As we step into the new academic year, the importance and impact of geography feels more immediate than ever. In this edition, we dive into a range of topics that reflect geography’s dynamic role in understanding the world today. From exploring land justice in Cambridge, to dissecting the future of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, our contributors offer fresh insights on pressing challenges - the local and global. This year, we’ve opened up our pages to voices beyond the Geography Department, welcoming contributors from disciplines, ranging from History to Natural Sciences. Their unique perspectives add valuable layers to our collective understanding.
With record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires and floods, 2024 has been a stark reminder of the urgent need for action and continuous reflection on climate change. Against this backdrop, our contributors tackle critical issues, from the complex outcomes of COP28 to the ongoing debates about last-chance tourism. Through in-depth features, interviews and reflections, this edition highlights the critical role geography plays in addressing these challenges.
As always, the views expressed in Compass are those of the individual student writers and do not reflect the opinions of the Cambridge University Geography Society (CUGS) or the Department of Geography. Our goal is to foster thought-provoking discussions and to give a platform to student writing in the field. We’re excited to bring you this collection of articles that reflect the creativity, curiosity and engagment of the next generation of geographers.
As a student-led publication, Compass is a collaborative effort. We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has offered their time and efforts to the magazine. We would also like to thank CUGS and the Geography Department for their support, making the magazine possible.
Eva and Isabelle
compass.cugs.co.uk
All images sourced from ‘Unsplash’ unless otherwise specified
Wandering Wildfire Smoke and the American Sense of Place
Emily Goniea
Climate change is becoming a tangible force in the air we breathe. In a country marked by diverse landscapes and rigid borders, Emily Goniea explores how the transcontinental journey of wildfire smoke challenges the American sense of place in the face of a rapidly-evolving climate crisis
Ithought it was cloudy. During the summer of 2020 there was nothing else to do but go for a walk, so even on days when I couldn’t see the sun I still made my way to the local footpath. The next
day was cloudy too, in the same eerie way. The sky wasn’t blue, yet I couldn’t make out the texture of any clouds. Looking up, everything was the same pale shade of shark-belly grey. I was halfway back home when I realised what I was looking at.
Wildfire smoke has been a staple of summers in California for decades. Images of hazy skies over San Francisco have become commonplace. However, the smoke I saw that day in 2020 was not in California. It was three thousand miles east of the fires, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That summer, California smoke smeared skies across the continental U.S., blocking the sun in areas where wildfires were typically only ever experienced in photographs.
This past June, I was walking through New York City when I looked up to recognize those same murky skies I had witnessed three years before. This time, the smoke had travelled across national bor-
ders. As wildfires raged in central Canada, skies above the eastern U.S. once again became engulfed in smoke. The next day I wore a mask as I walked to work, but by noon the smell of charred wood wafted through the cracks under doors and there was a visual haze inside. On the street, everything was tinted a sinister yellow. The words “apocalyptic” and “otherworldly” got thrown around.
In some ways, the smoke really was from another world, or at least another place, but wind patterns had brought this world into ours. Of course, the discomfort of New Yorkers can in no way compare to the suffering of those in the areas of the fires themselves. The air may have irritated our throats but the city wasn’t on fire. This fact led many fellow Americans on the west coast to respond with understandable apathy to the outcries of easterners. The reaction from Californians was broadly, “that’s no big deal, we go through it all the time.” The key difference was that wildfires are not a disaster New Yorkers are used to being affected by at all.
Wildfire smoke’s tendency to travel beyond geographical boundaries allows it to uniquely challenge American sense of place, particularly in the shadow of the climate crisis. Encounters with wildfire smoke in areas without fires have forced populations to face climate impacts not tied to their immediate surroundings. This new en-
counter with what many interpret as an offshoot of climate change has brought the impacts of a distant disaster into the air around them, encouraging many Americans to expand how they understand their sense of place in a world where climate disaster in one location increasingly has implications somewhere else.
Sense of place in the United States operates on a number of scales. The politicisation of national identity in recent years has left many feeling disconnected along state and
“Wildfire smoke has become a cultural object ”
regional lines. Cultural differences between urban and rural communities have also created a heightened sense of place hyper-locality. Americans inhabit identities rooted in their community, state, and country all at once, but the variances in terrains, climates, and cultures across the nation can still make defining one’s sense of place within the landscape a difficult task.
Because Americans straddle these multi-scalar identities, situating oneself within a widespread issue like climate change can prove difficult. Particularly in cases when disasters occur outside of the United States, individuals may struggle to feel directly connected to devastation happening in distant landscapes. At a time when many, particularly conservatives, increasingly argue for isolationist policies, wildfire smoke has become a cultural object representing the trans-national nature of climate issues.
Blanche Verlie, an Australian researcher and educator, has written about the various ways people form understandings of climate change. According to Verlie, ways of knowing climate change can be categorised into three types of experiences: encountering, witnessing, and storying. Encountering involves being face to face with a changing climate, directly impacted by it. Witnessing is when one observes encounters and is indirectly influenced by the effects of climate change. Storying occurs when encounters and witnessed encounters are strung together into narratives and given meaning. These three modes of knowing present “embodied, affective and relational practices that we enact with, and as part of, climate change, and through which we become climate-changed.”
By spreading beyond its source, wildfire smoke creates an experience of witnessing the aftermath of trees encountering climate change. This witnessing can have meaningful implications on how individuals understand
climate change and its place in their lives as it reshapes one’s storying of the climate crisis. Verlie writes specifically about breath as a way of witnessing climate change. When wildfire smoke inhabits the air, the inhalation of climate catastrophe can “reveal the intimate, visceral and personal violences of global climate change, and develop empathetic approaches to climate injustice.” When experiencing the disaster of a distant location in this embodied way, climate change becomes relational, reminding us how catastrophe in one part of the world has wide reaching impacts that do not adhere to constructed national or state boundaries. In the U.S., where identity politics play a large role in evaluations of the urgency of climate change, the shared experiences of breathing and witnessing wildfire smoke may help unify some of the storying around climate change’s impact and urgency.
Perhaps a more cynical view would argue that many Americans’ hyper-stratified sense of place-based identity has led them to only care about climate disaster if it directly impacts them. But in a nation as large and hetero
geneous as the U.S., particularly in light of already conflicting layers of identity, the land Americans identify as their home can be difficult to pinpoint. Wildfire smoke, by symbolising climate change’s lack of adherence to borders, may play a role in expanding what places Americans feel a kinship with and what home they seek to protect.
It’s human nature to be more emotionally impacted by a disaster that affects one’s own home” “
As climate disasters continue to emerge, the American sense of geographical identity remains as murky as a smoke-filled sky. Individuals’ and communities’ senses of place, and the role that sense plays in American understandings of the climate crisis, are continually restoried by encounters and witnessings of “otherworldly” impacts. However, when the smoke ultimately clears, I believe many Americans will look up at the clear skies and find that those other, imperilled worlds they imagined are not so distant after all. .
The Lie of the Land in Cambridge
Hannah Gillott
Despite the river Cam’s spatial and social centrality in Cambridge, many children from the city have never laid eyes on its waters. The culprit? A complex web of land ownership, possession claims, and restrictive access policies that have turned Cambridge into a walled fortress
In Saxon England, a town sprang up on the banks of the river Granta. It was named Granta Brygg, for the river which ran through it, and the bridge – or brygg – which connected both sides of the town.
Over time, Granta became Cam, and Granta Brygg became Cambridge. But one thing hasn’t changed. The river – now named the Cam in honour of the city which splays out around it – remains the heart of the city. It’s an integral part of Cambridge life
That is, unless you’re one of the many children living in Cambridge who have never seen the River Cam.
It isn’t just access to the river which is restricted. Dr Noterman explains that many locals just “don’t come into Central Cambridge, or if they do, they don’t spend much time there”. Why would they? For those without a Cam Card to flash, the centre of the city cajhn feel like a maze with very, very, high walls. “The walls and fences are very iterative,” Dr Noterman continues. “Like over and over again. The message is that this is ex clusive, that this is not for everyone”. To put it sim ply, “it’s about maintaining hierarchy”.
