| by Clara Clymer
Alice McGown MAIEP ’22 attends COP26 to present her work on mapping fossil fuels and protected areas.
We spoke with Alice McGown, a second-year master’s candidate pursuing International Environmental Policy at the Middlebury Institute, about her trip to Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) and the work that she presented during the conference.
McGown’s degree specialization is focused on land use and land management, with a strong geospatial information systems, or mapmaking, component. She has taken advantage of the Institute’s focus on real-world, professional experiences through her internship with the NGO Leave it in the Ground Initiative. For the past nine months, McGown has been working on a project that maps fossil fuel deposits below the ground and their overlap with protected areas around the world, and calculates the CO2 emissions that these reserves represent. McGown shared these findings at COP26 and advocated for countries to stop drilling in protected areas and for nations to include these protected area in their Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs, the comprehensive plan each country must have to demonstrate how they will cut their greenhouse gas emissions, as set forth by the Paris Agreement.
We’ve run out. We’ve run out of runway. We have to stop emissions, and we have to bring emissions to zero essentially, if not negative overall.
Watch McGown’s pre-departure interview below to learn more about the map-making process, what McGown judges to be the biggest challenges to creating and following through on meaningful environmental commitments, and what negotiations she will be watching closely during the conference. McGown also talks about her love for maps and how they are powerful tools to communicate information.
Watch McGown’s post-trip interview below. She shares her experience attending COP26, real-world applications of concepts she has been studying in the classroom, and the diplomacy that finding a middle ground on climate issues entails. McGown discusses the wider context of the conference set against the backdrop of climate events, protests, and activism. She is impressed by the real progress being made; however, there is still a lot of work to be done going forward.
Read a feature story on Alice McGown’s work at COP26 in the Monterey Herald.
Check out more Middlebury COP26 insights on our Twitch channel.
MA in International Environmental Policy
Leave it in the Ground Initiative
| by Jason Warburg
A series of international experiences taught Middlebury Institute alumna Lacey Raak MAIEP ’08 that lasting change begins at the local level, where today she is leading efforts to implement environmentally sound policies and practices in her own community on California’s Central Coast.
| by Jason Warburg
Bryce Bray MAIEP ’18 has been awarded a Boren, a Fulbright, and most recently an Institute of Current World Affairs fellowship, all of which are helping him continue to develop expertise and expand his professional network in his chosen field of climate policy.
On Wednesday, April 14, 2021, in one of the largest and certainly most timely Ocean lobbies in U.S. history, over 1000 people were mobilized from more than 30 states and territories. Meetings were held with 107+ Members of the House of Representatives and their staff, and 33+ Senators and staff. Over 150 virtual meetings took place on this Ocean Climate Action Lobby Day! The coalition (many of whose members had never visited with their elected representatives before) sent a clear message to our national policymakers: you cannot solve the climate crisis without ocean health, and ocean health is key to solving the climate crisis.
