And so it begins

Day 1 of the COP meeting involves the annual ritual of navigating your way to the venue, getting registered, and then becoming oriented to the city.  Those of us with observer credentials can’t get into the arena until the official opening of the conference on the first Monday, but it is a good idea to beat the morning crowds trying to register then.  The navigation part can be interesting in a foreign country, but this year, I am here with Sarabeth Brockley (Moravian College graduate and graduate student at Lehigh) and Deanna Metivier (an undergraduate at North Carolina State University) – both of whom are fluent in Spanish.  That helps with finding directions, communicating with taxi drivers, etc. 

The San Borja district has many small parks and tree-lined streets.  I learned quickly that these are great places for urban birding!

We knew we were close to the COP venue when we saw a sign and some folks handing out a mini-newspaper to people in the park about the COP meeting that contained articles like “El cambio climático es el problema ambiental más important.”

Deanna is on the far left, Sarabeth is the blonde

Security at COP meetings is always high and you learn not to question protocol, even if it seems odd.  Today we learned that once inside the first gate (which of course is the farthest away, so you walk around a lot of fenced in area), you have to take a shuttle to the actual meeting location and then go through another layer of security screening.  Each COP has its own quirks, but this arrangement in Lima promises to become a huge bottleneck when 15,000 people are all trying to get to the meeting at the same time in the morning.  But so it is.

The 2014 venue

Not until the meetings actually commence will we get a sense for what is going to be accomplished, but reports range from cautious optimism (1) to a sense that even negotiating success (i.e. a multilateral legally binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emotions globally) won’t solve the climate problem.  Take for example, the quote for an article in today’s New York Times (2):

“But underlying that optimism is a grim reality: No matter the outcome of the talks, experts caution, it probably will not be enough to stave off the increasingly significant, near-term impact of global warming.”

After my recent opinion piece that appeared in the local newspaper (a edited version of the last post on this blog), someone from the community wrote me a lengthy email with about the same sentiment as that from the NY Times.  Sigh.  I try to remain more optimistic than that.

After finding a place to eat (the San Borja suburb at first seemed like all apartments and no shops or restaurants), we hit the local grocery store to stock our rental apartment, and then headed to a vigil on the eve of COP20.  Often these are organized by faith-based coalitions, as was the case tonight.  Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC kicked off the event (before we arrived) and a large group marched through the streets.  We listened to a few speakers as well as some musicians who had composed pieces specifically for the event.

Of particular interest, was our conversation with the organizers of #fastfortheclimate (#ayunoporeclclima) scheduled for tomorrow.  

According to their press release,

Fasters will gather in the main cafeteria of the COP20 to pose with empty plates to show that they stand in solidarity with people impacted by climate change. Prominent fasters will discuss the attempt at the largest ever fast and launch the next phase of the movement - 365 Days of Fasting. Yeb Sano, Climate Change Commissioner for the Philippines will make a statement by video link.

I don’t know what or who "prominent fasters" are, but Yeb Sano is the delegate who announced a hunger strike at COP19 following the massive typhoon to hit the Philippines last year to protest the slow progress in climate negotiations and the impact being felt in his country.

I will let some photos from the event tell the rest of the story for tonight as they are better than words that I can come up with.

1) International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, Negotiators land in Lima with eyes on a draft climate deal

http://www.ictsd.org/bridges-news/biores/news/biores-lima-update-1-negotiators-land-in-lima-with-eyes-on-a-draft-climate?utm_source=International%20Centre%20for%20Trade%20and%20Sustainable%20Development%20%28ICTSD%29&utm_campaign=e22b00fdfa-BioRes_Lima_Update_1%20%28English%29%2011_29_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_7d42ca02cd-e22b00fdfa-148267217

2) Davenport, C. Grim Reality Amid Optimism Ahead of Climate Talks, New York Times, November 30, 2014 

https://mail.google.com/_/scs/mail-static/_/js/k=gmail.main.en.z9rNWMI3IGc.O/m=m_i,t/am=PSOG-b_7gxhjvktfVPv33-M8KX7yebgfacJLdgLA_2b_D-C_AX3qhwQ/rt=h/d=1/t=zcms/rs=AItRSTO_d2KQwYSVotuQSxsu5-cWq6Wq9w

Preparing for COP20

On December 1st, the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP20) will meet in Lima, Peru to continue the long-running attempts to draft an international treaty on climate change. A successful agreement would have aggressive commitments to mitigate the causes of climate change (reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a dramatically decreased rate of rainforest destruction) and would include a comprehensive global blueprint (and funding) for adapting to the changes resulting from planetary warming and climate disruption.