This message is re ceived, loud
To those working in land and housing justice, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Dr Elsa Noterman, now a lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University, found moving to Cambridge in 2020 a shock. Her experience working on housing and land justice, paired with her arriving in what she calls a “walled city,” led her to investigate the University’s connection to the land which surrounds it. Her research led her right back to the Cam.
There are ten bridges across the river in central Cambridge. Two are road bridges, leaving eight foot paths. Six of the remaining footbridges are collegiate, leaving just two for public use. The backs stretch out from college-owned bridge to college-owned bridge, fencing off both land and views.
and clear. Paul
Cutmore, a Cambridge resident, and avid walker, tells me that a “hotchpotch of different rules” control access to collegiate land. “It is only visitors who can leap all the hurdles who are not discouraged”. Once again, my conversation with Paul takes us back to the riverbank. “Of particular disappointment is the lack of access to parts of the river,” he says. While many other organisations recognise the “need and feasibility of providing public access along river banks,” colleges fail to do so. As he sees it, the solution is simple. “Colleges should recognise their privileged position and they should adapt to a more enlightened model for the 21st century, and permit public access along at least one side of the river”.
Whether or not the solution is clear, the history certainly isn’t. Dr Noterman recalls that in researching University land ownership, she ran up against an unexpected challenge. She had one simple request for Cambridge colleges: “Can you tell me how much property you own”.
A sizable proportion of collegiate land is unregistered, and claimed under “ancient possession” – most like ly, from enclosure. “There’s a certain degree to which they don’t want to be transparent,” she admits, “but the second piece is that there are some instances where they don’t know the full extent of what they own”. It took tireless investigation for the Guardian to reveal the property portfolios of Oxford and Cambridge (amounting to £3.5bn), and land justice projects just don’t have that kind of funding.
This missing historical piece matters. Dr Noterman explains that “University land ownership has complex, often violent histories”. Profits gained through “chattel slavery, extorted wealth, and colo -
nial land expropriation” funded the land grabs which now leave so much of Cambridge inaccessible to residents, and this only added to the swathes of land fenced off through enclosure.
“It’s not just something that’s happened in the past,” Dr Noterman tells me, “but it’s continuing”. Getting to know her neighbours in Cambridge, she remembers how difficult residents found it to compete with colleges for property. Even when they could buy a home, they still felt the University’s encroachment. One neighbour’s house lay at the foot of a path considered to be common land. It wasn’t. Dr Noterman highlights “the amount of frustration that even this path, which they commonly use, they have no control over”. “There is an attitude, amongst colleges, that this is ours, so we don’t care,” she continues. “I think it’s very disheartening and creates a lot of bad feeling”.
fluence rubbing up against each other,” he sees University interests consistently prioritised over local needs. A campaign which would prioritise green space over development – especially when said development regards housing – isn’t often a popular one, especially among young people. Antony emphasises, though, that land justice isn’t about preventing development. It’s about ensuring that development is in line with community needs, not profit incentives. He highlights the “massive increase in house prices” in Cambridge, and how increased rents (often imposed on collegiate land) have forced small businesses to close up shop.
Antony sees this as a “local democracy issue”. While the University no longer has counsellors on the City Council, the Greater Cambridge Partnership Board includes a Pro-Vice Chancellor as an appointee. But beyond the byzantine processes of local government, there is a deeper issue.
I spend well over an hour talking to Antony. I spend a good proportion of that time wondering what his Zoom background could be. At the end of our conversation,
I ask.
“It’s the concert hall we never got,” he says, referring to a promise made by a former Vice Chancellor, Sir Ivor Jennings, in 1962. Jennings had pledged that the University would contribute 50% of its cost, and Antony is still waiting.
Antony Carpen agrees. The community reporter was born and bred in Cambridge, and, as he puts it, “boomeranged back” after finishing his undergrad in Sussex. Discussing one instance in a long series of land-based injustices, Antony pauses. We’re running through how Darwin Green – the only real green space in Arbury – was sold off for development. “It was absolutely soul destroying to see,” he says. scribes as “a microcosm of poverty and af-
Conversations around justice can too often invoke feelings of guilt, or the language or repentance. But this isn’t productive. Discussing next steps with Dr Nicholas Blomley, the geographer offers some other options: “radical compassion, love, or anger”. He highlights “intellectual curiosity,” and using our privilege as students – principally, our access to archives – “to find out who owns our land”. Under all this, though, there has to be something else, which Antony encapsulates perfectly: a vision for a different, and a better, future. His vision starts with a new concert hall.
The Forgotten Trunks of Wales
The Forgotten Trunks of Wales
Despite their profound cultural significance, Celtic rainforests are slipping away from the collective consciousness of the contemporary era, overshadowed by more immediate environmental concerns. In the midst of a biodiversity crisis, the salvation of these forests becomes a rallying cry for a deeper cultural shift.
There is a Welsh myth that speaks of a woman fashioned from the blossoms of broom, meadowsweet and oak. Her name is Blodeuwedd, or Flower-Faced. Her story, This tale is the last of the Four Branches of Mabinogi, the earliest works of prose in the British canon, recorded in Middle Welsh in the eleventh century.
It is not just the narratives of these stories that ground humans in nature, with plants becoming women and women becoming birds. Their four branches speak to a culture that valued historicising tales using natural structures. Branches are of course connected by a trunk, fanning out from some epicentre. It would be common to argue that this trunk in the Four Branches of Mabinogi is a shared character, Pryderi. But there is something else this mosaic of tales share: a setting. It is the Atlantic rainforests of Western Great Britain that I will argue not only connect these narratives but help make sense of a patchwork of Welsh and British culture that we see today.
A British rainforest is a funny concept. What first comes to mind for me is the tropical rainforest biome at the Eden Project… neither a natural ecosystem, nor one home to British plants. But we need not limit our search to multi-million pound tourist attractions. It is one of the many great failures of our abysmally poor education in the natural world in this country that more people are not familiar with an ecosystem whose range covers 20% of Great Britain. The term rainforest might best evoke notions
of jungles and orangutans that may even be singing to a boy called Mowgli depending on your exposure to Disney adaptations of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, but the tropical rainforest has an underappreciated cousin. At middle latitudes, from Appalachia, to Japan and as far from us as New Zealand, in areas with high rainfall, you might stumble across a temperate rainforest, known colloquially in Great Britain and Ireland as Celtic.
Celtic rainforests are identifiable by their density of epiphytes: plants that grow on others without fixed roots in the soil, supported by moisture in the air (think mosses and lichens). They create a verdant forest that clings on to its green all year round. On the British Isles, they are typically oakwoods. It is curious that an ecosystem whose range spans from the tip of Cornwall, all the way along the West coast of Great Britain to the Outer Hebrides is not better known. This ignorance of the British people can perhaps be explained by the fact that today temperate rainforests cling on only in small pockets of Dartmoor, Wales and Western Scotland which together comprise less than 1% of the island. In this regard, they are seriously under threat.
In a rather refreshing twist on what I as an ecologist have come to expect when I discover such a harrowing statistic, it is neither climate change nor industrialised farming that temperate rainforests have fallen victim to. Be under no illusion, the cause of their decline is anthropogenic, but in our agricultural nation such a
Math fab Mathonwy, is a tale of curses, metamorphosis humans into animals,.
Mathonwy, curses, of animals,.
fall predates industrialisation. The temperate rainforests of Great Britain, according to Guy Shrubsole, author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain, fell victim to a kind of slashand-burn agriculture that commenced during the Stone Age. Following millenia of tree-felling, we are left with fragments of rainforest and a mythology far more preoccupied with the natural world than the twenty-first century, and very little to explain such a difference.
Embedded into Welsh rainforests is a rich folkloric history that hints at a people who predated the Romans, and an oral and subsequently literary tradition that greatly transcended the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Our historiography of the Celts is notoriously shoddy, given they left no written record of their knowledge and much of what we know today is supposedly due to pagan influence, but the high-ranking class of druid points to an appreciation and connection to the natural world firmly rooted in celtic culture. Druid appears to be cognate with celtic words that translate to ‘oak-knower’. In celtic mythology, oak is thought to be sacred, symbolising the connectedness of all life. Recall how in Welsh tradition this theme reappears, with the flower of an oak one third the essence of Blodeuwedd. These oak rainforests inspired stories of something greater than us. They speak to a shared spirituality that transcended cultures, a spirituality that is lacking today.
