Today at Brown

Ten Brown students will accompany J. Timmons Roberts, director of the Center for Environmental Studies and professor of sociology, to the global climate talks that begin this week in Cancun, Mexico. The talks are part of The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, established in 1992 as an attempt to limit the man-made emissions that are contributing to global warming. More than 190 and countries will participate in this year’s talks.

Today at Brown caught up with Roberts before he boarded the plane:

Who are the students and what is their interest in the talks?

With help from the Watson Institute and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, I have been able to help cover the costs of five Brown undergrads, three master's students, and two doctoral candidates. They come from four programs on campus, with quite different interests: international relations, sociology of development, environmental studies, and public policy. The response from students has been real excitement because they can hear directly from people about the issues they have only been able to study second-hand.

What will the students be doing at the talks?

In the world of climate negotiations, Latin America is terra incognita — that is, very little is known about the region’s special risks from climate change, its efforts to adapt, and its positions in the negotiations are quite misunderstood.

We have just created a joint Web portal with a new network of groups from 10 nations in the region called the Plataforma Climatica Latinoamericano. The website will be going live this week and will feature articles from Brown students Adam Kotin, Arielle Balbus, Emily Kirkland and Taryn Martinez  along with my project manager Guy Edwards.

At Cancun, most of the Brown students will be paired with Plataforma members from the region to support their work and to write something together for the site’s blog. They’ll be attending negotiations in the big plenary halls and smaller rooms, attending official “side events,” talking to civil society groups, and generally trying to understand the complexity of these exciting events. And in so doing, students will also be pursuing their own academic and personal interests.

What are the main issues at these talks?

The future of the Kyoto Protocol is on the line. It is set to expire in 2012, and there are proposals to extend it. There are negotiations on funding climate work in developing countries, which is the issue I focus most upon, and there is talk about helping transfer technology to the big developing nations, and to pay rainforest nations to limit deforestation. That is the top of a very long list!

Given the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, how optimistic are you that there will be any progress during this round?

To be honest, not very. I think the core problems that caused the train wreck in Copenhagen have still not been addressed. But for an environmental sociologist who studies the root causes of tensions between the global North and South, these kinds of times are very important and interesting. And from low expecations may come surprises.

Are there still skeptics about global warming and do they have a role at the talks?

There are skeptics, but they are very few globally. Their numbers and impact are much larger in the United States. Their role has been pivotal: the blocking of action by the U.S. Senate on climate change over the last 15 years has set back any efforts to address this issue by the human species. The prospects for action in the United States, and therefore globally, dimmed with the November election results.

What’s at stake here?

To state what most people know, with no binding treaty on emissions of greenhouse gases, we are locking ourselves into dangerous levels of increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And these gases stay up there for as long as 100 years and accumulate. The issue of funding is quite immediate. The poor nations are experiencing climate disasters like drought and flooding at an increasing rate, and they are the least able to cope with them. The funding to them is vital to their survival. Cancun might see some progress on this.

How will you and the students be keeping us up to date on what’s happening in Cancun?

The site I mentioned, which we are launching with the Latin American Platform on Climate (PCL), www.intercambioclimatico.com at Cancun, is a great way to keep tabs. Students will be blogging every few days. We’ll also have some more personal stories on Today at Brown over the two weeks. Thanks for reading!