Dickinson to Durban » Archive
Complexities of the Negotiations
The Climate Policy Simulation is an exercise created by Professor John Sterman at MIT to allow students to understand climate negotiations through actually attempting to negotiation for different countries. On Thursday, September 15, 2011, the Africa Mosaic students and one of Dickinson’s first year seminar classes came together to participate in these negotiations. Each student was to represent a nation state which was part of one of the three blocks (developed countries, rapidly developing countries, and other developing countries) involved in the talks. The students were not required to have a deep understanding of their country’s climate change policy; however, each student received an informational briefing on the negotiations from their respective block’s perspective prior to the negotiations. Over the course of three hours, the blocks debated with each other … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Mosaic Action
Cramped and Crowded
My favorite yoga teacher always jokes that the only way to get world leaders to agree on anything is to force them into doing hot yoga together. With yoga mats arranged only inches apart in a small studio heated to 98 degrees Fahrenheit, each state head would have to peacefully “negotiate” their space, attempting to stay fully conscious of their breathing and the future of the world as each sweats on the other. I could not help by remember this joke during our class simulation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change last week. Each group comprised of ten or so countries divided into negotiating blocs denoted by their economic status: “developed,” “developing,” and “other developing” (i.e. “least developed”). We represented a specific state, simultaneously functioning under a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Key COP17 Issues, Mosaic Action, Summer Reading Responses
The Devil’s in the Details
In a previous blog post, I discussed the need for a “moral compromise” between the developed and developing countries of the world in order to reach an agreement on climate change. Though I identified three points of compromise that most people would consider “fair”, this does not mean it is easy to act on them – as the students of our Mosaic and another class learned firsthand in a mock climate negotiation devised by Climate Interactive. This simulation divided us into the representatives of individual countries that comprised three different blocs: developed (USA, EU, UK, etc), rapidly developing (China, India, Brazil, etc), and less developed (Sudan, Middle East, small island states, etc). We were not given countries based upon our knowledge, and most students did not know much at all about … Read entire article »
Filed under: Mosaic Action, Student Research
Finding the “middle ground”
Solving the problem of climate change is an extremely difficult task when trying to negotiate with hundreds of other nation states, not to mention NGO’s, advocacy groups, etc. Every group has their own priorities of what they want from the negotiations and trying to find a middle ground can seem impossible. Our class, along with a first year seminar class, attempted to do what the world has yet been unable to do; find the elusive “middle ground”. Going into this I definitely had a lot more knowledge of the real process then the average student, which helped to keep me realistic about the possibility of agreement. We were split up into 3 different groups of “developed” “rapidly developing” and “other developing” countries and were charged with agreeing on reductions for each … Read entire article »
Filed under: Environmental Politics
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