The Book of Taliesin was compiled just a few centuries after the Four Branches of Mabinogi, it contains works that have been dated as far back as the sixth century. One inclusion is the epic poem Cad Goddeau, or The Battle of the Trees. Hidden within approximately 250 lines of verse is a nat It is thought that the order of ural knowledge lost to modernity.
trees in the poem signifies the sequence in which they flower. That such knowledge was worth recording, not just as a factual record but as part of a poetic work emphasises the enduring value that has been placed on understanding and living harmoniously with nature that has persisted over space and time until now.
Jez Butterworth’s 2009 Jerusalem, makes a case in which this incongruity between our ancestral culture and what it means to be living in rural Britain in the modern age is disaffecting, demoralising and leaves a sense that something is lacking. Plant illiteracy is at an all time high. Coca-cola bottles fight legends of giants for our attention and we are left without a connection to the natural world around us. It is not just temperate rainforests for which this cultural memory rooted in ecology is being forgotten. We are losing our connection to all ecosystems, natural and agricultural: it is now unsurprising if a young child believes that milk comes from a supermarket.
In Great Britain we are too often apathetic to the natural world around us. Our mission of the twenty-first century to put a stop to the biodiversity crisis will only be possible if we engage with it. This starts by coming to appreciate ecosystems not just for what they offer us, but in and of themselves: something we used to know how to do. In this example of the ever-dwindling Celtic rainforest I have deliberately refrained from delving into their ecological importance. That is not to say they are not just that, ecologically important, but they are worth saving for something more: a legacy from the past to give to the future, a place we can point to as we whisper to our children ‘look to the oak trees’ for the answers to their questions.
Animal Geographies of Hope: Ex-Commercial Hen Rehoming
Holly Jewitt-Maurice
A stark reality, the UK hen industry has a dark underbelly marked by the relentless mistreatment and cruel exploitation of animals.
Have you ever wondered what happens to the chickens who lay your store-bought eggs after they stop laying? I imagine this is not something frequently considered by members of the public and therefore may even be something most people do not care to know. However, as a chicken owner myself, this is a question that has recently caught my attention.
At around sixteen to eighteen months old, chickens experience their first molt – a consequence of which is a temporary stall in egg production. In a commercial setting, dwindling egg production is unacceptable, so these chickens are replaced with younger laying stock and sent to slaughter at barely two years old. The sheer turnover of hens within the commercial industry is startling to think about, especially as they are still capable of producing eggs past
eighteen months albeit at a slightly reduced rate.
Speaking with volunteers, Holly Jewitt-Maurice explores the compassionate and transformative impacts of rehoming initiatives in creating hopeful futures for rescued hens.
Organisations such as ‘British Hen Welfare Trust’, ‘Fresh Start for Hens’ and ‘Chicken Rescue UK’, along with other independent groups, are working to save these young hens through ‘rehoming’. To explore this heart-warming phenomenon, I talked to a volunteer who has worked with multiple organisations. Ava Brownhen first took interest in ex-commercial hens after taking in six of her own in Spring, 2020. Ava’s role involves catching and transporting hens, as well as operating at collection points. She described the operation as being extremely wide-reaching, from the Cotswolds to Nottinghamshire.
Ava explains that it begins with volunteers contacting various commercial laying facilities and encouraging them to sell their hens to a rehoming organisation rather than slaughter them. The admin team then advertise the chickens and allocate them to collection points. The host will have liaised with both the driver and the re-homers to ensure that the chickens have rested and eaten along their journey, ensuring that the chickens’ experience is ideally stress-free. Ava further explained that the public can apply to rescue these chickens. This involves quite a ‘rigorous vetting process’ in which re-homers are asked to prove that their environment is adequately fox-proof and spacious. Volunteers further provide the re-homers with guidance on how to rectify any requirement issues. Once approved,
When compared to the stark reality of slaughter that most commercial hens face, the care and compassion these volunteers have for these animals inspires nothing if not hope. Through the growth of rehoming organisations across the UK, the UK egging industry is forced to take on some semblance of accountability. Firstly, through increased societal awareness and discontent about the short lives of laying hens, farmers are more inclined to move away from sending their hens to slaughter. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, farmers are forced to pay greater attention to their flock’s welfare because if their hens are to be sold to people following commercial use, it then becomes unacceptable for them to be infested with lice or have infected injuries; leading to farmers committing to improved physical care for their flocks and thereby improving commercial hens’ overall quality of life. Therefore, the small changes in perspective that rehoming hens can lead to can act as a greater catalyst for hope within the UK egg industry through the improvement of animal rights.
When questioned about particularly memorable moments, Ava opened up about her experience with a hen she named Lucky. She described a recent rehoming in which the barn the chickens had previously lived in leaked overnight resulting in their becoming wet and cold. When being transported in open trailers to the collection point, the additional influence of the wind caused some chickens to contract hypothermia leading to death and putting many in critical conditions. Lucky defied all odds and was one of the few to survive the ordeal. Ava additionally tube-fed Lucky some warm eggs – a technique
“Have you ever wondered what happens to the chickens who lay your store-bought eggs after they stop laying?
she had been taught by a vet while volunteering at a previous rehoming. She is now ‘completely indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, and has made a full recovery’.
After listening to these stories from Ava, there is no doubt in my mind that these rescue organisations have some truly fantastic volunteers who care deeply about providing these hard-working young hens with the hope of a peaceful retirement. The gruelling distances many of the volunteers are willing to travel to rescue these chickens further speaks volumes about their genuine love and commitment to the work they do. It would be incredible to see more civilians getting involved with rehomings as buying point of lay hens can often be expensive, however purchasing a rescue hen only costs three pounds per bird; with the additional benefit of saving an animal from slaughter and providing some respite for them after a hard life of producing eggs in a commercial setting.
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Navigatingthe Roleof
Geoscience in a ChangingClimate
Chay Nathaniel
In a world grappling with the harsh realities of climate change, geoscientists find themselves at a moral crossroads. The industry, once heralded for their role in unearthing oil and gas reserves, now faces an ethical reckoning. As the planet teeters on the brink of environmental calamity, Chay Nathanial highlights a pressing question looms over the future of science: can geoscientists steer towards a more ethical and sustainable path, or are they doomed to stay tethered to a troubled past?
Imagine a world where geoscientists with a significant and historic role in finding oil and gas resources, grapple with the profound implications of how their professional lives have facilitated the extraction of fossil fuels.
Further imagine, that the unabated use of this fuel now poses the single greatest threat to societal systems, their sustainability, and the very survivability of the human animal on Earth.
If this sounds at all familiar, it is because this is the reality that many in the industry are now faced with. The ethical considerations of their work will only continue to gain traction amid the backdrop of rapid, unstable, industry-driven climate change.
Silvia Peppoloni and Giuseppe Di Capua, members of the International Association for Promoting Geoethics and the authors of Geoethics: A Manifesto for an Ethics of Responsibility Towards the Earth, describe the field as a framework to navigate questions associated with the complex nexus that exists between geoscience, society, and policy. It consists of research and reflection on the appropriate behaviours and practices of human activity with the Earth system. The framework stresses the importance of both sci - entific knowl-
edge and philosophical reference in effectively addressing the most pressing global issues, particularly with resources and the environment.
Its purpose is to encourage geoscientists to be more aware of their ethical responsibilities and to reflect on the principles which guide their contribution to society.
The recognition of this branch of ethics comes at a crucial time when the climate crisis is intensifying. With rising global temperatures and threats of irreversible tipping points, a re-evaluation of the role of petroleum geoscientists is essential.
There are two major production considerations in the petroleum sector; one is the extraction of hydrocarbons from pre-existing reservoirs, and the other is exploration of new potential reservoirs. Geoscience is essential in locating these oil and gas resources.
Consider for a moment that the oil wells in operation continue to exhaust their contents and no new drilling takes place, the consequence would be a net loss in product. For fossil fuel companies, this is far from an ideal scenario.
