Feature

Harris School Student Travels to Poland for UN Climate Negotiations

As world leaders gathered in Poznan, Poland, last month for the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Kyle Gracey, MSESP'09 made the trip as part of a United States youth delegation sponsored by the non-partisan organization SustainUS.

"Our main goal is getting a science-based climate treaty with the United States as a key leader," explained Gracey. "And so . we lobbied country delegations, both the U.S. and others, to support these policy positions."

Gracey called the negotiation as a whole "frustrating," but said SustainUS had some key successes, including securing the creation of an adaptation fund. "We worked a lot with small island nations and the least developed countries who are the ones that will be most affected by climate change because they have the least amount of money to adapt to it," he said. "Ensuring there's a global mechanism to protect them is crucial in this stage of the negotiation."

Comprised of 19 people ranging in age from 19 to 26, the group traveled to Poznan as advocates for sustainable development policy. They were part of a larger international youth delegation made up of over 500 people from 54 countries.

U.S. youth have had a growing presence at the U.N. climate change meetings since 2005. For last year's negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, Gracey worked on the stateside team that conducted media outreach, domestic policy research, and scheduled meetings with members of Congress.

While Gracey has a leadership role with SustainUS, he still had to go through the competitive, national selection process to be included in this year's delegation. His trip was funded in part by the Harris School's Women in Public Policy Conference Fund, and he spent time studying the disproportionate impact of global warming on women.

Gracey noted that other countries appear to be interested in working with the United States once again on climate change as the Obama administration prepares to take over. But concern lies in whether the Senate will ratify the new treaty to be finalized next year in Copenhagen, Denmark, which will succeed the Kyoto Protocol. He explained, "The problem with the Kyoto Protocol wasn't that the administration was against it, but the Senate didn't ratify it. So it never came into force in the U.S."

In Poznan, Gracey and the youth representatives met with staffers-or the members themselves-of 20 congressional offices. He said, "It was encouraging at least to see that a lot of [members] who have been leaders on this issue are keen to get the Senate to support something."

With less than a year until the Copenhagen conference, where final language will be written, SustainUS has plenty of work ahead. "We will shift gears in the intermediate time between the negotiations to focus on more domestic lobbying," said Gracey. "We'll be advocating to have enough of our senators support this to make sure it gets ratified whenever the administration signs it."