COP20 marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – an agreement that emerged from the Rio Earth Summit. It has been 25 years since the international community called for action on greenhouse gases, 26 since James Hansen testified to U.S. congressional committees about global warming. When the UNFCCC was drafted in 1992, negotiators borrowed language from the Montreal Protocol (an agreement to address the destruction of the ozone layer): that member states would “act in the interests of human safety even in the face of scientific uncertainty”. In the time since that draft, the scientific uncertainty about climate change and its causes has been greatly reduced as evidenced in the thousands of peer-reviewed papers published each year and the high confidence level (over 95%) expressed by experts in the most recent report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change is indeed human-caused.

This will be the 6th COP that Moravian College has sent a delegation to after being accredited as an official observer in 2009. We use this blog to report on the issues that we learn about at these international gatherings in an effort to increase awareness of this complex 21st century challenge and to hopefully generate discourse about how to address climate change.

There are a number of factors that make this COP particularly important, including some of the memorable events over the past year in terms of climate change history.

• COP21 in Paris in 2015 has been identified as the target year for adopting an ambitious, multilateral, legally-binding treaty that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make major progress on a myriad of issues related to building resilient communities, managing risks of extreme weather events and disasters, and assisting developing countries in adapting to the impacts of climate change already being experienced. That means that the main negotiations on targets and language will have to be developed at this conference. In order to “galvanize and catalyze climate action” in advance of COP20 and 21, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited world leaders to a Climate Summit in September of this year; over 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations for this event. Perhaps even more importantly, two days before the summit, the largest climate march in history took place with 2646 events in 162 countries. More than 300,000 people marched in the streets of New York City alone.
• Preceding this summit, over the past year, the United Nations hosted 13 Open Working Group sessions as part of the effort to develop the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Global climate change was at the forefront of these discussions, and combating climate change emerged this summer as one of the 17 proposed SDGs. Debate was not over whether climate change should or shouldn’t be a goal, but whether it should be a stand-alone goal or a component of all SDGs.
• According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the globally averaged temperatures over land and ocean surfaces for both June and September 2014 were the highest since record keeping began in 1880. September marked the 355th consecutive month (29.6 years) with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for June was in 1976 and the last below-average global temperature for any month was in February 1985. In the U.S., the October national average temperature was 3.0°F above average and 2014 is on track to be the warmest year on record globally. Welcome to the new normal.
• Slower to the warming party due to the physical and chemical properties of water, our oceans are now demonstrating the anticipated changes. The September 2014 global sea surface temperature was the highest on record for any month. Did these warming waters have any impact on Typhoon Nuri – the recent storm that hit Alaska? We can’t know for sure. Not only was this the strongest storm to hit this region, meteorologists believe that it may have been one of the deepest extra-tropical low pressure systems on record in the North Pacific.
• This spring, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels surpassed the 400 ppm mark. Unlike the stock market, rising values is not what the public should be hoping for. According to an October 2009 paper in the highly respected journal Science, you have to go back 15 million years to find atmospheric conditions like that in our atmosphere – long before Homo sapiens were around. According to UCLA professor Aradhna Tripati, the lead author on that paper, "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland." The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide today represent a 44% increase since the historical pre-industrial levels of 278 ppm which were relatively constant for about 800,000 years.
• The November election results in the U.S. will bring to Washington a Republican-controlled House and Senate. Party leaders have already vowed to revoke regulations aimed at tackling carbon pollution in this country and are trying to push through approval of the controversial Keystone pipeline project in this lame-duck session. Given these developments and the fact that the U.S. has long been viewed as a major obstacle in the international climate negotiations, I was assuming that COP20 would be another fruitless endeavor. And then, out of the blue this week, came the announcement of a historic climate-related agreement between the U.S. and China. These are the two nations with the largest carbon footprints and the two most recalcitrant parties at the COP meetings. The proposed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions of these two countries are not sufficient to “fix” the problem of global climate change, but the agreement is a crucial first step for both countries. No doubt this will lead to a showdown in Washington, but the agreement could really provide the spark needed to ignite progress at the international negotiation table.

