International Climate Connections
A More Sustainable World through Global Education
Dickinson students and faculty attend the conferences of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as official delegates and researchers, and CSE director Neil Leary is on the editorial board of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our students have opportunities to study climate change at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of Bremen in Germany, and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woodshole.
Eleven Dickinson students, Professor Jeff Niemitz, and CSE director Neil Leary attended the UNFCCC’s 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Durban, South Africa in December 2011 as part of a yearlong Global Climate Change Africa Mosaic. The Mosaic is an interdisciplinary 4-course program co-taught by Niemitz, Leary and Professor Jeremy Ball that included study of climate science, international climate policy, and ecological history of Africa, as well as training in social science field research methods, interview techniques, and video technology with Dickinson’s Community Studies Center and Media Center.
The delegation attended COP17 for two weeks, where they interviewed delegates to the conference, and spent a third week in South Africa for a service learning project with HIV/AIDS impacted children. The students wrote research papers on the negotiations, wrote essays for a course blog, and created an online, searchable video-archive of interviews with conference delegates. The interview archive can be viewed at here, and the students’ blog can be accessed here.
In 2009 a delegation of fifteen Dickinson students and faculty attended COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark as part of the course From Kyoto to Copenhagen, Negotiating the Future of the Planet. The students blog and interviews from Copenhagen can be found here.