To keep production high, and to avoid surpassing the dreaded concept of peak oil, they seek to increase both. Consequently, the role is created and maintained for petroleum geoscientists to analyse seismic data and predict hydrocarbon-rich geological formations, ultimately using their expert knowledge to help find and extract fossil fuels from new reserves.
As senior petroleum geologist Edith Allison and Schlumberger Fellow Ben Mandler describe in their contribution to the American Geosciences Institute’s webpage Geoscience Currents, Petroleum and Environment: ‘geoscience informs all aspects of petroleum production and environmental protection.’ Herein lies the ethical problem. This essentially places many a petroleum geoscientist in direct opposition to a wider consensus, one which calls for the cessation of investment, exploration, and extraction of fossil fuels to avoid further catastrophic damage to the total Earth system.
which has been referred to with such urgent terminology for the best part of the last five decades, some petroleum geoscientists may still take a seemingly apologist standpoint. There is the suggestion that the muchtalked-about energy transition needs to be a gradual one because fossil fuels are so deeply intertwined in the energy infrastructure of the modern world.
These arguments frequently cite reliance on (read, addiction to) fossil fuels and how the way forward should include so-called sustainable oil and gas, which concerns itself with the promise of greener practices and the elusive carbon capture and storage technology.
“Geoethics and geoscience in the context of the climate crisis represents a pivotal moment.
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The urgency of the situation has led to calls for Net Zero, the concept of balancing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions with their removal over a given time. The International Energy Agency (IEA) report Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector outlines the immediate halt to investment in new fossil fuel supply projects which is required. The effectiveness of the target, however, remains up for debate given current projections of world GDP, energy use, and CO2 emissions.
While acknowledging the importance of the climate crisis,
Alarmingly, however, and as the latest IPCC report (AR6) warns, there is now no realistic pathway to keeping global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is true even if long-term sequestration projects could be put into practice yesterday. Petroleum geoscientists in the sector might be expressing the need for a gradual shift largely out of fear of losing their source of income or high standard of living. On the contrary, a procrastinated transition to more ethical sources of energy will only undermine the swiftness with which a trillion-dollar industry can be realised.
Geoethics and geoscience in the context of the climate crisis represents a pivotal moment. The slow progress of the transition to a low-carbon energy infrastructure highlights the dire need for geoscience to contribute more to the planning and operation of alternative energies, such as geothermal power and offshore renewables.
If you think fossil fuels belong in the past, then once again imagine a world where any pragmatic geoscientist, or indeed any student of the field, must redeploy their work if they are to belong to a truly ethical and rich future.
In the realm of environmental innovation, small spheres are making big waves. From shade balls shielding water reservoirs to silicate glass beads combatting polar ice melting, Molly Hill explores how these spherical solutions offer promising strategies in the battle against environmental threats and climate change challenges.
Spherical snoituloS for safeguardinghumanresou
pheres occupy a prominent place in the field of Geography, from physically spherical entities like our planet to the categorisation of Earth's elements into the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. Some spheres, though much smaller in size, hold great potential for safeguarding human resources from environmental threats and tackling the challenges of climate change.
One such solution is shade balls. Typically small, hollow, and dark in colour, these plastic balls find their purpose on the surface of water bodies, where they shield water from sunlight. As Marco Chown Oved, Foreign Affairs Reporter at the Toronto Star describes in his brilliant poster, Shade Balls – Just Add Water, the protective layer that shade balls create on reservoirs and drainage ponds prevents
solar energy from initiating chemical reactions between naturally occurring compounds in the water. These reactions can yield potentially harmful products, making it crucial to stop them, especially if the water is intended for human consumption.
The choice of a dark colour, often black, is not coincidental. It enhances the absorption of sunlight and diminishes the water's exposure to incoming solar radiation. Oved explains that shade balls also inhibit algal growth by depriving them of the sunlight required for photosynthesis. In doing so, they contribute to maintaining water quality. Furthermore, shade balls are crafted from high-density polyethylene, a food-grade material, to ensure their safe application to drinking water. Most importantly, the ‘carbon black’ dye protects against the Sun's ultraviolet rays, preventing the balls from deteriorating and releasing microplastics.
One of the most famous cases of shade balls in action can be found at the Las Virgenes Reservoir in Los Angeles. In 2014 and 2015, journalists Alice Walton and Francisco Vara-Orta from the Los Angeles Times reported on the region’s creative approach to water conservation. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power introduced 96 million shade balls, each about four inches in diameter, into the Las Virgenes Reservoir.
The motive behind this project was twofold. Firstly, it aimed to curtail water loss due to evaporation. Secondly, it sought to prevent bromate formation, a by-product that emerges when ozone reacts with naturally occurring bromide in the water. According to researchers at the National Institute of Hygienic Sciences in Japan, bromate is carcinogenic. Shade balls, therefore, help protect water quality in an innovative and eco-friendly manner.
To fulfil environmental responsibility, shade balls are half-filled with 200 grams of water to prevent them from being carried by the wind into surrounding areas. As part of their sustainabil- ity plan, shade balls are recy cled to create new prod ucts at the end of their service, demonstrating a commitment to environmental safety and resource conservation.
Molly Hill
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‘Some spheres... hold great potential for safeguarding human resources from environmental threats’
Shade balls have demonstrated success by conserving water in arid regions and providing a cost-effective method for water management, but they are not our only spherical solution. A more novel approach has been a topic of discussion for several years – silicate glass beads to combat climate change.
According to Jonathan Bamber, reporting to PBS, polar regions like the Arctic are warming at an alarming rate, up to four times as fast as anywhere else on Earth. In light of this, finding ways to mitigate the loss of glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice in these areas is necessary. One intriguing proposal by Ice911 Research (now known as the Arctic Ice Project) involves spreading tiny silicate beads across sea ice surfaces to increase their albedo and reflect more incoming solar radiation. This reduces the heat absorbed by the underlying natural sea ice surfaces and prevents accelerated melting.
Sea ice has been proposed as the target of application because of its relatively low albedo (reflectivity). Its dull, off-white to grey colour is due to its annual formation and melting cycle, which prevents it from compacting as older continental ice that persists year-round does. It is also surrounded by the dark ocean, whose low albedo enables absorption of a lot more insolation compared to continental ice-covered regions. As the National Snow and Ice Data Centre explains, warm waters surrounding sea ice cause it to melt more quickly than its terrestrial counterparts. Ice911 therefore suggests spraying the silicate beads directly onto sea ice or releasing them into waters near sea ice production sites, where they would stick to any ice they encounter. Despite their name, these beads do not resemble perfect spheres. Katie Evans describes their appearance as fine sand, to the point where you can hold millions in the palm of your hand. They are primarily composed of silicon dioxide (SiO2), which is the main constituent of most of Earth’s rocks.
What makes the material appealing is its natural abundance and minimal ecological impact. SiO2 is naturally occurring and, according to Alfredo Ambrosone and other scientists writing on the safety of SiO2 nanoparticles, they do not bioaccumulate inside animals or humans when ingested, making them an appropriate choice.
The microspheres are also designed to measure 35 microns, a size considered more than safe even if consumed, as only particles smaller than ten microns can pose health risks if ingested.
While these silicate beads have not been put into practical use yet, there are ongoing assessments of their feasibility and environmental safety. In 2018, scientist Leslie Field and her team from the Ice911 project put this geoengineering solution to the test. They conducted trial runs in small areas of Alaska which yielded promising results, with the glass beads increasing the reflectivity of the snow surface by fifteen to twenty per cent, according to their paper published in Earth’s Future.
Additionally, climate modelling by the Arctic Ice Project indicates that if these beads are widely employed, we could see a ten per cent increase in ice volume, a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature reduction, and a 20 to 50 centimetres increase in average ice thickness in the Arctic region over the next 40 years. However, longitudinal assessment is needed to fully understand their real-world performance and environmental impacts. While spherical solutions like shade balls and glass beads might sound unconventional, they underscore the importance of innovative thinking to address the pressing environmental concerns, especially with ongoing climate change.
The Future of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
In a recent study that has gained a lot of attention both in the media and among academics, siblings Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen shed light on the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). They suggest that this collapse, driven by global warming, could happen sooner than scientists previously believed, possibly in the middle of this century.