Stay tuned! 2014 still has several more weeks to add even more chapters into the climate history book.

References:

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/

http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/ 

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/ 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm



The best argument can’t always win the fight.

But does arguing at least get us somewhere? To test this a group of students at Lehigh University staged an information stake-out in the center of the campus on Friday night with an objective: invite their peers to the Largest Climate March in History: The Peoples Climate March.  Via a couple of projectors, a sound system and two huge walls at the University Center, they were able to make people pause for a moment and think about the Climate March and the Climate Summit.  

Finding yourself in need to catch-up on the debate?  You can learn more about the summit itself and why it matters by checking out this special brief ‘The People’s Climate March: Everything you need to know to change everything.

But ask yourself why you aren’t aware of the Call to Action for the Climate March? Light projections using the viral Disruption video and the People’s Climate March Graphics attempted to encourage a response from students on Lehigh’s Campus. But the argument in support of Climate Change moved no one. The real question had been inadvertently raised: How are students at Lehigh living the spirit of the Climate March?  Are they invested?

 

The answer is, the students at Lehigh University aren’t aware of it at all.  Everyone stopped because they were attracted to the Light from the videos.  Yet, no one knew what the videos were about. Instead of an information exchange and debate the organizers expected, they received confused expressions and low-interest in an event that will shape everyone’s future. 

What became obvious in the outreach session was the disconnect plaguing climate change action.  When buses will be traveling to the Climate Summit this Sunday in droves from all places across America, what could possibly be missing from student opinion in a small town that is only 2 hours outside of NYC? What are Lehigh Students missing?

Emotional response.   

“This non-reaction from students is a larger warning to Universities that they aren’t doing enough to engage youth on Climate Change.”  --

Gerardo Calderon, a Lehigh Student and community organizer.

The evening was a harsh reality-check of what their peers knew about the Climate Summit this week at the UN. It was clear that engagement on the campus about climate change was staggeringly low.  And that individual connection to climate change was even lower.  What gives? Can factual Statistics prove and help us understand apathy?

A poll conducted by Gallup this year found that while 69 percent of Americans believe climate change is caused by human activity, only half are personally worried about it. “We’ve won the argument but we haven’t done anything on it,” Bill McKibben of 350.org is noted for saying. “We haven’t been able to overcome the power of the status quo enough to make real change, so that we’re losing the fight.”  McKibben is completely on-point.

Its not a fight of factual evidence, its an emotional one.

Those words are echoed by a study from Yale University which supports the idea that emotions act as drivers to connect people to Climate Change Action. "The Role of Emotion in Global Warming Policy Support and Opposition" speaks to what we already know. Looking at how research points to the “affect (feelings of good or bad) and affective imagery (associations) strongly influence public support for global warming.”  What happens to the style of argument when we voice the issue of climate change as if specific emotions, like fear, anger, worry, guilt that are programmed into our discourse and communication?

Through this graphic the paper further shows how specific emotions were stronger predictors of global warming policy than supported cultural world-views. 

Egalitarianism, individualism, negative affects, top of mind associations, or socio-demographic variables, including political party and ideology DIDN’T MATTER. The findings go further to say that,

“50% of the variance in public support for global warming policies was explained by the emotion measures alone. In particular, worry, interest, and hope were strongly associated with increased policy support.”

What does that mean for people communicating climate change? The results contribute to how human beings process information and suggest that emotions play a significant role in public support for climate change policy.  So what are the implications for climate change communication then if we are only hardwired to act when we feel guilty or worried?

Enter a local climate change advocate in the Lehigh Valley, Dan Poresky, has spoken about the role of human emotion in the efforts to reach a larger audience to discuss engagement with Climate Change.  His proposal for Climate Action provides a step-by-step action guide for organizers to place more emphasis on people than the planet. Put simply, it’s his call, a local citizen’s call, to action.

By emphasizing, “How is climate change going to affect me?” Poresky argues that only when people feel secure in the vision of their future will they push governments to act.  That security needs to be based in emotional response like entitlement, fear, anger, and a sense of loss of what you cannot regain. This type of proposal is what is needed from citizen groups.  At the junction of climate change communication efforts from Light Shows to step-by-step guides is the answer to the lack of emotional engagement.

“People will more readily accept the adaptations necessitated by climate change when they can envision living comfortably in a society with reduced carbon emissions is the norm. Its all about public attitude” said Poresky.

