Are the COP meetings an effective way of achieving climate action?

Event description

CIWEM’s Early Careers Network are delighted to host a lunchtime provocation event, supported by CIWEM’s Climate Change Panel. The webinar will have a panel of early career professionals debating whether the COP (Conference of Parties) meetings are an effective way of achieving climate action.

Ahead of COP28 (the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference) which starts on 30 November, the panels will be assessing COP’s ability to reach the targets set by the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted at COP21 in Paris. Its goal is to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.

Attendees of this event will get the chance to vote their opinion at the beginning of the event, and again at the end, to see if they have been swayed by the arguments posed. There will also be a Q&A session at the end, where attendees can quiz panel members. This will be chaired by a member of CIWEM’s Climate Change Panel.

Disclaimer: Provocation events are set up for lively discussion and is a safe space to stimulate critical thinking. The panel will consist of six early-career professionals, three will argue for and three will argue against the effectiveness of the COP meetings. The panels will be randomly assigned to a position regardless of their personal stance and arguments made are deliberately phrased to be thought provoking.

It is the second event in a series of lunchtime webinars hosted by the Early Careers Network, focused on climate change in the water and environment sector. The first event was in May, debating whether the public or private sector has the most important role in driving climate action.

We can’t wait to see you there.

Part of the CIWEM Climate Emergency Adaption & Resilience series.

About the speakers

Chair

Emma Moses MCIWEM C.WEM

Emma is the Strategic Business Development Director - Climate resilience UK for Royal HaskoningDHV, where she has worked for the last 24 years. Emma is passionate about supporting clients in both the public and private sector, through their climate change resilience journey, helping them to understand their risks, identifying and planning adaptive measures and delivering adaptive solutions.

Speakers

Alice Slattery GradCIWEM

Alice is an Assistant Environmental Scientist at Atkins. specialising in natural capital and multiple benefit assessments, water quality, and sustainable land management. She is passionate about analysing the benefit to the environment and society provided by natural assets, and the research and implementation of integrated catchment management.

Jess Knaggs GradCIWEM

Jess is an Environmental Consultant at Arcadis, working on a variety of environmental management projects, including large infrastructure projects where she has undertaken many hydrogeomorphological assessments to understand watercourse conditions and how they can be improved to create a better water environment. She is passionate about river restoration and improving the water environment through nature based solutions.

Nathan Strathdee GradCIWEM

Nathan is an Assistant Modeller at RPS Group, modelling the causes and impacts of spills from combined sewer overflows, involving a range of sewer network and water quality modelling and geographical data analysis and is involved in the development of software to optimise the design of solutions to prevent sewage spills. He is passionate about the restoration and enjoyment of our natural landscapes and loves to spend time fell-running, trekking and volunteering with the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust. He thinks there’s no better way to understand the modelling of rivers and other natural systems than getting up to your waist in them.

Sediye Machaba

Sediye is a Civil Engineer at Arup in the water and flooding team, she has broad experience in the construction of bulk water and sanitation supply and has served in that function across the African continent and Europe. She is inspired by the complex challenges that beckon infrastructure development and is determined to build nature in and preserve the natural system while providing resource accessibility to all diasporas.

Jessica Webb MCIWEM

Jessica is a Hydrologist at Mott MacDonald, currently working on Water Framework Directive assessments to inform asset management planning for water companies, nature-based solutions river catchments to deliver multiple benefits to the environment and society, and environmental impact assessments for dredging operations. She is passionate about Natural Flood Management, sustainability and climate change policy and mitigation measures.

Dr Linda Geaves

Linda is an interdisciplinary scholar in environmental hazard, risk and resource security, currently working as a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Centre for Sustainable Development. Earning her doctorate from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University in 2016, Linda has degrees in both human and physical geography with a specialism in risk modelling. Currently, as part of the EU Commission’s ‘Managing Resilient Nexus Systems Through Participatory Systems Dynamics Modelling’ project, Linda is developing a suite of models to assess risk and value redistribution across water, energy, food and climate sectors in response to changes in physical flows caused by the introduction of new resource management interventions.

Booking and joining information

This event is open to members and non-members of CIWEM.

This webinar will be hosted on the Zoom platform and will be recorded. Please note that registrations will close 24 hours before the event starts. If you have not registered before that time, unfortunately we cannot add you to the event. You will receive an email with joining instructions after you have successfully registered for the webinar and the registration has been approved by our team. If you have any questions about your booking or would like to cancel your attendance, please contact barbara.woods@ciwem.org.

Please make sure you add this event to your calendar, all you need to do is copy the body text of the joining instruction email, go to your Calendar, create a new calendar appointment, set the start and end date and time, paste the text and click the "Save & Close" button.

If you have any queries about this talk, please contact Chloe Goode at chloe.goode@ciwem.org.

Are the COP meetings an effective way of achieving climate action? | WEBINAR

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Hosted by the CIWEM Early Careers Network with the CIWEM Climate Change Panel

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