In a groundbreaking study, siblings Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen have sounded the alarm on the precarious future of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), warning of its potentially imminent collapse as global warming accelerates.
Despite Hollywood-esque doomsday scenarios, Lili Csada explores how understanding the complex interplay of the AMOC and climate change reveals a more nuanced reality.
Lili Csada
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While some might imagine a doomsday scenario akin to Hollywood’s The Day After Tomorrow, where the planet is blanketed in snow and ice within days of the AMOC shutdown, the reality, although impactful, might not be that extreme. Let’s take a closer look at AMOC and its behaviour under climate change.
The AMOC is driven by density changes. In the tropics, warm water near the surface flows towards the North Atlantic. There
With a 95 per cent confidence interval, the tipping point would occur between 2025 and 2095”
it cools, increasing its density, and sea ice begins to form, which causes salt to concentrate and further increases the density. The high-density seawater sinks and flows to the south. Then by upwelling, it finds its way to the surface around the Antarctic region, warms up, and the cycle repeats.
The AMOC moves more than twenty million cubic metres of water per second. This means it facilitates the transport of more than a million gigawatts of heat, making
it a critical driver of the Earth’s climate. The cycle is slow, with approximately 1000 years needed for a parcel of water to complete full circulation. However, sediment, ice core, and other proxy records have revealed that the pace of the AMOC is not constant.
Throughout the Quaternary period, the last 2.58 million years, the strength of the AMOC has been highly variable, reflecting its sensitivity to changes in environmental parameters such as
freshwater flux, global temperature, and precipitation patterns. Its dynamics have been altered, leading to substantial cooling and warming episodes, as well as other environmental changes. Current global warming is capable of driving changes to these environmental parameters and initiating feedback loops between the AMOC and the environment, particularly affecting the climate. So, how does contemporary environmental change influence the AMOC?
The area in the North Atlantic where water descends is salty and dense. However, during warming events, meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets dilutes the water, reducing its density. A diminished density gradient causes the sinking process to slow down, leading to a decrease in the overall circulation speed. The AMOC therefore transports a smaller amount of salty water from the tropics to the North, further amplifying the slowdown.
Upon reaching a certain threshold, a self-perpetuating cycle is initiated, and the AMOC slows down significantly, no longer efficiently redistributing heat. This
critical point is known as a tipping point, where the system transitions from one stable state to another. Historical records and model studies have confirmed that the AMOC has a tipping point. But how close are we to this tipping point?
Palaeoclimatologists unanimously affirm that the strength of the AMOC has diminished over the past centuries, reaching its lowest point in the past millennium. While direct measurements only date back to 2004, fingerprints of the AMOC that indicate its speed have been used to reconstruct its historical behaviour. Additionally, a decadal oscillation has been observed since the 1950s, prompting scientists to question whether it is solely a product of the system’s natural variability or a response to global warming and an early warning signal.
Early warning signals manifest as signs indicating that a system is losing its stability, often observed in datasets as increased
variance and autocorrelation. Various models and observations have suggested that the AMOC is nearing its tipping point, although their outcomes vary.
Conventional climate models indicate a low risk in this century, a sentiment echoed by the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It asserts that the likelihood of the AMOC collapsing is very low, with a less than ten per cent
However, these models have been identified as underestimating ice loss from Greenland, a significant freshwater source, and exhibiting high uncertainties in predicting freshwater movement around the North Atlantic. A recent article has reignited discussions about the AMOC with a high probability of reaching a tip-
ping point around 2057. In their 2023 study, the Ditlevsen siblings hypothesized that, with a 95 per cent confidence interval, the tipping point would occur between 2025 and 2095. The likelihood varies within this range, with early collapses like the one predicted for 2025 regarded as unlikely.
The controversy surrounding their findings lies in their deliberate omission of drivers in their model and sole reliance on high-resolution data – a decision that leaves the observed outcomes without a clear explanation. The driving factors are left out because other models that do contain them mostly do not provide a thorough explanation of their mechanisms, resulting in model outputs that do not match the observations.
Certainly, the debate regarding the timing of the tipping point is understandable as we aim to be prepared. However, what exactly should we be prepared for? On a climatological scale, the collapse would occur very quickly; the AMOC would shut down in a few decades, causing the North Atlantic to cool by five to twenty degrees Celsius, with Europe experiencing the most effects. The temperatures in England would re-
semble those in northern Canada. Since heat would not be dispersed, it would remain in the tropics, where it would contribute to the El Niño system and raise temperatures dramatically. However, as global warming would continue to affect the system, the climatic impact would be more complicated.
It’s like pushing the brake and the speed pedal at the same time when driving a car, according to Peter Ditlevsen. As a result, it is challenging to predict how the two processes would interact.
Although there are inherent uncertainties in modelling and prediction, growing evidence indicates that the ten per cent chance of a collapse reported by the IPCC may have been greatly underestimated. Future forecasts are expected to be more precise as time goes on and we get closer to the tipping point. One thing is certain: the possible effects of a collapse would change our way of life substantially. Since climate change is the primary driver of the AMOC’s slowdown, we have no choice but to take steps towards sustainability at the individual, national, and international levels.
R ad ioactiveHeirlooms? TheFutureofFinland’s SpentFuel
“ A h o peful examplethat wearecapableofthinking beyondour own lifetimes”
Catherine Veronis
With the legacy of nuclear waste persisting for generations, dealing with highly radioactive waste is a seismic challenge. Catherine Veronis explores how Finland’s innovative approach, a subterranean repository of stored copper canisters of spent nuclear fuel, not only addresses the intricate challenges posed by nuclear waste, but reflects the larger narrative of a need for sustainable, safe energy solutions in our quest for a net-zero future.
As ordinary people attending to our busy routines, most of what we spend our time caring for will not outlast our own lifetime. Our beloved pets provide us with happy company for a decade or two if we’re lucky. Our cars will start to yawn and wail into retirement after 12 years, and most major kitchen appliances require a shining replacement after 15 years. If we stumble into multidecadal, sometimes intergenerational, commitments to the management of something (say heirlooms, or a story), it is likely that the practice of looking after it will gradually become a part of our lives. It is less likely that we set out, from the very start, to know that in many decades’ time it will still be well-maintained by the hands and minds of our future selves.
To the dismay of many activists, the commercial nuclear power industry is much the same. Nuclear power generation leaves behind metal rods containing high-level radioactive waste no longer useful in producing electricity. Spent fuel makes up just 3% of the total volume of waste from nuclear plants but produces fatal doses of radiation - particularly hazardous if it were to seep into the surrounding groundwater or riverbeds. These hot, radioactive rods are typically placed in cooling pools for five to ten years, before being moved into dry storage in canisters of thick steel and concrete for another 40 years.
Nuclear fission generates energy by colliding extra neutrons with atoms of uranium-235, splitting the atom apart and releasing an immense amount of heat to generate steam, enough to turn the turbines of an electricity generator. The splitting of uranium creates the radioactive daughter isotopes cesium-137 and strontium-90, each with half-lives of 30 years – around the average time a homeowner spends living in their house. Other uranium atoms form heavier, transuranic elements like plutonium-239, which takes 24,000 years to decay. If these units of transuranic waste were to accumulate in our biosphere, it could prove fatal to exposed populations of human and non-human life.
While some countries have opted for methods of recycling the radioactive elements for further use in nuclear power generation, others are still stor-
ing their spent fuel above ground in wet or dry casks. Those 40 years of storage dwarf in comparison to the 24,000 years it takes for the radioactive element plutonium-239 to decay by half.
What do we do with waste that will far outlive not only us, but many generations of future life? Shoot it into space? Sink it below the seabed? Finland might have a better answer. Next to the Gulf of Bothnia on the country’s west coast, twenty miles of holes and tunnels have been drilled deep into the crystalline bedrock of Olkiluoto island.
The company Posiva Oy from Eurajoki, Finland, has been developing a geological disposal site for the past four decades, identifying intact areas of rock below the water table to drill vertical boreholes at a depth of 1,400 feet.