One thing is for certain the People’s Climate March will be an emotional tour through Manhattan on September 21. Over 400,000 are expected to show up and walk together. This preempts the week leaders are coming to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit to discuss ambitious goals to reduce global warming pollution. That bit is incredibly important.

The People’s Climate March will take place BEFORE a UN meeting on climate change attended by delegates from 168 countries from all over the world on the path to COP20 in Lima, Peru this year. The message is clear: the pressure is on.  

Who could argue with that?

If this People’s Climate March doesn’t make people feel something?  What will?

Hope to see you all there in a few hours, physically and emotionally invested.

     

--Sarabeth Brockley @sara_brockley

Post-15 Agenda and UNFCCC Draft Agreements: Can They Be Friends?

After a marathon session at the UN in New York last week for the 65th Annual United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI) Session, the world is now one step closer to a to-do list to end poverty that includes one of its main drivers: climate change. 

In the case of the Post-15 Agenda and the UNFCCC, the chances for their goals to compliment the other could easily dismantle and confuse global negotiations for the issues surrounding climate change, sustainable water, energy, and food scarcity.  Can these two Draft Agreements work together to integrate and not desaturate the necessary components each brings to the table?

The Post-15 Agenda is an answer to the Millennium Development Goals...and should guide the UNFCCC roadmap to Paris 2015.  

 Deadlines. Deadlines. Deadlines.

From August 27th to the 29th at the #UNNGO2014 65th DPI NGO conference invited over 920 NGOS to comment on the final version of the Post-15 Agenda. In 2015, the UNFCCC COP 21 in Paris and the launch of the Post-2015 Agenda will culminate within months of each other. This Roundtable discussed the interlinkages between both processes and the benefits as well as the of drawbacks of having two separate tracks in the medium and long terms. Terms like Low-carbon development, adaptation, disaster risk reduction and finance were thrown around. 

The Post-2015 process is to create a transformative agenda that is meant to usher us into a new era of sustainable development and in harmony with nature, that is rights based and ensures no-one is left behind. 

Cross-synthesis was a theme hammered by the panelists, but the articulation of that word failed to show the audience examples of how the policies could co-exist and not cancel the other out. 

Moderating the panel, Lina Dabbagh, Post-2015 Officer, CAN International immediately stated that climate change affects every sector from sustainable water, energy.  This is an important step. Citing Climate Change for the first time after the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) failed to include it as the driver of social poverty, the Final Draft of the Post-15 Agenda gave Climate Change a number: Goal 13  The panel suggested that its inclusion is the key issue to ensuring sustainability in the future. While there could have been a fierce debate about one developmental agenda against the other, overall the panelists stayed on the fence about the conflicting status of the declarations.  

H.E. Gustavo Meza-Cuadra Velásquez, Permanent Representative of Peru to the United Nations, kicked off the panel discussion citing how Peru has already accomplished their MDG's for targeting poverty levels and other targets in his own country.  Stating that the "Issue of inequality is important, we want to address social exclusion and inequalities" he set the tone of the discussion. Peru is the next host country for the final UNFCCC meetings before Paris in 2015.  Velásquez believes that the efforts need to be more aggressive and drafting resolutions that use technology transfers first and financing second will be the successful components of each plan. He emphasized building social capital before financial capital. 

No one argued. 

It seems that reversing individualistic approaches to resource security by identifying opportunities for integration and identifying existing trade-offs will result in better policy recommendations for both draft agreements. 

Velásquez made the link between poverty and climate change.  What are these linkages exactly?

Dork Sahagian, an IPCC Nobel Prize winner and professor of Earth Sciences at Lehigh University suggested we think alongside the fabled words of John F. Kennedy "Ask not what climate change will do to the poorer populations but ask what the economic development will do to 7 billion people. Moving away from fossil fuel development in the post-15 agenda is not a current development goal and is necessary, said Dr. Sahagian,

"otherwise the sustainability goals are in direct conflict with our Climate Change goals."

Additionally, Nicholas Nuttall, Creative writer for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and Director of Communications & Outreach, UNFCCC suggested that much of the development targets and discussion that are central to Sustainable Development Goals in the Post-15 Agenda and the UNFCCC should be to act as opportunity multipliers.  The division between the private and civil society sector is a huge obstacle. He articulated the issue between the policies well. Consider what the RIO+20 was asking for: a new indicator for process for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that was not just limited to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) valuation. He asked the only worthwhile question in a panel circulating in a maelstrom around the possibilities for collaboration How can the SDG's support a legally binding process?  

