Five Emory University students were among the almost 56,000 delegates who attended the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, UNCOP30, in Belém, Brazil, last month.
Environmental sciences professor Eri Saikawa spearheaded the trip, leading the students to network with policymakers, listen in on global negotiations and learn more about climate-related career options.
Saikawa says the trip was inspired in part by her own experience attending the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa, known as the Rio+10 Summit, when she was an undergraduate student.
“For me, that was extremely eye-opening to know what kinds of things you can do in the environmental field,” Saikawa says. “I realized that’s probably the best thing for students to see what kinds of paths they can take.”
Each student who participated in this year’s trip is a member of Emory Climate Hub, a program focused on expanding experiential learning related to climate change. Saikawa serves as the program’s director.
This was the ninth time Saikawa has taken students to U.N. or other global conferences, such as last spring’s World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health in Colombia.
“Every year, it’s a little bit different,” Saikawa says.
During their time in Brazil, the students viewed the second half of the two-week-long event and the closing ceremony, which featured final negotiations between nations.
Student delegates helped facilitate Q&As and panel discussions during the conference. They also led an exhibition booth to inform stakeholders about climate research efforts at Emory.
The trip marked the first time junior Carter Douglas-Brown, a double major in environmental science and anthropology, had traveled outside the U.S. The experience helped introduce her to global leaders at a personal level — something she says she didn’t anticipate.
“One day we had lunch with a member of the German parliament just because he couldn't find a spot to sit and asked to sit with us,” Douglas-Brown says. “That happened a couple of times.”
Douglas-Brown adds that individual meetings with global leaders such as Saqib Huq — managing director at The International Center for Climate Change and Development — helped bolster her passion for bridging science and policy.
Belle Pobsuk, a junior majoring in both business and environmental science, decided to participate in the conference to learn more about corporate sustainability and non-governmental organization work.
“I really wanted to go into this experience and hear from a lot of the researchers and policymakers about what they think the role of businesses and institutions is in climate change and climate justice,” Pobsuk says.
Learning about avenues beyond traditional business, like climate finance, gave her an answer.
“In academia, there’s a lot of saying, ‘We need to do this!’ But there's less implementation,” Pobsuk says. “It's so important to be able to actually do things. This inspired me to continue to try and boost local scale initiatives and see what other kinds of global work I can get into.”
Attending previous conferences also proved to be formative for alumna Lauren Balotin, who graduated from Emory in 2019.
Balotin didn’t initially plan to pursue a career in environmental science, but when her role as a staff writer for The Emory Wheel led her to cover COP21, she was intrigued. She accompanied Saikawa to COP23 in Bonn, Germany, in 2017 and COP24 in Katowice, Poland, in 2018.
“[The conference] really was my first foray into climate negotiations and climate and health,” Balotin says. “After that, I followed that path, and I haven’t really swayed from it since … It was the reason I pursued my master's degrees in environmental science and public health.”
Balotin went on to intern at U.N. Climate Change and now works as a communications coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate and health program. In addition to impacting her career, the conference continues to be a reminder of how combating climate change is an interconnected process.
“There's a lot of energy and work being done, and I think it's just a good reminder,” Balotin says. “Sometimes, you feel like you're in a bubble working within your organization, but it's important to remember that we're just one piece of this much larger puzzle.”