EDST members endeavour to contribute to efforts around climate change and bring their insights to inform the global effort to mitigate, even if modestly, the effects of climate change on Earth and on its social and natural ecologies.
An international United Nations Summit is currently held to that effect, COP27. It stands for The 27thUnited Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) summit and is taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, from November 7 to 18, 2022. This annual UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) brings together countries, civil society, companies and people on the frontline of climate change to accelerate action on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change .
A UBC delegation is participating in COP27. EDST colleague, Vanessa Andreotti, is part of the UBC delegation “with the aim of supporting Indigenous leaders from the Amazon region to raise awareness about neocolonialism in climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.” For more UBC resources on climate change and sustainability, please consult the UBC Website. A Virtual Event of COP27 Live will take place on November 15 from 12:00noon to 1:30pm. Registration is now open.
UBC “performs an annual GHG [greenhouse gases] inventory to measure and monitor our campus emissions. Through this process we fulfill the requirements of the Province of BC’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act, and report our annual progress through the annual Climate Change Accountability Report.” As well, “In 2007, UBC established a Technical Advisory Committee of academic, operations, staff and student members to measure our GHG emissions. The initial inventory used the World Resources Institute Greenhouse Gas Protocol to quantify 2006 emissions, which include direct and indirect emissions (Scope 1 and Scope 2), and optional emissions (Scope 3).”
Within the above campus context, EDST is part of these organisational and global movements on climate change. On June 13, 2022, EDST has launched a Climate Action Plan (CAP) Working Group under the co-leadership of EDST colleagues Claudia Ruitenberg & Robert VanWynsberghe and the membership of Samuel Rocha, Jenifer D’souza, Rosemarie Desmarais, and Chi Pham, and to whom we are profoundly grateful. The CAP WG will be sharing its proposals and recommendations on how to engage climate change within EDST sometime this year. EDST’s plenary will then consider practical ways to engage climate action and resources that would be made available for teaching, research and service aligned with climate change concerned. We very much look forward to the CAP WG’s recommendations and subsequent discussions.