Which process will be codified 

into international law first,

if any?  

Elenita “Neth” Dano, Asia Director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) remarked, that we must first raise awareness about the issues we wish to combat, this is key to a more sustainable global development agenda. SDGs should act as enablers. Post-2015 draft agreements should be a development agenda. UNFCCC is the driver. Dano argued that we have to look beyond SDGs 2013, because they talk only about food, water and health. However, the success of solving those conflicts builds upon the capacity on countries to adapt/mitigate to climate change in relation to those SDGs.

François Gave, Counsellor for Development and Sustainable Development, Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations debated that Climate Change is still politically charged and polarized. It tends to be a left-winged and right-winged debate.  He called for a broad-based world consensus on climate change and action. He outlined those ideas below:

1. Incentives (Carbon pricing) Is on the road map to Lima and Paris.  The September 21st, Climate Summit will offer a global schematic that will be addressed in Peru this December at COP 20.
2. Building confidence and addressing the free-rider problem through rules, transparency and monitoring at the private and civilian level.
3. Perceptions. The language barrier between science and public information is not being addressed.

If we are to illustrate how awareness is the key to driving dialogue, development draft agreements like the Post-15 Agenda and the UNFCCC as well as others across the globe are mirroring much of the dialogue from this roundtable, and we are slowly learning that integration is a must.

The main takeaways from this roundtable is that only through collaboration, adaptation, and dissemination will sustainability be ensured in our development goals.  It is only a matter of time before further integrated dialogue on each sectors’ development needs eliminates the separation of climate change from sustainability goals and unites them as dependent on the success of the other.

I know what you are all thinking... we know this already?

Exactly.  Join the Call to Action.  See you in NYC for the Climate Summit. 

There can be no Social Justice without Environmental Justice.

What we aren't hearing about from Bolivia

"So now I can only ask for your prayers for our indigenous fellows in order to bring some hope to this people who have lost the few things they had, their crops, their land, their animals and their homes."

We all get the emails that come from foreign countries, asking us for something. They are scams, of course. But today, I received this email from Carmen who I met at the U.N. in early January while attending on session (OWG7) on developing the next round of sustainable development (see previous post). Today, she is asking for our prayers.

What struck me about Carmen was how passionate she was about dealing with climate change. She was a prominent voice at the session arguing that sustainable development could never be achieved without dealing with climate change.

Her story below is real (I delved into the international press), but not covered in the U.S. media. While we can't say that these current conditions are linked to climate change with any certainty, people in the global south do make this link, right or wrong, and typically believe that the problems have been caused by the industrialized nations.

I share Carmen's accounting (verbatim) to give you a sense of what we hear when we attend the international meetings.  Take a look at the images from Reuters.  This has been haunting me all day as I ask myself, what can I do besides send prayers?  

Dear women,

I’m writing to share a little of the grief that we have being suffering here in Bolivia in the last month. Bolivia has suffer the worst wet season in years and we have take into account that is not a NIÑO or NIÑA year, already 50.000 families have being affected, and around 30 casualties due to the rains, almost 80% indigenous people of lowlands in the Amazonian forest.

The causes are basically three: - Climate change - The dams in Brazil - Deforestation With the increase of co2 of 400ppm the increase of global average temperature of 0.8 C has cause an increase of only 4% of humidity that has being translated in almost three times more rain in the wet season, that has also impacted another countries of the world develop and developing.

That is why I urge to stop talking about a 2C limit event 1.5 will be catastrophic, we have estimated that by the time we reach and a increase of 1C we may have lost the ways of life of 50% of the indigenous people here in Bolivia, unless something is done, the tragedy that today we are facing may have impacted some communities even for ever, including a great number of species that we have already seen how they are migrating; a few weeks ago a wildcat was hunted in a city where this animal has not being seen before, and we have lots of other examples.

Although studies about the dams have being going on since the 90 and despite the opposition of grassroots movement in brazil, I remember talking about this with Norma already in 2007 and the effects of mega dams in the Amazonians as well as other parts of America, most of the calculations for them have being done with typical precipitation rates and did not took into account the possibility of increasing rains, now water is stuck in Bolivian territory, dams in brazil especially Jiarou and San Antonio have already over passed their limit of 75 m of water, and even the infrastructure itself can be impacted.

