The University of Bristol has declared a climate emergency. We hear from just some of Bristol’s experts about what’s happening.

 

Professor Rich Pancost

Professor Rich Pancost, Head of School for Earth Sciences considers the University’s role and its commitment to become carbon neutral in 2030.

‘Rather than ignore what’s happening we can, in our different areas of expertise, work together on sustainable solutions for all.’

 

 

 

 

Sir David Attenborough

Sir David Attenborough, broadcaster and naturalist talks about the scale of the problem and how we have the power to tackle it.

‘If we have an obligation to our children, our grandchildren and further generations then it is time we took that seriously.’

 

 

 

Jack Farmer

University of Bristol alumnus and Co-Founder and Operations Lead at LettUs Grow Jack Farmer is an expert in controlled environmental agriculture.

‘We want to enable new business models for local growers and play a key part in creating a non-wasteful food supply chain by supporting alternative, resilient food production’

 

 

 

Dr Alix Dietzel

Dr Alix Dietzel is a lecturer in Global Ethics at the University of Bristol, specialising in climate change and global justice.

‘We are at a critical crunch point with climate change and it can no longer be ignored’.

Professor Rich Pancost, Head of School – Earth Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment talks about the University of Bristol’s response to climate emergency.

On 17 April 2019 the University of Bristol became the first university in the world to declare a climate emergency. It enshrines our institutional obligation to address the climatic, ecological and wider environmental threats posed to our planet and our society.

The University has been at the forefront of exploring and solving these challenges for decades, both through our world-leading research exemplified by the Cabot Institute for the Environment and our education via the Sustainable Futures theme. Some of our environmentally focused Schools – including Civil Engineering, Geographical Sciences and Earth Sciences – are ranked among the very best in the world. Many of us contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, including the most recent report that highlighted the dire consequences of failing to limit warming to 1.5˚C.

‘Rather than ignore what’s happening we can, in our different areas of expertise, work together on sustainable solutions for all.’

We must do more. Just like our pledges in 2015 when Bristol was the European Green Capital, the Climate Emergency Declaration recognises that our University’s impact on our city and planet transcends its research and educational mission. We are an employer, a procurer and a consumer; our academics fly across the world and our students fly to us; we consume food, energy, water and minerals. We are part of the problem and we must be part of the solution. In particular, the Declaration renewed our commitment to become carbon neutral by 2030. But what does that mean? How will we do that? We know it will be messy and complex, just as our decision to divest from fossil fuels was. Not all companies that hold fossil fuel assets are the same; in fact, many are critically involved with obtaining the resources needed for a post-fossil fuel electrical future. But then, we must ensure that our own efforts for carbon neutrality do not simply shift the environmental burdens to other countries nor hinder their own development.

We do not have all of the answers yet. Consequently, I consider the Declaration to be a call for a renewed, self-critical, demanding and collaborative conversation about the future of our University. It is an opportunity for dialogue between all of us – staff, students, alumni, partners and stakeholders across our institution, city and the world. It will embrace every aspect of our organisation and it will lean on our own world-leading expertise and potential for innovation.

Dr Alix Dietzel, Lecturer in Global Ethics, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) and specialist in Climate Change and Global Justice considers the ethical dimensions of climate emergency.

In our bid to act now against the current climate emergency, we must not neglect the ethical dimensions of climate change. A focus on justice needs to be included in the conversation. Climate change will bring suffering to communities, individuals and ecosystems and those least responsible for the problem will suffer the most.¹

Those least responsible include people living in the Global South and economically disadvantaged people living within wealthier countries, who have very low emissions and at the same time have little adaptive capacity to climate change. And, of course, future generations, who have done nothing to contribute to climate change. The fact that that these people will suffer more than the wealthiest individuals in the world, who contribute most to climate change, presents a profound case of injustice.

My research focuses on climate justice and the evaluation of the global political response to climate change. This approach allows me to understand and assess the complexities of state (UNFCCC, Paris Agreement) and substate (cities, NGOs, corporations, individuals) responses to climate change and make suggestions for reform that are grounded in both ethical considerations and policy analysis.

My work has a focus on human rights and where responsibilities for taking action actually lie.

I analyse policy documents, outcomes and negotiations taking place at the global level. I consider both state and non-state actors to get a sense of what responses are working, who’s doing best in terms of acting justly (protecting human rights, making fair decisions) and what can be adapted and replicated.

What my research is showing is that at the sub-state level organisations are more ambitious and creative and it’s this area which gives me hope. States have trouble making just decisions at the global level. For example, if you think about the Paris Agreement negotiations, we had over 200 parties trying to agree on a way forward for addressing climate change, so it was inevitable that any measures were going to be ‘watered down’ and somewhat conservative in their approach. Otherwise, not every state in the world could have come to an agreement.

‘We need to humanise the global climate change problem. We need to get away from the idea that we’re somehow separate and remember to include a focus on human rights as part of this debate.’

Cities, by comparison, have a much easier time implementing change than states. City mayors and councils can make decisions on transport, new buildings, food supply, and so on and all these changes can make a very big difference. So, for the University of Bristol and the City of Bristol to announce a climate emergency is a good thing, because it shows potential for movement forward at a local level at least.

Universities can also join together in their thinking as they have many aspects in common – such as academic travel and waste management.

You only have to look at the We Are Still In group in the USA to see how sub-state action can be effective. Despite President Trump declaring the USA no longer part of the Paris Agreement, We Are Still In signatories, including cities, corporations, and individuals, represent a constituency of more than half of all Americans and taken together they represent $6.2 trillion, a bigger economy than any nation other than the USA or China. That is a powerful sub-state group of people pressing for increased ambition on climate change.

