Bali Here We Come

As my trip to the United Nations climate conference draws near, I’m flooded with memories from my first experience at the UN. Back in 2000 as a senior at IC I had the opportunity to attend the UN climate conference in The Hague, Netherlands. Greenpeace USA recruited 250 students from the United States for the US Student Climate Summit. The goal was to have students demonstrate to the US negotiating delegation that there was strong public support for taking action on climate change at the international level. Another goal was to have students serve as the eyes and ears of the American public about what was happening at the conference. That is, to report back to our family, friends, and communities about how positively (or negatively) the US delegation was contributing to the negotiations. At the conference I spoke with delegates from across the globe, attended workshops on a variety of climate change topics, and participated in media events to raise awareness of the key issues being discussed.

Probably the most exciting part of the conference was seeing all the people in action who were working to ensure that the negotiations had positive outcomes. I was truly inspired by seeing the dozens of representatives from environmental organizations working tirelessly to provide constant analysis of the various scenarios at play during the negotiations and attempting to influence world leaders to maintain strong commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, the details of which were still being decided in The Hague. This really sealed the deal for me in terms of realizing that I wanted to make a positive impact on the world related to environmental issues. I thought, if all these people can work to enact positive change, then so can I.

Years after The Hague when I came back to work at Ithaca College, I thought other students could benefit from participating in these UN climate conferences. Realizing that the next meeting was going to be in Montreal, relatively close to Ithaca, I saw an opportunity to engage IC students in the upcoming conference. It seemed like a good idea to have Ithaca College apply for observer status, which is required to participate in the climate conferences, and send a group of students to Montreal. I ran the idea past a few of my colleagues at IC and they agreed that it would be great to get the College involved with these UN conferences.

Before I knew it, we had an all star committee working on this project. Tom Shevory (politics), Jason Hamilton (biology), Susan Allen-Gil (biology), Marian Brown (Provost’s Office), and Gordon Rowland (communications) were just a few of the key players involved with this initiative. Needless to say, our application was accepted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the administering body of the UN climate conferences, meaning that we can now attend and participate in these meetings. This observer status designation gave us the opportunity to send 20 students to the climate conference in Montreal in 2005 led by Jason Hamilton, Tom Shevory, Casey Malsam (residential life), and myself. Since then, Garry Thomas and I attended the next conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 2006. And now here I am, heading to Bali, Indonesia with Warren Schlesinger.

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The photo is of Jan Pronk, the chair of The Hague UN climate conference, symbolically putting a sandbag on a dike being built around the conference center. The dike was constructed by NGOs in order to represent that the Netherlands would be submerged under water due to rising sea levels as a result of climate change. Pronk showed his support by participating and called on delegates to come to a positive agreement in order to tackle climate change. I happened to be near him and was captured on the Associated Press photo that had worldwide circulation.