Colby students had front-row seats at the Bonn Climate Change Conference last month as international delegates and civil society members worked to hammer out climate policy.
The annual Bonn conference, hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, will strongly influence the decisions made at the UN’s annual Conference of the Parties, or COP, scheduled for the fall.
“It’s a planning meeting for the COP. A lot of things get haggled out and planned, and it’s very political, too,” said Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment.
In recent years, the College has been capitalizing on opportunities to participate in the global climate conversation. Last year, Colby attained observer status to the Conference of the Parties, and students attended the COP in 2022 and 2023 and the Climate Change Conference in 2023. This year’s gathering, COP29, will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November.
With around 6,000 attendees, the Bonn conference is much smaller than the Conference of the Parties, and it is intended to be a time for delegates to buckle down and get to work. At last year’s COP28 in Dubai, there were more than 84,000 registered attendees.
There are often more opportunities in Germany for students to be in the mix, according to Carlson. “I think there’s an accessibility to the proceedings at Bonn, which is not always there at COP,” she said.
The Buck Lab funded three students who went to Germany: Emma Rothwell ’26, an environmental policy and Spanish double major; Madison Lin ’25, an environmental policy and East Asian studies double major; and government major Peter Ryan ’27. The fourth student, environmental policy and history double major Lucy Robinson ’24, received a Founder’s Award from the Environmental Studies Department to go to Bonn.
Colby professors did not attend, but the students appreciated being able to reach out to Meg Boyle, a former visiting assistant professor in international environmental policy, during the conference. “We texted pretty frequently and met up a few times to chat, and she did give very helpful advice,” Lin said.
The students were glad to attend and delighted for the support that made it possible, though some expressed surprise and disappointment at how little forward progress was made on critical issues.
“It was incredible. I’m so grateful to Colby and the Buck Lab,” Rothwell said. “We’ve talked about the climate—now it’s definitely time to take action.”
For her and others in the Colby group, one of the best parts of the conference was the chance to join with other young people through YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, but every YOUNGO meeting I went to made me feel so hopeful,” Rothwell said. “If these are going to be the next generation of leaders, I feel so good and positive about the future.”
Ryan, who continues climate justice work this summer through an internship with Refugees International, appreciated getting an up-close view of how policy is actually made.
“I was encouraged to see countries working together diplomatically, even if their viewpoints didn’t align,” Ryan said. “Overall, the opportunity to travel to Bonn and experience a UNFCCC conference was amazing, especially because I was able to apply past knowledge and research in a professional setting.”
Some aspects of the conference were surprising. To Robinson, not least of those was the fact that sometimes it felt like there were two divergent events taking place at the same time.
In one, national delegates gathered in huge plenary rooms where they seemed to talk for hours about tiny changes proposed for Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a document that’s intended to enable international cooperation and unlock financial support for developing countries. In the second, non-government organizations met in smaller breakout rooms where people shared personal and powerful stories about how climate change is affecting their communities.
As Robinson watched the long, official debates about the placement of commas or the use of brackets in a sentence, it felt like some urgency was missing.
“I thought, this cannot be how policy is made. It just felt so crazy,” said the recent graduate, who next month will start a job as a climate change researcher at Virginia-based consulting firm ICF. “The developed countries are just so in the weeds that they’re not really thinking about the big picture of how these countries just need financial support to deal with mitigation adaptation. Unfortunately, money is never going to be an easy conversation.”
Lin noticed some of the same issues.
“People would get caught up in the wording for something very specific that they wouldn’t be able to get anything else done on the agenda, and then it would delay everything else,” she said.
“We’ve talked about the climate—now it’s definitely time to take action.”
Ultimately, there was not a lot of forward movement made in Germany, meaning that much of the work was pushed forward to Azerbaijan. “I think there was a lot of disappointment after Bonn just because there’s still so much work to be done,” Robinson said.
But the other parts of the conference felt different as people shared their experiences, fears, struggles, and hopes with one another. In one room, she listened carefully as a coalition of African women talked about gender and climate in a way that was powerful and personal. They described the impacts of the changing climate on menstrual cycles, childbearing, raising children, menopause, and more. In their conversation, there was a sense of a shared challenge and also a shared joy, Robinson thought.
“There was a lot of humanity—and a lot of human experience,” she said. “It was amazing to see both sides.”
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