At my boarding gate, super stoked and jumpy to hop on my plane to Poland. I realize that my journey to COP24 wouldn’t just be the next eight and a half hours but have been the past three and a half years.
In September 2015, right when I started my undergraduate education at Duke University, the world leaders adopted 17 goals with 169 targets and 1 global agenda: Sustainable Development. These Goals encompasses a wide range of complex and interrelated challenges. 2015 was also the year of COP 21 in Paris, where parties to the UNFCCC reached a landmark agreement to combat climate change (SDG 13) and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low carbon future. The Paris Agreement builds upon this Convention and – for the first time – brings all nations into a common cause to undertake take ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so. As such, it charts a new course in the global climate effort.
As I was researching the Paris Agreement for a climate change seminar class my freshmen year, I came across this very blog- Duke to the UNFCCC. I knew at that very instant I want to use the next few years at Duke to explore my passion, develop the knowledge, encourage innovation through research and accelerating action to underpin implementation of climate change solutions. It was then this journey had begun.
After taking more courses I found my calling in global action towards climate change. Studying the issue from a broader, more holistic manner so I found myself fitting the pieces together that all led to the formation of the concept of climate change and its impacts. It is a cliché that environmental problems are substantial, and that economic growth contributes to them. Sole regulatory solutions can be trade-offs between a healthy environment on the one hand and healthy growth on the other. However, there are some forms of development that are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. They lead not to a trade-off but to an improved environment, together with development that does not draw down our environmental capital. This is what sustainable development is all about – a revolutionary change in the way we approach these issues. Businesses and societies can find approaches that will move towards all three goals – environmental protection, social well-being and economic development – at the same time. Sustainable development and combating climate change is good business in itself. It creates opportunities for suppliers of ‘green consumers’, developers of environmentally safer materials and processes, firms that invest in eco-efficiency, and those that engage themselves in social responsibility.
As country’s like China and India throw their economic weight into the renewables and industrial revolution, they are triggering a global chain reaction that could benefit – and be a role model for – many more developing countries. At the COP, I would want to learn more on preempting the energy revolution in other developing countries while specifically exploring the opportunity to share and strengthen capacities through non-state actors’ approaches to a low carbon future.
At COP 24 in Katowice, Poland I will be working with the US Green Building Council as an accredited LEED Green Associate and with the UNFCCC’s Global Climate Action team. After all these years of following the international climate change negotiations, the time is almost here!
Suuuper proud of u. Good luck.