Students Practice Climate Change Negotiation

Weekend simulation includes an address from the French ambassador to the United States.

October 12, 2015

French Ambassador to the United States Gérard Araud speaks to students at the French Embassy on Friday. (Photo: Logan Werlinger)

French Ambassador to the United States Gérard Araud speaks to students at the French Embassy on Friday. (Photo: Logan Werlinger)

By Ruth Steinhardt

The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), also known as COP21, will gather in Paris this November with the aim of setting a new international agreement to keep global warming below about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

In anticipation of that global event, several dozen college activists gathered at the George Washington University for the UNFCCC Intercollegiate Climate Negotiation Simulation, where the students assumed the roles of countries that will attend the Paris convention.

The French Embassy, which has a longstanding relationship with GW, hosted the students at a reception where French Ambassador Gérard Araud delivered a career diplomat’s candid, often humorous advice on negotiations as well as an inside preview of the issues facing the COP21.

 


Gérard Araud. (Photo: Logan Werlinger)


As negotiators, he reminded students, they need to think first of the national interests of the countries they represent. “They’re not fighting for the good of humankind,” he said.

Each country, he continued, has a role to play and specific resources to bring to a worldwide climate agreement. While industrialized nations with high gross domestic products may immediately have to start reducing their carbon emissions, developing countries might need to stay at their current emission levels in order to maintain their economies—as many now economically powerful nations did a century ago.

“In a sense, what we are asking [developing nations] is not to do what we have done,” Mr. Araud pointed out. “We have to accept that one size doesn’t fit all. You can’t ask Germany and Burundi to make the same amount of effort.”

Mr. Araud took questions from students who—already adopting the roles they would play for the rest of the weekend—asked questions from the perspectives of parties such as the Alliance of Small Island States and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations.


GW student Erin McDevitt, who represented the Alliance of Small Island States, poses a question to French Ambassador Gérard Araud. (Photo: Logan Werlinger)


Though it might take decades to see the changes implemented at the COP21, Mr. Araud said, “the momentum is there” to make a difference. “All the countries want a success,” he said.

“We see Paris not as the end of the road, but as the beginning of one.”

Eleanor Davis, a senior in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences who helped bring the event to GW, said the event gave students new perspectives that will help them to bridge the gap between academic exercise and collective action.

“Climate change is the biggest problem in our generation’s lifetime, and international collaboration is the only way to find solutions to it,” she said. 


GW student Eleanor Davis with Mr. Araud. (Photo: Logan Werlinger)