Brown University's Taubman Center for American Politics & Policy Policy has recognized Mili Mitra with the Noah Krieger Prize for Academic Excellence. Her thesis, titled "From Persecutors' Offices to Prosecutors' Offices: The Effects of Racial and Gender Diversity in U.S. Attorney's Offices," uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the impacts of diversity on prosecutorial behavior in American law.  

Mili's excellent writing and analysis skills also shone through as a member of the Climate and Development Lab, where her research focused on media coverage of international climate change negotiations. Her work culminated in an article in Climatic Change: "Global issue, developed country bias: the Paris climate conference as covered by daily print news organizations in 13 nations." Mili also helped write the 2015 AdaptationWatch report. 

Congratulations, Mili!

When climate change impacts strike, they hit vulnerable populations and developing countries first and worst.

These are the same populations that are least responsible for causing climate change, and yet most frequently lack the financial resources to prepare for and cope with the impacts, like storm surge, high winds, flooding, droughts and heat waves.

The impacts that cannot be avoided by reducing emissions or by adaptation efforts result in what we call “loss and damage” in climate change policy.

It took decades of pressure from vulnerable developing countries, but the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) finally established a body to address loss and damage in 2013 at COP 19.

It’s been five years since this body (the Warsaw International Mechanism, or the WIM) was established. And it’s been two years since the nearly 200 countries signed the Paris Agreement, which dedicated an entire article to loss and damage efforts.

So, are we putting our money where our mouth is?

During the first few months of its G20 presidency, Argentina's government has focused on jobs, infrastructure, and food security. But, in contrast to the previous Chinese and German presidencies, it has de-emphasized climate change, jeopardizing the group's goal of ensuring sustainable economic growth.

Benjamin N. Gedan and Christopher Phalen’s recent piece for AQ discusses how Mapuche indigenous communities in Argentina are becoming more assertive about reclaiming their ancestral lands, which could derail plans to develop the country’s shale gas and oil reserves.

The article frames the development of Argentina’s shale reserves as crucial to the government’s efforts to accelerate growth. Indeed, Argentina has the second-largest shale gas reserves in the world and the fourth-largest reserves of tight oil, and President Mauricio Macri has prioritized attracting foreign investment to the sector. The government wants to end Argentina’s reliance on foreign energy and achieve self-sufficiency by 2022. It is also interested in becoming a leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. To this end, it is boosting the supply of domestic natural gas and increasing renewable energy capacity. These topics and others will be discussed at the G20’s Energy Transitions Working Group meeting in Buenos Aires on Feb. 22 and 23.

That said, Gedan and Phalen’s article omits several important issues that merit discussion: Argentina’s commitments under the Paris Agreement to reduce its emissions and the global carbon budget; climate risks, including the threat of stranded assets and growing divestment from fossil fuels; and the potential benefits from a greater emphasis on renewable energy, storage and efficiency measures.

​During the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) last month, the former President of Kiribati, HE Anote Tong, called into question traditional understandings of the 1.5 degree target. This highly-contested objective states that Parties to the Paris Agreement aim to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” The goal has particular significance for former President Tong and the people of Kiribati given that their nation lies an average of two metres above sea level, making it one of the most vulnerable place on earth to climate change. 

Brown’s Climate and Development Lab is revving up for the UN climate change negotiations or COP23 in Bonn under the Fiji presidency following a busy couple of months of preparations.

Two squads of CDL researchers will attend the two weeks of the negotiations, where we will be working closely with some of our partners from around the world. Here’s a look at what we will be up to:

Working with our partners:

During the COP, CDL researchers will working with a variety of individuals and groups including:

• Supporting the Least Developed Countries Group Chair, Mr. Gebru Jember Endalew of Ethiopia
• Working with the United Nations Development Programme, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (Bangladesh), Climate Action Network International, and Oxfam International.  
• Collaborating with the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) which focuses on the Small Island Developing States and working specifically with the Seychelles and Palau delegations.
  Working with Climate Home to report on events and conduct interviews with leading figures at COP23.

Events at COP23:

The CDL is hosting an event at the German Development Institute Interconnections Zone in Bula on Saturday, November 11th from 9:00 - 11:00  called, “Transparency, Governance, and Accountability and Governance in Climate Adaptation – Perspectives from the Developing World”. We are co-hosting this event with AdaptationWatch, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). A second overlapping event will be held that afternoon in the WWF Pavillion, also featuring CDL work through the AdaptationWatch consortium.

The CDL’s director Professor Timmons Roberts will be on the panel for a side event at COP23 in Bonn titled, “LUCCC, A LDCs initiative to build long-term climate capacity and implement Article 11 of the Paris?” on Thursday, November 16th from 11:30 to 13:00. The panel will discuss the context, vision, and function and the role of universities outlined in LDCs University Consortium on Climate Capacity (LUCCC) under Article 11 of the Paris Agreement.

The lab is co-sponsor of and participant in Capacity Building Day, 16 November, at GIZ GmbH, Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strabe 9, 53175 Bonn. Our partners include the UN Development Programme, International Centre for Climate Change and Development (Bangladesh), University of Colorado-Boulder, Oregon State University, and the United Nations University.

Preparing for Bonn:

In preparation for COP23, lots of exciting work has been underway. Our latest book, the Paris Framework for Climate Change Capacity Building: Time for a Fresh Approach, is being prepared for publication with Routledge.

Other recent publications include the major annual policy report from Adaptation Watch on the implementation process of adaptation governance under Paris.  

The CDL works with partners from GFLAC, PACJA, Adaptify (Netherlands), Both ENDS (Netherlands), ENDA Tiers Monde (Senegal), Grupo de Financiamiento Climático para América Latina y el Caribe (Mexico), International Centre for Climate Change and Development (Bangladesh), Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (Nepal & USA), Nur University (Bolivia), Oxford Climate Policy (UK), Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (Kenya), Stockholm Environment Institute (Sweden), Transparency International (Germany), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Centre d'Etudes du Développement durable  (Belgium), and University of Colorado-Boulder's Environmental Studies Program (USA)
Find more on http://www.adaptationwatch.org/.

A series of policy briefings have been released weekly from the AdaptationWatch network. This work was coordinated by Danielle Falzon of Brown’s CDL and Kevin Adams of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and can be found at http://www.adaptationwatch.org/#our-publications.

Researchers in our lab are are contributing to a myriad of projects ranging from supporting energy sovereignty for tribal nations through grant writing to contributing editorial content to ClimateChangeNews.org.
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Further, we have researchers working with the US Climate Action Network on a climate finance brief for congressional staffers, and others researching financial flows to climate action and denial organizations. Several other projects are also in the works.

Follow us on Twitter here during the COP:
@ClimateDevLab
@TimmonsRoberts
@GuyEdwards

​This week Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the U.S. will join other G20 countries for the leaders’ summit in Germany, where climate change will be one of the top issues. Following President Trump’s announcement to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, there is pressure on Canada to work more closely with Brazil, Mexico and Argentina to fill the leadership vacuum in the Western Hemisphere.