Bolivia has a deforestation rate of 300.000 ha a year’s 20 times more than the global average, that is why we have to abolish the slash and burned based agriculture which is a practice that came with colonization, people here used to live in harmony with the forest and the jungle but slash and burned based agriculture makes it easy to just burn the forest and open land to new crops in many cases monocrops. Also we have strongly recommended not to deforest the higher parts of the basin especially the area or TIPNIS where average precipitation reaches over 5000 mm this forest work as sponges for the extra water and keep the climatic system "healthy" but with the efforts to have the highway and new coca fields, people are already feeling the impacts.

Therefore the Bolivian tragedy cannot be blame only in climate change but in the fatal combination of causes al related the thirst for energy of the occidental way of life.

That is why my labor is focus right now with the bases, I have being organizing a solidarity campaign for the Mosetenes Indigenous people in their territory 6000 people have being affected by the floods, they have lost almost everything children cannot go to school, and they are living with water under their feet and two babies have pass away. I being advise not to ask any kind of international help in order not to have problems with the gob, at least for now. (Bolivia is not accepting international aid) the gob will only help people that will vote for them in the elections that is why they have not declare emergency yet.

So now I can only ask for your prayers for our indigenous fellows in order to bring some hope to this people who have lost the few things they had, their crops, their land, their animals and their homes. My commitment to fight climate change is stronger than ever and in that sense we will continue to help the people affected.

Please see some images in: http://in.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=INRTX18J4G#a=4

Facebook campaign: https://www.facebook.com/events/595008687241058/

If anyone needs more specific information please write me. Thank you and keep on with the global efforts.

Regards, Carmen Carmen Capriles Cel: +59178877955 La Paz - Bolivia

Revisiting the United Nations

On this chilly day in January, I find myself sitting in the Trusteeship Council Chambers of the United Nations. A very long time ago, back when I was still in high school, I had a chance to tour the U.N. with my family. A trip to New York was certainly an adventure for someone from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the chance to see the institution that represented the world was exciting. I didn’t know anyone who had been to the U.N. I still remember looking at all the flags of the world in awe and being thrilled to see stamps from so many countries, my being a semi-serious stamp collector and all. I don’t remember much else about what we saw on the tour, but at the time, I doubt that I had a good sense of the wide array of roles that the U.N. plays in the world.

I am no longer new to U.N. processes, having attended the international climate conferences for the past five years, as readers of this blog know. Contacts that I have made through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings, especially Dr. Gillian Bowser of Colorado State University, led to my becoming involved with the National Science Foundation-funded Global Women Scholars Network. That group signed on as a member of the Women’s Major Group (WMG) that is working on the post-2015 goals for sustainable development. The WMG goes back to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit during which women were recognized as one of the nine major groups of civil society. These groups are analogous to the constituency groups of NGOs in the UNFCCC process. (I have previously written about my role in the Research and Independent NGOs or RINGOs. See, for instance: http://moraviancollegeatunfccc.blogspot.com/2011/11/so-what-is-ringos.html. And if you haven’t noticed, all U.N. functions use a lot of acronyms!)

Although I am new to the SDG process and meetings, I am not new to the themes. I teach a course on sustainability and redefining prosperity, and last year, I served as the co-chair for our year-long In Focus theme on sustainability. One of the main topics being considered at the U.N. this week is how climate change should factor into the next round of SDGs – yet another reason why there is some logic to my being here. But also, long story short, due to it still being our break between semesters and my relative proximity to New York City, I was invited to represent the Global Women Scholars Network at this event.

Over the past several weeks, the WMG members have been circulating drafts of several documents for both OWG7 and the upcoming OWG8 at which ecosystems and biodiversity are key themes. This group’s documents for OWG7 can be found at http://www.wedo.org.  As these documents circulated back and forth via emails and “the cloud” (just how did people collaborate before the internet), it became clear to Gillian and I that there is need for the inclusion of more sound science to strengthen arguments and to formulate sound recommendations.

