Contributed by Sustainability Intern Grace DiTunno
Next month, 11 UConn students will be departing from UConn and flying 11 hours to Antalya, Turkey, to this year’s UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP). UConn began sending students to the conference in 2015, when the landmark Paris Agreement was created. The Paris Agreement was the first widespread international agreement that focused on countries reducing their carbon emissions through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and setting our goal warming temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. This agreement brought international attention to climate change like never before. At the conference, UConn students will be able to see the climate negotiations that happen between nations and represent UConn and US academia as they speak to fellow students, ambassadors, and advocates.
In this series, I will be highlighting the stories of five COP31 fellows following their journeys before and after COP.
Paige Gregory, a senior Environmental Studies major, Political Science and Climate Science minor on the Master’s of Public Policy track from Virigina Beach, saw the firsthand impacts climate change had on coastal communities while growing up. She highlighted how she worked on banning plastic bags with her city council members and created a rain garden for her Girl Scout Gold Award. She just recently wrapped her summer at the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments (NVCOG) in Waterbury, CT, working on the USDA-funded expanding urban agriculture project and as research apprentice at UConn’s SUPER Lab. Paige is currently interning at the Office of Sustainability.
As a college student, balancing personal environmental goals while bearing the weight of an anti-climate federal government can feel overwhelming. However, our UConn fellows are having pre-departure meetings to prepare for this experience. In these meetings, the fellows collaborate with faculty a divisors, discussing climate topics and how to be a good ambassador for UConn.
For Paige’s preparation for COP, she is “personally staying up to date on global and federal climate news. The United States government is not attending, so that means that universities, students, and professors who are going are going to be the face of the United States.”
In addition to the conference, fellows have cultural immersion experiences to better understand the life and culture of the host country. Brenny Alcantara, who describes himself as a confident, introspective and very passionate individual with a curiosity for new information, couldn’t describe how eye-opening the experience of Turkey as a whole will be. “To go to a country such as Turkey is an amazing opportunity. Just being able to experience a completely new culture, a different mode of life, for a mere nine days, I think will be very beneficial to my perspective of the world and build on the curiosity that I have.” Meeting residents of the host country and learning their way of life builds cross cultural understandings and lessons all fellows can take back home.
Policy and politics are seen on the global scale at COP, yet small town perspective is sometimes undermined when everyone is focused on the large, influential countries. Ryan Engels, a Political Science student, is a member of the Zoning Commission and Chair of the Sustainability Committee in the small coastal town of Westbrook, Connecticut.
“I saw that not many young people were doing this type of work. I knew that those decisions that were being made by commissions would impact my generation. So, I decided to bring my youth perspective to it.”
When Ryan goes to COP, he is excited to “learn what other communities are doing in the face of climate change,” especially regarding responsible land use and redevelopment.
Samantha Glass, a PhD Candidate in Oceanography, was inspired by a fellow graduate student and former UConn@COP Fellow to apply to COP. When she started graduate school, she thought she wanted to be a research professor, but throughout her time in grad school, her perspective has since evolved. “I realized that I wanted all the signs that we have about climate change to have the ability to impact the policy that gets made.”
While the science and policy sides of COP are constantly highlighted, business is another factor at play. Take Megan Romansky, a second-year master’s student in Applied Resource Economics, who has an expansive background in welfare, environmental justice, and energy. “I really care about advancing economic growth while keeping it clean and equitable,” she said. “I can’t wait to step outside my comfort zone.”
While all of the fellows are excited for this life-changing experience, many of them are approaching COP with a critical, but open mindset.
Brenny mentioned the unfortunate truth of these conferences. “We are on COP31, and the world is still burning.” While the famous 2015 Paris Agreement is still in action, countries are not reducing their emission to the level that is needed, and climate has become a backburner issue for many countries. Both Samantha and Megan agreed that they are coming to COP with “no expectations” to be able to fully absorb other people’s and countries‘ perspectives. As Ryan mentioned, he is there is to “learn what other communities are doing.”
As our fellows continue to prepare to be UConn’s and the United States’ global ambassadors, the rest of us back home can learn from the fellows by following along. We can be active learners by following news developments from the negotiations and hearing from the fellows at the Climate Change Cafe on December 2nd hosted by UConn’s Office of Sustainability. As mentioned before, a follow-up story will be written here with the same five fellows, giving us a firsthand account of what it was like to be a UConn@COP fellow.
