‘I can’t see anything more important’
Professors from the Lehigh Valley are attending UN summit on climate change
Two college professors from the Lehigh Valley will have an opportunity to witness history, and bring back some of that history to their students, when they attend the United Nations climate conference in Scotland.
“I can’t see anything more important than going there and bringing this information back,” said Anita Forrester, a Northampton County College associate professor of geography. “How can I teach my students and not invest in their future by making sure climate change is important?”
Forrester, of Palmer Township, and Kristy Kelly of Bethlehem, who teaches at Drexel University, are leaving Friday for Glasgow, Scotland, and the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26 (for the 26th such conference). The summit, which opened Sunday, runs to Nov. 12.
Forrester, who is adviser to the school’s Climate Action Network and has organized two “climate strikes” in the Lehigh Valley, said she wanted to attend, in part, to ensure government leaders and others are held accountable for carbon emissions. The conference aims to get governments to commit to curbing those emissions fast enough to keep global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels.
And the Lehigh Valley is getting warmer and wetter, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose experts compiled and reviewed 30 years of data from the region and thousands of weather and temperature stations across the country, spanning from 1991 to 2020.
Forrester will be sharing as much as she can from the event with her students, sending social media posts and videos. She plans to incorporate what she has gathered at the summit in her class lessons.
Forrester “has a really good grasp on ... global studies, climate change and how everything is connected,” Northampton
spokesperson Katherine Noll said.
Kelly, an associate clinical professor in Drexel’s school of education, said the college has provided support for graduate and undergraduate students from Drexel to attend and participate in COP26. She said she will be supporting their studies while in Scotland.
Both Forrester and Kelly are part of Drexel’s contingent who applied to attend the event, according to Forrester, who is pursuing her doctorate degree at the Philadelphia school.
Kelly said her research interests include gender, education and social change, so she is attending to understand how gender shapes climate-change debates, particularly as they involve females.
“I attend and participate in the U.N. Commission on the Status of
Women in New York City each year in March, but this is my first time attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference,” she said.
Moravian University has also sent two faculty members to Glasgow, according to spokesperson Michael Corr. They are Diane White Husic, a biology professor who is dean of school’s natural and health sciences, and Hilde Binford, an associate professor of music.
The Glasgow summit is gathering leaders and participants
from around the globe to lay out the vision for addressing climate change, which is the umbrella term to describe the various effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases on the world, including extreme weather, and changes in rainfall patterns, ocean acidification and sea level.
Some people disagree with the severity of climate change projected by scientists, while others, notably in the petroleum industry, are being accused of spreading disinformation or
concealing evidence about the dangers.
Forrester said scientists have reached a consensus on the damage and danger if the world fails to act more swiftly and decisively.
“It’s really no longer anything two-sided,” she said. “We know the facts and the science, and the science is very clear.”