However, we need to ensure that the voices from the Global South are also heard. We are not alone in Western countries in heading for a 3-4 degree Celsius rise in temperature.² Countries and communities in the Global South will also need technology, funding and research and we need to understand the social systems that scientists are pushing technology into. A green transition will only be just if we understand the global effects of such a transition.

Those living in the Global South struggle to have their voices heard in global negotiations.

They often do not have the resources to send a large team of English-speaking representatives who can attend all of the important side-events and discussions. Even when they do, their voices are often overpowered by richer nations. In addition, activists in the Global South often don’t have the funds for the substate work they want to do. We also need to understand global supply chains and the repercussions of the so-called ‘green economy’. If we encourage people to switch to electric cars, what is happening to the scrap metal of the petrol ones?

Where are the lithium batteries for the electric cars coming from, where is it being mined and under what circumstances? What is extracting it doing to the earth? We can no longer look at ‘greening’ in isolation. Bad supply chains and slave labour conditions are unacceptable from a climate justice perspective.

Right now, we are at a critical crunch point with climate change and it can no longer be ignored. Paying attention to just decision-making and fair global action is a critical part of understanding how to move forward. I’m proud to work at a university that is willing to push boundaries and take ambitious action.

References
1. Dietzel, A. (2019). Global Justice and Climate Governance: Bridging Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2. CAT. (2019). The CAT Thermometer. Available online at: climateactiontracker.org/ global/cat-thermometer [last accessed 30 July 2019].

International Development Ethnographer and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, Tigist Grieve, is researching marginalised voices in rural Ethiopia in an effort to explain the ongoing difficulties in achieving education for all globally.

In a year where we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of men landing on the Moon, we still can’t achieve access to education for all across the globe.¹ I continually ask myself, why not? How is it so hard? We make it complicated by not listening and by not understanding other people’s perspectives. Why is it the trend to look at people living in poverty from a deficit point of view? My work as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow has given me the opportunity to build on my years of PhD research, which focuses on improving the educational outcomes and empowerment of adolescent girls in Ethiopia. I want to bring those voices of marginalised adolescent girls to the ongoing debate of gender and empowerment, while recognising the effort and resilience that goes unnoticed when we have a deficit-based perspective about certain categories of people.

I want to inspire people to go where others would never expect them to by engaging with relevant stakeholders in Ethiopia and beyond.

In particular, my work is about seeing the social, engaging and responding to local voices. In the words of the writer Arundhati Roy ‘There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’

My inspiration for examining voice is the inspiring work of Robert Chambers, author of Rural Development: Putting the Last First. I am listening to the everyday lived experience of people. My work is about voice – the voices of children, of women, of the resources-strapped communities in rural areas. Really, international development policy to date hasn’t given adequate space to hear them, it’s not informed by their experiences or by their voices.² Even where there is a claim for ‘voices of the poor’ it is proxy voices where the privileged few speak on their behalf from a position of assumption.

My work is focused on disseminating my research findings back to target communities in Ethiopia, to spark constructive debate about rural schooling and development. I want to do this in a way that challenges policy makers, development practitioners, donors, teachers, researchers and communities themselves.

I’m researching within two communities in Ethiopia, a peri-urban and rural, chosen because they are under the same local authority, but with considerable geographical differences. I believe there’s a misconception that certain communities don’t understand the value of education, but we need to research why, looking at policy, political economy, culture, social pressure. For example, despite the increasing enrolment, school attendance is very poor, not because education is not valued but because the expectation that children will be working around their homes and farms is greater. Girls’ attendance is much lower than boys because societal pressure is higher on girls. Boys have much better autonomy in how they use their time while girls in rural areas are time-poor. My work confirms the importance of recognising the difficulty of transforming gender relations through schooling alone.

We need to make informed decisions through lessons learned from quality research. The joy of being a researcher at the University of Bristol is the opportunity to collaborate with world-leading multi-disciplinary teams interested in developing ideas to meet the global challenges of development.

In analysing categories of children and childhood experiences, I’ve discovered that children are highly mobile in search of opportunities for them and their families, starting from a very young age. My research showed that the ultimate question in rural Ethiopia is ‘Who is this child to me?’ 16 per cent of children in households in my area of research are not in their biological families and relatedness matters in this culture. This context is so important in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has such a huge population of children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic.³ The concept of family is a complex one and undertheorised in the context of Ethiopia. If you’re related to the head of the household, you have access to better resources.

I’m also looking at issues such as access to water and autonomy of reproductive health (or lack of). These also play a part in preventing girls from obtaining an education. A school without a water source or toilet facilities is not hospitable to children, even less so to adolescent girls dealing with menstruation. Climate change also has a part to play in water scarcity issues, with the African continent identified as one of the parts of the world most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.⁴

The University’s second cohort of 15 Vice-Chancellor’s Fellows started in the academic year 2018-19, joining the 12 from 2017-18. Alumni and friends have contributed funding for six of the Fellows to date. For more information on the Fellows see our dedicated web page.

References
1 UIS. (2018). One in Five Children, Adolescents and Youth is Out of School. [Available online at: uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs48-one-five-children-adolescents-youth-out-school-2018-en.pdf.] (last accessed 23.08.19).
2 Brock, K. and McGee R., (eds) (2002). Knowing Poverty: critical reflections on participatory research and policy. Earthscan.
3 Unicef. (2016). For Every Child, End AIDS: Seventh Stocktaking Report, 2016.
4 Serdeczny, O., Adams, S., Baarsch, F., Coumou, D., Robinson, A., Hare, B., Schaeffer, M., Perrette, M., Reinhardt, J. (2016). Climate change impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa: from physical changes to their social repercussions. Regional Environmental Change. 1-16.