The plan is that these boreholes will each host two tons of spent fuel, encased in thick, multi-barrier copper canisters. Finland currently operates four nuclear power plants, and each plant will send its spent fuel to be packaged and buried into 3,000 of these canisters. By the year 2120, Posivo’s operators will backfill the tunnels with clay, seal any entry points, and decommission the site; leaving behind just quiet forest and wild Nordic grass above the surface, troubled only by the wind and snow.
Image sourced from Catherine Veronis
The homepage of their website boasts: “We have a solution which is an example for the whole world.”
To deliver on their promise, the people behind Posiva have performed a series of ‘Safety Case Assessments’ to forecast how the bedrock will change over Earth’s long-term future, particularly future glacial periods that could cause the area to fracture, freeze, or shift over thousands of years. Vincent Ialenti’s 2020 book Deep Time Reckoning, published by MIT Press, presents a detailed and qualitative case study of the Safety Case Experts as one of the first groups to apply geologic time scales to the deposition of spent fuel.
Any number of geological events can affect the integrity of the bedrock, causing groundwater to seep in and corrode the canisters. Floods, fires, earthquakes, and erosion may jeopardise the canisters.
Forests may be replaced by lakes, and the chemicals within the soil and mud can take on new forms. Anthropogenic activity is considered as well; thankfully, the region is not home to precious minerals or oils that may lead future humans to drill below. Knowledge about possible future climates is produced by Earth system and ice sheet models, respectively called CLIMBER-2 and SICOPOLIS.
These show that Finland could experience an ice age 50,000 years from now, the onset of which will depend on the shape of Earth’s orbit, as well as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These two factors create feedback effects that either warm or cool regions of the planet, and are thus major determinants of the long-term evolution of global temperature.
We know this, of course, from lessons in history. In Earth system modelling, the past is prologue. During the last glacial period over 12,000 years ago, Finland was covered in thick ice sheets, which led to the phenomena of ‘isostatic depression’ wherein the land mass sunk hundreds of metres. As the Earth warmed, ice sheets melted and the weight of seawater caused the seabed to descend, lifting continental land in reverse - much like a shovel wedging into hard soil. Eventually, Finland rebounded above the sea. The arrival and retreat of ice ages will depend on those factors mentioned earlier – Earth’s orbital force, and future anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.
Image sourced from Catherine Veronis
Given the careful planning by their Safety Case Experts, Posiva expects to receive final approval from the Finnish government and begin burying radioactive waste this decade. They must continue to prove that far-off future exposure to radioactive isotopes will be less than 0.01 millisieverts (mSv) per person. For reference, the average person in the UK today is exposed to 2.7 mSv a year.
The repository is a hopeful example that we are capable of thinking beyond our own lifetimes and that of our children. The achievement of net-zero goals depends partly on the adoption of nuclear power and other renewables. Carefully constructing geological repositories is one step in that direction.
In Conversation with Eco-Activist Léa Weimann: Ecocide and Arts Activism
Charlotte Evans
Léa Weimann is a climate activist and specialist in ecocide law, organising environmental campaigns in South Africa, Germany, and the UK. Charlotte Evans sits down with Léa to discuss her research, and the unique role that art has played in her environmental activism.
You’ve been an ‘Eco-activist’ for many years now. Could you start by sharing about how your environmental journey started?
It was with growing up in Cape Town in South Africa, and seeing a lot of environmental pollution - that got me thinking about how we treat our planet. How do we treat nature? In my final year of school, there was a massive water crisis, there were predictions of ‘day zero’ when the city would have to import water because none would be coming through the taps anymore – so it was really a crisis moment. That made me realise how we are already living on the frontlines of climate change.
I quickly then knew that I wanted to speak up about this. I think it gave me a voice and a mission that previously I didn’t have. This is something I need to talk about, because I can’t stay silent, and that re ally drove my confidence in public speaking. And then I started studying all of it: in St Andrews with Sustainable Development and International Relations, and I got into international law. Wanting to pursue that further, I did the LLM in Global Environment and Climate Change Law at Edinburgh.
Are you hopeful that these measures are coming soon?
How have those interests fed into your PhD research now?
All of that really got me excited about activism. There’s definitely a big need for people going out onto the streets and going to politicians, but we also need people championing that from within. We have to recognise that being an activist can be taking a cause forward in a different scenario – whether that’s in an academic, institutional, or legal setting.
But what struck me is that Ecocide – the mass destruction of our environment - is not criminal. Through studying my LLM, I got really interested in some of the legal concepts such as ecocide law. Ecocide law is not a silver bullet solution, but it addresses some of the worst harms – and I think we need to start somewhere. At the moment, some of them can be captured with penalties – where corporations pay a fine – but that’s not the same as putting something into criminal law, holding someone criminally accountable. That has a whole other preventative measure. This conversation is about changing norms.
That’s something I’ve become really passionate about, being involved with Stop Ecocide International, and wanting to research more into how these emerging legal principles can help contribute to the paradigm shift we need within our society.
I would say so, yes. From the high-level dis cussions I’ve been able to go to – at the UN, at the Stockholm Conference and within UNEP - people know that it’s coming. The Interna tional Criminal Court knows this is coming. Actually, the Rome Statute initially in cluded ecocide law, but they took it out last minute – so actually it’s already been in historical discussions.
It could be within the next 2 or 3 years that we see it being pro posed. Once it’s proposed, then countries and corporations will know it’s coming – and the goal is not to have a thousand cases, but to have a preventa tive law that will set a norm within international socie ty that mass environmental destruction is not okay, oth erwise we’ll see you in court!
Finally, I want to consider more accessible spaces for activism than the ‘badged’ spaces of COP. What do you see as the role of arts within climate activism?
I think we need to be aware that in order to contribute something to the movement we don’t have to engage at the diplomatic level. There’s a lot of potential for change in the international arena, but like I said, the most hopeful spaces at COP for me have been with civil society. There’s a really big role that the arts and culture have within our society to create change. Climate change is an uncomfortable topic but art is about bringing out those uncomfortable topics within society. Whether that’s through theatre and humor, or through poetry and stories.
That’s something that I’m increasingly passionate about - my side project to everything that I do from a legal perspective. That’s how I got into poetry writing, and also why I lead
the Art Working Group within the Youth for Ecocide Law group. I’m compiling different art and stories from around the world into a storybook. People send in stories and photography from nature because those speak to the heart in a way that law can’t, and I think that’s so, so important.
There’s a lot of love stories and songs, but there’s not enough love songs about the Earth! And if we love on Earth, there’s so much that connects us to the Earth itself. How do we find cooler ways to communicate that? The more I think about it, this is the more fun and transformative way that we can change society and public views on climate change – because if those shift, the politicians, and leaders have to shift as well.
Could you share any vignettes of your experiences of previous COP events, and any expectations for COP28?
I obviously feel very grateful to be able to go – it’s a very hard place to get to. Last year was my first COP, so it’s nice going in with a better idea of what awaits me. The people you meet there from NGOs and civil society are really engaged people. One of the most hopeful things I found at COPs was the people you can see on the ground collaborating with each other, saying: ‘You’re working on this in this country, I’m working on this; how can we collaborate? How can we learn from each other to progress?’ Especially the youth sector has got so big, so there’s a lot of youth coalitions pushing forward. There’s still some youth tokenism happening there –a lot more countries are sending youth delegate, but not giving them a strong voice.
But COP is a massive space... there are so many side events and exciting discussions happening, that you can lose track of the importance of the event itself – which isn’t just to showcase the amazing things people are doing around the world, but about how do we progress international law on this? That was really eye-opening for me at another conference, which was the Subsidiary Bodies meeting in Bonn in June. That’s the
pre-conference to COP, but it’s only the negotiations. So it’s a lot drier and more technical overall, but you can see more clearly: what are the important matters that need to be discussed? What are the tensions?
