“Alright guys, leave your ego outside, it’s going to be useless from here on out.”
Words of that nature were spoken by Karen Wiltshire, Chair of Climate Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, in a small room on campus in early August. One might wonder what occasion warranted such words – and one might be even more struck by wonder when confronted with the answer: The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30).
Let’s start with the beginning; the chain of events which would lay the ground for that entirely warranted, yet unexpected, introductory statement.
Trinity has had observer status at The United Nation’s annual Climate Change Conference (also known as COP) for the past two years. In 2023, Trinity sent two staff members who had been able to self-fund the trip to Dubai. Last year, however, due to the small size of the COP29 in Baku, Trinity had only been granted tickets for virtual attendance. A group consisting of 15 in total undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students were selected after an open call for application was sent to every student on campus.
But this approach to COP lacked direction and purpose, Jane Hackett, Sustainability Manager of Trinity Sustainability, explains to The University Times:
“What I came up with after that was that we needed a more streamlined process”, she says, “not just to be reactive but to figure out, what does Trinity actually want? When we talk about climate change and climate action, what do we [Trinity] mean by that? And what are the areas we want to have a voice on?”
And so it happened, that Hackett, along with the Trinity Sustainability team, came up with a new strategy for Trinity’s involvement. The medium through which Trinity will assert itself at COP30? Its students, or more specifically, a white paper created by a group of 21 PhD researchers.
The white paper will give Trinity’s position on climate action, focusing on five specific areas: health, nature and biodiversity, human rights, small island nations, and education. Each subgroup will create 1-2 pages, which will be compiled with the work of the other groups. They meet up every week in the subgroups, and once every two weeks all together, but other than that, the structure and approach is entirely up to students themselves.
”A very nice aspect of this is that it’s very self-organised. It allows us to do things as we envision them, and therefore we have a lot more stake in it and get a lot more of a learning experience out of it too, which is very important,” Faolán Doecke Launders, a PhD researcher with the Department of Botany, told The University Times.
Saumya Shendurnikar is a microbiologist doing her PhD in the department of Environmental Engineering, and a part of the Health subgroup. For Shendurnikar, it’s not only the diverse nature of the working group, but the care taken to overcome inequalities within the group, that stands out: “Everyone here is equal and we do all our work equally. We [women] don’t need to shout to prove our point,” she recalls a senior staff member emphasising.
And this focus on making every voice heard is central to the ethos of the working group, Rose Dunne, a Teaching Fellow at the Trinity Education for Sustainable Development course and a PhD student in the Education subgroup, highlights:
“What Trinity is doing is really taking a bottom up approach, listening to student voices, and ensuring that they play a role in how Trinity leads change.”
“That’s whether it’s embedding climate action and sustainability into its educational courses, into its community outreach, or into its research, and ensuring that it’s taking this agenda seriously,” she said.
However, on a campus with more than 21,000 students, 70 per cent of which are undergraduates, a working group consisting of 21 PhD researchers seems to work against its noble mission to center student voices.
When questioned on whether she felt the make-up of the group was representative considering that undergraduate and master’s students were not included – let alone invited to participate – Hackett admitted that it wasn’t. Hackett, however, stood by herself and Trinity Sustainability’s decision, stating that it was the best option considering capacity and the fact that this was just a trial run.
The group of PhD researchers are “a microcosm of the university”, she concluded. But then again, a microcosm is still better than nothing at all.
And maybe that could be the takeaway from all of this: nice try, but not good enough – although that would be a shame and a terrible mistake.
In an interview with CBC Radio, Jayati Ghosh, economist and co-author of Earth for All, calls COP “performative”, and denounces it as a “meaningless ritual”. She argues that the only way to make climate conferences matter again is to rescale them completely, making the summits themselves smaller and more frequent, and to reframe how we see ourselves in the context of these international efforts.
Ghosh centers the role of citizens rather than decision-makers, emphasising the need for citizens to play an active role in holding their governments accountable: “It’s up to people to force the transformation,” she says.
While not perfect, Trinity’s COP30 working group marks just one such effort to rescale and refocus climate efforts.
The COP30 working group not only marks a great leap in Trinity’s involvement in the international conversation on climate change, but more importantly highlights the importance of connectivity. Trinity’s working group embodies and proves the possibility of a new approach to COP: a conversation that goes beyond ego and threads the connection between everyone impacted by the climate crisis – that is, all of us.
Karen Wiltshire’s words, artfully paraphrased to The University Times by Faolán Doecke Launders, are the blunt call-out perhaps not wanted, but needed, when discussing efforts like the working group – or the climate crisis in general. Faolán Doecke Launders, Rose Dunne, and Saumya Shendurnikar, along with their 18 peers, will play their part – not for Trinity, and certainly not for themselves, but because they understand that nothing exists in a vacuum.
As Shendurnikar put it: “If more people got into what’s talked about at these conferences, and if people started having these conversations more in general without you having to go to another country to sit around and talk about it, the world would become a much better place.”
In the end, the COP working group isn’t really about COP at all – it’s a lesson on standing up for the climate without believing that some one individual, or one group of individuals, are going to fix everything in one amazing feat of heroism. Much like the research being done by the PhD students, or the white paper they’re creating together, COP cannot stand in isolation.
Just because you weren’t invited to the conference of parties (or the working group), doesn’t mean the door is closed. We can’t afford to let it be.
