BU students watch politics in action at Kyoto summit

Geography and environment professor Anthony Patt drove to Montreal Friday with a group of 12 Boston University students to observe international politics and negotiations at the 11th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The purpose of the conference was to implement the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that requires the 30 industrialized countries that signed on last February to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2008. While the United States has signed the agreement, Congress did not ratify it.

Patt said he brought his students so they could glimpse the inner workings of climate change politics.

“I wanted to give students the opportunity to see first hand how complicated the issues are and how big the community is out there who are working on this,” he said. “I attended the event two years ago when it was in Milan, Italy. I just found it an incredibly eye-opening experience as far as how many people are working on this and what negotiators face.”

For two days, the students got to attend informal negotiations among national delegates, as well as watch information sessions sponsored by non-profit Non-Governmental Organizations, who arranged the credentials for the students. Patt said he wanted his students to attend as many side events as possible, but it was also important for them to observe actual negotiations.

College of Arts and Sciences graduate student Katlyn Stillings said she attended a wide variety of sessions among the delegates.

“There were scores of negotiations in the rooms,” she said. “We sat in on negotiations between all the parties that were discussing post-Kyoto emission targets and parties discussing technology transfers from developed countries to developing countries.”

For Patt, there was another aspect to the negotiating process that he wanted his students to pick up on.

“I wanted them to gain an appreciation of exactly how slow they are,” he said.

Stillings said the talks were extremely slow at times.

“They can be discussing one word of language for an hour or half an hour,” she said. “And it’s just because there’s no agreement between countries about who is allowed to attend and who isn’t.”

There were moments when CAS graduate student Bill Boykin-Morris said he was at a loss to explain why negotiations progressed so slowly.

“The U.S. representative insisted that the word ‘such’ should be dropped completely so there would be no specificity about types of transfers of technology to the developing world,” he said. “I kind of had trouble wrapping my head around that one.”

But, Boykin-Morris said he felt that the goal of the conference -negotiating the Kyoto Protocols to make them more binding – was important.

“The more data we get, the more we figure out that greenhouse gases are affecting the way the climate is changing,” he said. “If the Kyoto Protocols expire in 2012 and policy-makers have not figured out a way to extend the framework of the treaty, we will be back at square one.”

Stillings said the long-term effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol is at risk.

“There is not currently a plan for post-Kyoto greenhouse gas emission reductions,” she said. “So countries need to start negotiating that now, not post-2012 when the Kyoto Protocols end.”

Despite the serious undertones of the conference, CAS junior Katie Glodzik said the overall mood was amicable.

“A lot of negotiations can be really friendly and the delegates even joke around,” she said. “And sometimes it did get serious and there was conflict between countries. But it was pretty optimistic, I feel.”

Glodzick said she felt the conference was an invaluable experience, as well as a sobering one.

“It was nice being around so many people who care about what you care about,” she said. “But it’s a bit of a slap in the face because you realize that the goal of scientists is to keep the atmospheric concentration below 450 parts per million and that probably won’t happen. It’s so difficult to satisfy every country’s interests.”