Over the next week I will be using this blog as a platform to share my experience and reflections at the Bonn Climate Conference SBSTA50. This will be the 50th Session of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (hence, SBSTA50). Although I am very excited to share my reflections on this conference, although I do not expect to always have something to say about it, or whatever thoughts I have to be polished. This will be my first experience at a climate negotiation environment, and I expect to learn a lot from it.
As part of the Human Ecology degree, students at COA are allowed to do immersive residencies on particular topics (sometimes research, cultural immersion projects, or otherwise independent projects of different sorts). I am currently in the middle of doing two independent studies in Berlin, Munich, and Mostar; one is on Peace Education, and the other on Arts & Culture - hence, the multiple posts I have been making recently about experiences in independent Film Festivals, Peace Education Programs, and other cultural events I have been attending.
From Peace Education to Environmental Justice
In the field of Peace Education there is an ongoing conversation about what constitutes peace education? What are the essential components that it addresses/should address? What form or forms should it take? As a modern academic institution, or rather a discipline, Peace Education has existed for almost 60 years, and it has worked to address issues of violence all across the world as a response to the world wars that occurred in the middle of the 20th century. Lately, I have been reading a lot about the history of Peace Education and the philosophies that support it. Literature I have encountered includes Monisha Bahaj’s work on the Encyclopedia of Peace Education (2009), Peace Education International Perspectives (2016), and several papers published on “The Journal for Peace Education” where I would like to highlight Michalinos Zembyla’s paper “Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education” published in 2016. I mentioned these publications because they were the ones that inspired me to dive deeper into the topic and look for an intersectional understanding of Peace Education theory and praxis.
Throughout the literature I have studied I have realized that a fundamental component of Peace Education is environmental peace. You can see this reflected in UNESCO’s approach to Peace Education, where peace is grouped under three basic sources: inner-peace, social peace, and peace with nature (UNESCO, 2005). Hence, I believe that to understand the context in which climate negotiations are occurring is very important, and I hope to share what I learn so that other young students can diversify their action toolkit and hopefully find new channels for social/political engagement. My interest, however, in attending the Climate Conference is not all theoretical, if anything is more moral. Studying at College of the Atlantic (COA), a school that puts a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmental justice (and which I would say is at the forefront of educational experimentation), along with my experiences on Semester at Sea, have made me aware of the state of the planet and how urgent is that we work towards the development of policies and strategies to address climate change. During Semester at Sea I took a Global Change Ecology class, which opened my eyes to realities of the world and specially to those that are lived in non-western developing countries (or otherwise the Global South), countries like Vietnam, Myanmar, India, South Africa, Ghana, Mauritius, to mention some. Those are stories that I am yet to share, but the experiences on Semester at Sea added an experiential component to this state-of-the-world awareness that I developed at COA.
As someone with a strong interesting in “peace”, and born and raised in Chile, I grew up concerned about issues of inequality and social justice. Chile is a country of the global south with a “developed” economy, yet a lot of inequality; highly vulnerable to Climate Change, but considered also one of the best prepared countries to face it. The impacts of Climate Change, however, will not going to impact the wealthy Chileans in the same way it will impact the rest of the country’s people. In the same way, globally, the causes and impacts of Climate Change are disproportionate between the Global North and South; developing and developed countries. In this context of high inequality, is that I believe international cooperation is necessary to address Climate Change, otherwise we risk a future of high resource scarcity, large-scale environmental catastrophes, which could lead to intra-national and international violent conflict, or as the Australian National Centre for Climate Restoration, called in a publication viralized through Facebook, an “existential climate-related security risk” (Spratt & Dunlop, 2019).
The idea of environmental justice, which is the framework I am most interested in studying, brings about the ideas of peace and peace education that I was speaking about earlier in the post. Environmental justice (and I’d like to acknowledge: I am yet to dive deeper into the literature and philosophy of this field) and the movements I have gotten to know thus far, address issues of violence at multiple levels. it recognizes, for instance, that industrially developed nations in the Global North contribute to most of Green House Gasses (GHG) emission but that Climate Change’s impact in the Global South it’s going to be bigger. Therefore, countries in the Global North should be held accountable for a larger portion of the development, implementation, and funding of adaptation and mitigation strategies for Climate Change. I have heard over the past months, activists and academics that go beyond, and connect contemporary global inequality with colonial histories of violence and oppression, that gave the opportunity to colonizing nations to develop. These thought, I think connects with addressing that historical violence perpetrated that is so important for Peace Education.
In summary, concern about Environmental Justice was an organic future of my academic interests, I want to be of best use in the creation and sustenance of sustainable peace, I want to work for the prevention of war, the eradication of social, structural and cultural violence, and first and foremost protect those whom I love, and the world that I have been so incredibly privileged to see. I want a future so that one day I can be able to share this world and this stories with friends, family and children. I think it should be at the forefront discussions in education, politics and many other sectors of society so that together we can solve what some label “the biggest challenge of the 21st century”.
Why Bonn?
This is one of those serendipitous situations where a piece just happened to fit perfectly in the puzzle. COA happens to send a delegation every year to the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP24), as an experiential component of the Environmental Justice class given by Doreen Stabinsky, and the COP24 is expected to be hosted in Santiago de Chile, the city where I grew up. So, counting that everything will go as planned, I will be attending the COP24 with COA. Other the THIMUN, which I attended in The Hague on 2013, I have never been in a UN Environment. So the SBSTA50, happens to occur right at the time when I find myself in Germany with a flexible schedule and relative agency on how I spend my time; moreover, I can apply Peace Education frameworks to my experiences and reflect upon, for instance, how education is addressed within the context of climate negotiations, on education about climate negotiation, for climate negotiation, and for the addressing whatever results from climate negotiations.
I hope that this blog reflects my learning throughout the experiences I have had so far, and the ones that I am about to embark, and I hope that in the future, some of this can be used as a resource for my own further education, and the education of those interested in similar topics.
That being said, if you are not a professor of mine (but especially if you are), I would love to receive comments, feedback, and chat about these things! So you can either leave a comment, or send me an e-mail or find me on Instagram.
So I hope enjoy the ride, and I look forward to hearing from you!