On Wednesday, we met with Dr. Phillips and were provided with an experience that I will forever appreciate. Dr. Phillips walked us around the Blue Zone Pavilions, introducing us to his colleagues and friends who work at different climate organizations. He gave us a proper lay of the land and made COP feel smaller and manageable. We met leaders working in the Ocean, Digital Innovation, and World Green Economy Pavilions. We got the exclusive opportunity to talk with a secretariat at the United Nations, in the restricted section of the Blue Zone. This experience framed my perspective for the last two days I spent at COP. It reaffirmed the idea that everything is about the connections you have with individuals in and outside of your field. As we parted, Dr. Phillips reminded us that, in 10 years when we are growing professionals in our respective fields, we need to share our experiences like he did.
On Thursday, I was able to attend a talk that I had been looking forward to attending all week, put on by the International Bar Association that addressed how lawyers and law firms can advance climate mitigation and adaptation through pro bono work and beyond. While it is no secret that there are lawyers out there fighting for the environment, I find it extremely important that all lawyers, no matter what their practice, are conscious of the effects their work has on our natural world. I found this talk so interesting because it stressed the importance of that idea, and the speakers provided actionable steps to help achieve those goals. For instance, the speakers emphasized providing non-governmental organizations and civil society groups that protect vulnerable groups and mitigate climate change with free or reduced-cost legal services. I will surely take back what I learned from this talk and apply it to my future career as an attorney.
Afterwards, I had the honor to participate in the Higher Education as a Critical Global Partner for Enabling and Accelerating Climate Action panel alongside Valeria Soto (Tecnológico de Monterrey), Phoenix Boggs (Yale University), Javiera Cabezas Parra (Northwestern University), and Fernanda Muraira (Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México). We exchanged insights on unique ways youth have felt both empowered and faced barriers when getting involved in climate action. It was incredible to witness the administrators and delegates in the room break down their plans to combat those barriers.
As I reflect on COP30, I keep coming back to one central idea: climate work is about people. When I say people, I do not mean it in the Bill Gates way. I mean people in the human sense. People with stories, cultures, memories, and lived experiences that shape how they move through the world. People whose lives are touched by climate change long before it ever becomes a headline or a negotiating point. People who carry knowledge that does not come from textbooks but from daily life, from land, from history, from relationships. These are the people whose experiences define climate reality, far beyond the technocratic lens that tries to manage suffering instead of transforming the systems that create it. One of the most meaningful parts of COP30 was realizing how my own lived experiences shape the way I see the world and the way I understand this crisis. The values I grew up with, the communities I have been part of, and the moments in my life when I felt both supported and unheard all influenced how I responded to what I saw in Belém. In many ways, COP30 made me more aware of how personal climate work is. It touches everything from where we come from to what we care about to how we show up for each other.
Our cohort played a huge role in shaping that understanding. We came from different places and were drawn to different aspects of climate work. Some of us focused on justice, others on technology, international systems, or environmental health. We had different academic backgrounds, cultural perspectives, and personal motivations. What made the experience powerful was the way we all brought our full selves to it and I learned how climate change intersects with identity in ways I had not fully appreciated before. COP30 also taught me that lived experience is not something separate from climate work. It is part of what shapes climate justice, resilience, and policy. People who live through storms, displacement, heat, or pollution carry knowledge that cannot be found in reports or negotiation texts. People whose lives intersect with social, economic, and cultural challenges understand the complexity of transition in ways that academic theory alone cannot capture. Any meaningful path forward has to center those voices and bridge the gap between policy and lived reality. Looking ahead, I want to build spaces where people feel heard and supported. I want to work in ways that respect different perspectives and value the power of community. I want to make room for lived experience in every climate conversation I am part of, whether big or small. COP30 reinforced that climate action is not only a global responsibility, but also a human one, shaped by the connections we make and the communities we build. That is the lesson I am taking with me, and the one I hope to honor moving forward.
In the news, we often hear about the negotiations, which countries are willing or unwilling to compromise, and what transpired the previous day. What we rarely consider is the sheer number of individuals involved behind the scenes—from those engaging directly in diplomacy, to the people handling logistics, to the reporters and bloggers who communicate the events in Belém to the rest of the world. Two experiences in particular helped me humanize this entire process.