What’s really important for this year, is that it’s the first Global Stocktake – the first time that countries have to bring forward the progress that’s happened since the Paris Agreement. Everyone knows that the Global Stocktake is not going to be a very rosy looking document! – but it’s an important exercise – it shows how we have progressed or not, and why is that? A lot of progress was made on Loss and Damage funds, which will be a big topic for COP28. We also know that it will be one of the biggest COPs. It’s more accessible in some ways, getting lots of people together in a very climate intensive, emission-intensive conference. Who do we really need there to progress discussions? And how do we give voice to those people? Lots of questionable things are happening, but if we don’t have activists going that will call out what’s happening, then you will just allow people to go forward with greenwashing and with the oil industry dominating discussions. It’s pretty clear that oil wants to stay within the COP, so we need to push back.
What happens when you ask for a seat at the table, but the table is broken? This analogy is uncomfortably familiar for the Cambridge students who attended the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Dubai last year, the primary decision-making body of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Stepping outside the Cambridge bubble, Laura Lock - HSPS student and climate activist - and Aman Verneker - Engineering undergraduate and president of the Cambridge Climate Society - attended the largest annual gathering on climate action. Their insights into the event shed light on the exclu-
At its core, COP is a mechanism for discussion: a space where the global community can convene to discuss climate policy and supposedly bolster action. Over the years, its purpose has expanded beyond government negotiations, bringing together diverse voices from civil society.
tFigh i
ng
As the dust settles on the 28th Conference of the Parties in Dubai, two Cambridge students, Laura Lock and Aman Verneker, share their eye-opening experiences attending this event with Eva Weinstein. Delving into the uncomfortable reality faced by these young activists as they grapple with a system rife with exclusion and corporate influence, Eva explores the fundamental flaws within COP that hampers genuine progress in the fight against climate change.
COP 28 sparked widespread criticism before negotiations began. Dubai’s human rights record coupled with its role as the third largest producer of the OPEC oil alliance, fed accusations of greenwashing by the UAE. Notably, the appointment of Sultan Al Jaber (CEO of state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) as president of the talks was condemned for the undue influence of fossil fuel companies at COP proceedings. This conflict of interest, which figuratively and literally places fossil fuels at the head of the event, became a running theme throughout the conference.
Wary of claims that having the very businesses whose models need to change in the room is essential to combating climate change, Laura worked on a campaign pushing the UNFCCC to establish a definition and framework for conflicts of interest. “If you’re going to get a divorce, you don’t want your partner writing the terms that that divorce” she points out, “[COP] should be responding to the interests of people, not the interests of corporations”.
Eva Weinstein
Echoing how the World Health Organisation pushed out the tobacco lobby, Laura emphasises that there is no space for unregulated corporations with vested interests in the fossil fuel lobby.
The distinction between those actively fighting for their lives and those performing their jobs in suits becomes glaringly obvious. At least 2456 fossil fuel delegates attended the conference. This means that one in every 30 delegates Laura walked past had invested interest in the fossil fuel lobby; the consequences of which are painfully evident in the final text. The outcomes fall short of demands for a full, fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels. Riddled with loopholes, dangerous tech-reliant solution sand overemphasis on the green economy, the weak outcome left Laura feeling “helpless for humanity”.
The document refers directly to fossil fuels for the first time in its history, indicating crucial movement towards tackling root causes. However, as Laura points out, this “would’ve been historic ten years ago, now it’s just pathetic”.
Se a or a f
tPledges for the loss and damage fund amounted to $712 million – an amount equivalent to the annual salary of the world’s six highest-paid football players. This is brought into ever-starker relief considering that the fossil fuel industry has been receiving subsidies of $11 million a minute, every day, for the last 50 years.
Laura fears that “the Global North has moved to looking at loss and damage as a solidarity thing”. They are losing sight of the function of loss and damages as a reparation structure, whereby they should be “paying for the damage and the loss it has caused through extractivist colonialism, capitalism and industrialization”. Aman agrees that the document “wasn’t really as ambitious as we needed it to be ‘’, dismayed by loopholes which will allow gas exploration and use to continue by ambiguously calling it a ‘low carbon fuel’.
Both students are outraged as we discuss the final text. They both swear - the only words apt enough to describe their anger at the “death-sentence” which has left Laura feeling “betrayed, and numb, and not sure how to feel”. “When you have spent so many hours of unpaid labour pouring your absolute heart and soul into something for it then to get completely disregarded to prop up the interests of the fossil fuel companies, that is heart-breaking”.
The final decision wasn’t all that shocked the delegates. Aman divulges how decisions for the global stocktake occurred on the final day. The stocktake, an overarching climate inventory assessing the progress countries are making towards the Paris Agreement, underwent ample change in the 48 hours before the closing plenary. Explaining the moment the decision was made, Aman reveals that the “[Alliance of] Small Island States weren’t even there in the room… they were still coordinating their position”. He is confounded by this oversight: “I assumed that consensus actually means consensus, and not just the president elect forced consensus. How can such an important decision be made without ensuring that everyone who’s agreeing to it is in the room?”
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This blasé attitude was present elsewhere at the conference. Laura talks about her experience speaking in a bilateral discussion on conflicts of interest with the head of the EU commission, EU presidency, and the head of each of their delegations. “Last year, one of the chiefs of BP was on a Mauritanian delegation badge”, this year “the EU had people that work for BP and ExxonMobil all on the negotiation delegations”. She explains that “because the UNFCCC system is consensus-based, it means that any of these people can go into a room and block consensus. And so not only are they having sort of backdoor discussions…but they actually have the ability to be in the negotiation room”. After pointing out that perhaps having these people in delegations is compromising the ability to negotiate ambitious policy, Laura reveals that “the response from the head of the EU commission was ‘Keep up the good work!’, ‘We trust in the professionalism of our negotiators’ – ‘I was like this is your job! This is not my job! You’re paid to do this”.
Real change requires parallel action at multiple scales”
It is moments like these where inclusion of diverse actors from civil society can feel tokenistic. As an intergenerational justice issue, the presence of young people at negotiations is essential. Yet despite campaigns against ‘youth-washing’, inclusion can still feel performative. Aman points out that “young people aren’t a homogenous group”, emphasising the importance of representing the diversity of views that exist among young people, but feels that they do bring a general “level of ambition”. While there are increasing avenues for meaningful engagement, like the Youth Negotiators Academy, which trains young people to engage at COP as negotiators, and YOUNGO (the official youth constituency of the UN), there remains a pressing need to validate the knowledge of young activists, often side-lined in the face of institutional strength.
“You get a lot of invitations to speak on a panel… then they take a photo and that’s it and they never do anything with it again” Laura shares. “I think a big part of what has to be done to make youth inclusion more meaningful, is validating just the knowledge that you have as a young person, the knowledge that you have from your own experience from your community…and making sure that there is space for that to be heard with as much sort of weight and gravity as an IPCC scientist reading off numbers that he collected on his screen”.
Laura doesn’t hold back in discussing COP’s exclusionary nature, citing barriers such as language, finance, and visa imbalances. Our conversation sheds light on the power dynamics within COP, illustrated by the hierarchy of badges. “The big distinction is observer and party badges”, Laura explains. Party badges are given out by countries to delegations who will be actively negotiating, while observer badges cover most civil society actors and NGOs. “One of the things that I noticed that is increasing this year, is that fossil fuel delegates used to be primarily on observer badges, but increasingly, they’re getting party badges”, Laura points out. The word ‘observer’ is poignant, often too literal a description of important stakeholders whose views should be expressed, considered, and translated into final decisions.
Language like this is powerful in shaping the outcomes of COP – reductive distinctions of ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, or references to ‘natural resources’ which automatically frame nature as a resource for exploitation. English remains the working language at COP, so “if you’re coming into the system without speaking one of the main five UN languages, you’re having to mediate your thoughts and your voice into what is ultimately a colonial structure of language”. These barriers were exacerbated by the logistics of the event, as Laura shares the experience of walking into a room without an empty seat in sight – “you don’t have access to a translator because you’re like sat on the floor in the back of the room. Aman adds that despite entitlement to sit and observe negotiations, rooms “would just get filled up with country representatives, and then you weren’t actually able to go in”.
Being English and Hungarian, Laura has spent the last two years trying to get in touch with the Hungarian delegation through every possible mode of communication. “They have completely ignored me…which hurts a little”, she jokes. At COP 28, after a meeting with the EU delegation, Laura made a beeline for a Hungarian delegate. “They knew exactly who I was, and so it wasn’t just that they hadn’t seen the emails. It was like they’d seen them and repeatedly chosen to ignore them”. But despite following up on her conversation, in which Laura claims that the delegate told her “Of course, like we’d love to have a meeting. That’s actually such a big priority for us. Like we really want to engage young people”, she is yet to hear back.
