​For years, Brown University students in my “Engaged Climate Policy” course watched firsthand the negotiations to design the Paris Agreement, eventually adopted by 196 countries in 2015. Taking 15 students to the United Nations climate change negotiations across the globe since 2010, the course was unique in the U.S. The class was the center of my Climate and Development Lab, consisting of a dozen Brown undergraduates, a couple of grad students, research fellows, postdocs and myself, who conducted original policy research and spent a week at the negotiations “embedded” with top research institutes, environmental and international organizations from around the world.
 
Then in June, 2017, President Trump announced that he’d be withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. With a record delegation of 18 Brown students at the UN talks in Germany in 2017, we heard U.S. dignitaries like Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown proclaim that “We Are Still In!”-- that states, cities and corporations would pick up the slack and meet the pledge to reduce emissions our nation made in Paris. As the country most responsible for the greenhouse gases disrupting our planet’s climate, the rest of the world has always looked to us to do the heavy lifting. These local efforts are therefore crucial. To keep the effort by the international community to solve this wicked problem moving forward, national efforts matter most. We needed to get back in.
 
Therefore, it was time for us to change course.

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.