and should influence the future of combatting climate change. At COP27, he spent a lot of his time at the Indigenous Peoples Pavilion.

“Indigenous people come from across the world to talk about their experience,” Rengo said. “Some of the topics that were discussed were how Indigenous knowledge can impact climate solutions. I learned a lot about the Land Back movement and how global finance has, to this point, mostly failed to move resources and financing to Indigenous communities.”

CSB senior Kate Fenske, an integrative science major and political science minor, took the class with interest in how policy interacts with social and environmental justice and climate change. While attending a wide variety of events at the conference, Fenske went to those focused on aspects of her research.

“I was doing my research on how climate change impacts public health in the Amazon region specifically, so I went to a lot of events focused on health,” said Fenske. “There was a World Health Organization booth there that I went to a lot, and there were a lot of things about food sovereignty, nutrition and biodiversity from a health standpoint that I also went to.”

Students were filled with a sense of urgency to act now and bear down on the roots of environmental issues at hand.

“I met a lot of individuals and people who are doing work on the ground saying, ‘we need help, our voices aren’t being heard, we don’t have representation in these big, fancy negotiation rooms,’” Rengo said. “The colonial society that is contrived, the systems that are the United Nations, they’re all wrapped up in the history of colonialism and the oppression of these communities.”

There is also emphasis on the role and impact of youth in climate policy discussion.

“Youth are the ones that are doing the work all around the world,” Fenske said. “They’re the ones that are going to be the most impacted by climate change, so they’re forced to do the work because the burden is on them.”

Although there remains frustration among students when examining the progress of COP’s efforts to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis, they are still finding glimmers of hope for the future.

“It gives me a lot of hope just to see the whole world, and young people from around the world, band together and say that we do care about this, and we want to change it,” Fenske said.