Yale Daily News

Yale representatives recently arrived in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th annual United Nations climate change conference, also called the 30th Conference of the Parties, or COP30. 

COP30 began last Monday and will run until Friday. The two-week event involves climate negotiations, speaker panels and dialogues between different organizations.

According to Melanie Quigley, the School of the Environment’s associate dean of strategic initiatives, Yale has been sending students to the Conference of Parties for the last 30 years. The 17 School of the Environment representatives are graduate students selected from the Yale COP Delegate Program. Many will be supporting deliberations and negotiations for countries, including the Republic of Vanuatu, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nigeria, Montenegro, Ghana and more.

“These graduate and professional students, they’re looking for internships, they’re looking for future job prospects and they’re also trying to pursue their kind of academic and research interests,” Quigley said in an interview. “So we try to help them get to the point where all of this makes complete sense for what they’re trying to do, and that’s why it’s been so successful.”

Umer Vaqar ENV ’26 will be a party delegate for the Pakistan Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination. 

In addition to coordinating the COP30 Pakistan Youth and Expert Support Network, his work will focus on adaptation, climate finance and the Global Goal on Adaptation areas critical to countries most exposed to climate risks.

“For Pakistan and other nations of the Global South, it’s not just about representation but about redefining resilience as measurable, fundable and just. Being part of this process as both a student and a practitioner is a rare opportunity to translate academic research into policy action,” Vaqar wrote in an email to the News. “I hope to bring that experience back to Yale to strengthen our community’s understanding of what equitable implementation looks like in practice.”

Camila Young ’26 is the head of the five-member undergraduate delegation representing the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. Young is a climate artist whose work promotes climate justice and the impact of climate change on islanders.

One of her exhibition pieces titled “Babel” features a city crumbling under crashing waves, held up by the back of a woman. 

“We are in this era where we need to have humility that these things are happening around us, but we can be receptive to it and move forward if our leadership is willing to kind of take on this mantle of sacrifice and build with us on behalf of the community that is being affected the most,” Young said.

Young pointed out that this year’s conference will be held in the remote forests of Belém, in contrast to previous conferences, which have been held in major city centers. The choice in location has resulted in both praise and controversy.

In March, BBC reported that tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon forest were felled to make way for a four-lane highway into the heart of the secluded city.

The conference has tried to spotlight more indigenous voices, with over 900 indigenous participants registered. On Friday, about 100 indigenous Munduruku people blocked the main entrance in a peaceful demonstration, forming a human chain that required attendees to take a side door, AP reported.

“It can be seen in two different lenses. One is that the Amazon, this small place, might not have the capacity to accommodate so many people coming, but at the same time, it kind of puts us in a setting that gets to the heart of why we’re talking about climate change in the first place,” Young said. “The Amazon is one of the places going to get destroyed with the oncoming changing climate.”

Phoenix Boggs ’26, a political science major, is another undergraduate representative attending COP30 alongside Young. Boggs came into environmental justice advocacy by way of insect conservation and will be representing Xerces, an invertebrate conservation organization.

“The most important part of COP30 is to demonstrate to the international field that the United States still cares and that Americans still care about climate change and environment movement and the green transition,” Boggs said in a phone interview from Rio de Janeiro.

This year marks the first time since 1995 that the United States will not be officially represented at the annual conference. However, in addition to individual delegations like Yale, the U.S. Climate Alliance will be sending 100 local leaders to the conference, the group announced in a press release.

While climate change is often at the center of discussions, Boggs says discussion of biodiversity is often lacking. She will be speaking on panels about both higher education and climate, as well as how insect population decline will broadly affect the world, she said.

“The ecological damage and the downstream effects that will be caused as a result of insect population decline will be felt first in the Global South and in developing countries,” Boggs said.

The Amazon rainforest spans 6.7 million square-kilometers across eight countries.