Students attend ‘life-changing’ climate summit
Sam Kocurek first heard of the concept of climate change at fouryears-old from John Kerry, the United States special climate envoy. In November, the University of Connecticut senior got to meet him personally in Egypt.
The conversation took place at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), an annual meeting among global leaders to address the climate crisis, after Kerry gave a brief speech at the NDC Partnership pavilion.
“I saw him walk by and it’s the first time I ever saw a politician like that,” he said. “I did have a goal at the conference to be more assertive. So I kind of got in the way to a degree and just briefly chatted with him.”
He thanked Kerry for bringing visibility to the issue, something he’s also working to achieve in his career as an environmental science major.
Kocurek was one of the dozens of Connecticut students who attended the U.N. summit in Sharm ElSheikh through UConn, Southern Connecticut State University and Yale University. Through the universities’ programs, they had access to the Blue Zone, where negotiations took place, and the Green Zone, the public area that served as a platform for advocates, NGO leaders, scientists and other experts.
Many students said they noticed a glaring disconnect between the two zones, where the messages they heard from advocates weren’t addressed in the negotiations and in the final COP27 agreement. A diplomat from The U.S. State Department told Kocurek during the conference that the discussions were “semi unproductive.”
“There was an energy that was lacking in the room,” Kocurek said of the negotiations and when describing Kerry’s speech.
Kocurek said the Green Zone panelists, especially people from the Global South and Indigenous communities, exhibited a higher sense of urgency because of their direct experiences with the effects of climate change.
At the first panel he attended, Elizabeth Wathuti, the founder of the Green Generation Initiative, spoke about the drought in Kenya and how women are digging wells in an attempt to tap into groundwater. Some of them died in the process, she said.
“Their lives are being displaced. Relatives are dying as a direct result of climate change. The air feels heavier in those rooms,” Kocurek said.
For Christabelle Calabretta, a student at the University of Connecticut School of Law, the most notable moment was a panel that discussed the U.S. military’s environmental damage on island nations, but military spending or demilitarization wasn’t touched upon in the agreements. Another panel that stood out was about pollution-related diseases manifesting in children, another issue that was missing from the agreement.
Sydney Collins, a senior at the University of Connecticut, said during the conference, she heard scientists describe how nations are significantly behind on reducing warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius pre-industrial levels, a threshold U.N. leaders set in the past to avoid cataclysmic events. She heard some negotiators push for a 2 degrees Celsius target instead, which would create severe climate-related risks for island nations and developing countries.
“Is there a sense of urgency with negotiators? I should hope so. But I think how the structure of the conference is set up isn’t always conducive to the inclusion of certain voices,” she said.
Progress made at COP27
COP27 marked the first time young people got their own pavilion, which aimed to include youth in the policy making. Karen Lau, a sophomore at UConn, said she spoke with her peers at UConn about being scared for the future because they can’t make policies to shape it.
“I think as much as a lot of climate activists are feeling burnt out. There is a sense of urgency here and a sense of exasperation,” she said. “If the parties that are negotiating don’t act quickly enough and don’t take bold enough measures, then time is running out.”
Destiny Treloar was one of the Yale University students who represented environmental organizations and whose NGO helped lead the first-ever Climate Justice Pavilion. After seeing young people and grassroots organization leaders mobilize from all corners of the world, she’s hopeful the conference inspired more local action, she said.
“On the grassroots and local side, I think that’s where the real change is going to be most illuminated,” she said.
She also saw this inspiration in the People’s Plenary, when Indigenous leaders, youth, farmers and NGOs ran the program instead of conference officials.
“The whole room was on fire,” she said. “[People] knew every single chant that had anything to do with climate justice and also in multiple languages,” she said.
Lauren Wiggins, a master’s student at Yale University and an NGO representative, had attended COP21 in Paris. COP27 was more focused on climate justice — the social justice issues of the climate crisis — and it brought the experiences of underrepresented groups to the forefront.
As a local advocate and someone who grew up in an environmental justice community in Georgia, Wiggins felt validated hearing panelists describe their experiences.
“I felt like they were speaking to me, people like myself: people of color, people who are from historically oppressed groups,” she said. “Letting those individuals lead these causes towards the solutions that are needed for the world — that was very emotional just to hear that.”
Representing the U.S.
Wiggins said she felt a heavy sense of responsibility as an American to address the climate crisis.
The United States is responsible for the most historic carbon emissions and is currently the secondhighest polluting country. Wiggins said an attendee from the Dominican Republic described President Biden “as the most powerful man in the world” and stated that the U.S. sets the precedent for other countries.
She thought “Oh my gosh, we have so much to do within these two years, while we have the latitude to even get things like this accomplished,” she said. “Because people are looking to us constantly to make changes to enact policies and to finance vulnerable communities with the money that we have.”
Calabretta said hearing people’s stories helped her understand the gravity of the climate crisis and reflect on her privilege as a Connecticut resident, where one of the biggest plights is turning up the air conditioning in November. She remembers attending the same panel as Kocurek about people risking their lives in search of groundwater.
“That’s not a perspective that you can go and listen to these stories and hear people firsthand tell you that your country is destroying theirs and destroying their lives,” she said. “And I think that that perspective is extremely important for understanding how to have an impact, but also to feel responsible for making decisions that have a positive impact on the world and not just ignoring it, because we can here in the U.S.”
She was proud to represent Connecticut and New England, which is taking measures towards climate resilience compared to the rest of the U.S., she said.
The conference also helped her understand the importance of her law education and plans on using the degree to take more local action.
“Lawmakers are going to influence all of these decisions,” she said. “You can have all of the science in the world. But if there’s no law that says, ‘Hey, you can’t use fossil fuels,’ it doesn’t matter what other alternative technologies you have.”
Kocurek called the experience “life changing.”