So here I am – almost 4 decades later – at the U.N. sitting in the Seventh Session of the General Assembly Open Working Group (OWG7) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The theme today is Sustainable Consumption and Production including chemicals and waste. Chemicals, natural resources, conservation, natural resources, environmental and human health, toxicity, biodiversity, climate change, poverty eradication, gender equality and women’s rights – a career’s worth of scholarly interests plus many more – all converging at once. This is a far cry from an early interest in seeing the world vicariously through stamp collecting.

My day started with attending a Women’s caucus at the U.N. Foundation (well, after catching the 4:45 a.m. bus into NYC). The conference room was filled with women from around the world, each representing a different NGO. We only gave brief introductions, but I may have been the only “academic” in the room. The time was used to review presentations that would be made on behalf of the WMG during the day and to plot strategies for documenting the events and for outreach to policymakers. I felt very welcomed, and was impressed with the wide range of knowledge, the humor, and the passion that was clearly evident in the room. But I also felt uncomfortable with the strong anti-chemical, anti-technology vibes I was picking up.

It is here that the worlds of my scholarly interests collide. I was trained as a biochemist, coming up through chemistry-based academic departments. I was also a graduate student in plant sciences at the time many of the new genetic-based technologies were first being applied. I follow advances in fields such as genetic engineering, synthetic biology, green chemistry quite closely. At the same time, I work in circle of conservationists and environmental activists, many who are quite chemophobic and typically anti-GMOs, so things feel a bit schizophrenic for me at times. I wasn’t surprised to hear concerns about nuclear energy, genetic engineering, environmental estrogens, and large-scale biofuel production from this group, but wasn’t expecting a debate over how synthetic biology is defined. Many concluded that it is far worse that genetic engineering. Sigh. I teach that topic with some enthusiasm.

Because the Global Women’s Scholar Network does not yet have official credentials for the SDG process, I am actually here under the auspices of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). During the online drafting of the position papers, I learned that my comment noting that "in order to move forward and to sound credible, we can’t be against everything" was a minority opinion. So when the WMG presentation for today included a statement about a goal of zero hazardous chemicals by 2030, I cringed inside, but remained silent. Because I was new at the caucus, I played the role of observer-learner.

As I was getting my security clearance at the U.N., there was another person new to the process. Somewhat ironically, it turns out that he was representing the International and American Chemical Councils. He asked what group I was representing, and when I said the “Women’s Major Group”, there was a heavy sigh. I quickly added that I was trained as a chemist, but the conversation was over.

The official morning sessions began with the co-chairs for OWG7 hearing presentations and interventions from representatives of the Major Groups and other stakeholders. There are nine Major Groups in all, but not all were represented today. Speakers represented the interests of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, the Children and Youth Major Group, Indigenous Peoples, and the WMG. The Business and Industry Major Group representative (yes, the guy I met at security) spoke on behalf of the Chemical Councils – the only voice not speaking about the evil impacts of chemicals on people and the environment. In a way, I felt sorry for him. Fortunately, one of the co-chairs of the session said what I had wanted to say at the caucus, that essentially all chemicals can be hazardous at the right dose or under the right condition, so total elimination of them is essentially impossible.

I still believe that technological innovations are key in helping us to attain food security, develop clean, renewable energy sources, find cures for diseases, address climate change, clean up toxic environments, and address at least some of the social and economic inequities on our planet. Somehow, we have to find ways to balance the emotional responses and fears of chemicals and technology with evidence-based decision-making. The passion of civil society is essential for pushing governments to act, but the policy decisions have to be practical, and hopefully, based on science. As one plenary speaker said later in the morning, we need system innovations, not system optimizations.

I have to find ways to convey this message such that my invitation to participate with the WMG isn’t revoked. I care about the same issues that they do, as I fully understand the disparate impacts that unsustainable practices, poverty, lack of access to education, climate change, water shortages, and environmental toxins have on women. But I also know that we can’t solve these problems by going back in time in terms of technology. Neither these conversations, nor finding the path to a truly sustainable future given all of our global challenges, will be easy. Yet, as I listened to the dialog amongst representatives from nations around the world – nations that used to be bitter enemies in war that are now trying to work collaboratively to tackle these challenges – I felt a sense of hope.

Leaving the building, I saw images of U.N. peace-keeping forces helping villagers build a community well, of the Holocaust, of melted and fused metal items found at Hiroshima, children’s posters on Human Rights, and an automatic rifle converted into a musical instrument. These were all powerful and conflicting reminders of how complex the world is, and how far I have come since that first trip to the U.N. so many years ago.