As a student, it can feel paradoxical to engage with events that reinforce hierarchies of knowledge production, glorify the UN, and where participation can feel performative and futile. However, having radical factions both within and outside of these negotiations is essential to push policy making in a more ambitious direction. Laura feels that much of the climate youth work centres on recognising that “nothing that gets decided at COP is actually decided at COP”. While conferences like COP are significant, she believes that grassroots work, such as that done by organisations like Cambridge Climate Justice (CCJ) and Cambridge Climate Society (CCS) are equally important. Both Aman and Laura urge a shift in focus towards local and international collaborations, emphasising that real change requires parallel action at multiple scales.
“I think I’ve found a foothold, but that is still a foothold that is very much on the outside’’. Laura’s awareness that despite finding a way to participate, there are still barriers preventing activists to effect real change demonstrates that getting a seat at the table is only the beginning; the challenge now lies in fixing the table and fostering truly impactful and inclusive conversation.
Images sourced from Laura Lock.
Free Walking Tours: the Future of Urban Tourism?
Isla Hammond
Are conventional city tours that dent your wallet a thing of the past? Isla Hammond recounts her experience of game-changing free walking tours, arguing that they allow tourists to connect with locals, discover historical and political nuances, and witness the city through the eyes of its residents.
Tours challenge binary ideas of scale and instead produce a new form of ‘glocalisation’”
ooking for a cheap and efficient way of exploring a new place? Want to see a city through the eyes of a local? Overwhelmed by the extensive list of trip-advisor reviews for restaurants and bars?
Last summer I visited a lot of new cities in Europe, from the culturally diverse neighbourhoods of Budapest to vibrant streets of Barcelona. Arriving in these cities for the first time and wanting to make the most of the few days I had to immerse myself in the culture and history, I tried to think of how best to explore without spending too much money on cable cars, museums and cathedrals. That’s when I came across Freetour.com.
Free walking tours are a relatively new form of sightseeing, common in urban areas and differ from normal tours as a tip (the amount decided by the participant rather than the tour company) is given at the end rather than pre-bought as a ticket. The increased popularity of these tours has been dependent on the advancement of the internet as these tours are advertised, circulated and accessed globally.
Having supposedly booked a two-and-a-half-hour tour around Budapest, on the slightly dodgy looking website ‘Freetour.com’, I promised my friend a chimney cake (a traditional Hungarian treat) if she would accompany me on this excursion. Exhausted and slightly hungover from the night before, my friend and I dragged ourselves out of our Airbnb in search of the location where our tour guide would be waiting for us with a blue umbrella. Unsure about what we had signed up for, I was nervous it would be a tedious morning, with both of us planning ways to discretely escape and lose the tour group without them noticing our absence.
However, my fears did not materialise. A few hours later and we felt like experts on the history, culture and politics of Pest (the Eastern part of the city). Our hilarious tour guide, Endre, led us on an engaging and educational tour, highlighting the most impressive architecture, explaining the rich history of the city and dropping in occasional anecdotes to keep us all entertained. He also provided us with a map, full of recommendations for traditional food, drinks and activities, as well as discount codes for certain restaurants.
Free walking tours, create new relations between tourists and place. The guides can be viewed as mediators of urban areas as well as the local history, given the power to lead the route and choose the attractions. However, rather than the profit from the tours by-passing local communities and going straight to international touring companies through package holiday deals, this approach benefits local people and businesses. That being said, this ‘innovative and disruptive’ model has the potential of transforming into a traditional capitalist economy, due to the professionalisation of the guides, marketing of the tours and deals with bars and restaurants.
This collaborative experience is rewarding for both the participants and the guides, as the participants can ask questions and shape the places by bringing their own stories and knowledge. For young people especially, I think this provides an accessible way of learning about the history of a place without being forced to study travel guides. Despite being a group with various ages, nationalities and knowledge of the city already, the whistle stop tour incorporated a vast range of interests and we all came away having learnt a lot – even if it was just about where to find the best beer!
Recounting my trip later to my family, I was able to explain why the ‘St Stephen’s Basilica’ was composed of multiple different architectural styles including neo-classical and neo-renaissance and how the height of the cathedral is equal to the height of Hungarian Parliament building (96m), towering above the rest of the city to show the equal importance of the state and religion in Hungary. We also learnt about the politics of the country and how Hungary is still searching for its own identity, due to its history of big
powers such as Russia, Nazi Germany and the US asserting dominance through control of Hungary, demonstrated by the placement of statues in Liberty Square (with Reagan walking from parliament towards the square and George Bush pointing up towards one of the last remaining soviet monuments in the city). However, not only did our tour guide talk us through these power struggles, he also told us personal stories about how his parents and family had lived through and experienced the Nazi regime, the rise and the fall of the soviet union and Hungary joining the European Union. It was fascinating to learn how huge moments in history and global processes can influence livelihoods on such a personal scale.
While the guides share local knowledge about the place, the actors involved engage with global processes, such as discussing the impacts of Covid 19 or high inflation (which we learnt had affected Hungary the most in Europe in 2023, explaining why the food and drink was not as cheap as we had expected). The fusion of different cultures and stories happens in a specific place, producing new knowledge about the place and fusing the global and local. Therefore, it could be argued that these tours challenge binary ideas of scale and instead produce a new form of ‘glocalisation’.
I would highly recommend going on a walking tour if you are arriving in a new city and want to meet new people, find out about historical and current politics and see the city through the eyes of residents themselves. Disappointed that the two hours had come to an end, we even considered joining our guide for his afternoon tour of ‘Buda Castle’. Keeping to my promise, my friend got her chimney cake and we reflected about our fulfilling morning and everything we had learnt, our hangovers now a distant thing of past.
Phototography Competition
‘Growth’
When I think of ‘growth’, I think of the pine forests of Washington state, USA, which I encountered during my dissertation research trip this summer, investigating the intersections between wildfire politics and hikers’ experience of landscape. To me, this image, showing the aftermath of the Norse Peak Fire in 2017, captures the eerie beauty of burned forests. Though desolate, dry, hot, and a visceral confrontation of climate change, these areas also offer signs of hope through the gradual regrowth of grasses, shrubs and tree saplings. Even in the most devastated landscapes, there is still growth and positivity to be found.
Compass Photography Competion Winner
Aidan Crowson, 3rd Year Geographer, Jesus College
Last-Chance Tourism: A Force for Good?
Finn O’Hare
The climate crisis is accelerating at unprecedented rates, induced by harmful human activities such as chopping down forests and flying aeroplanes. As climate change imperils almost every component of society, there are growing feelings of panic. Finn O’Hare explores how tourism, leveraging these urgent ‘last-chance’ narratives, can paradoxically be part of the solution to safeguard the planet against its increasingly precarious future.
Agrowing travel trend emerging from the increased awareness of the impacts of global warming and climate change is ‘last-chance’ tourism, which describes the desire of tourists to see specific landscapes, seascapes or species before they are gone. ‘Lastchance’ tourism encapsulates many of the complexities associated with anthropogenic-induced climate change, whereby humans are seemingly so appreciative of and share a desire to see the world in its natural state and beauty, and yet continue to partake in activities which contribute to its destruction. Tourism to areas such as the Great Barrier
Perhaps the emotional bond created between tourist and their site of tourism can provoke the behavioural changes to save nature in years” “
Reef, where polls have suggested that 70% of visits are motivated by a desire to see the reef “before it is gone”, or to glaciers in the French Alps, or to small islands states like the Maldives or the Seychelles, are being undertaken by individuals with a desire to experience the seemingly pristine environments of the natural world. Yet their very act of travelling there invariably involves a variety of carbon intensive transport methods, not least air travel which is responsible for 3.5% of effective radiative forcing.
Much of the focus of this trend has been Arctic areas, as they are undergoing global warming at the fastest rate and so face the most immediate risk from climate change, with the amplified warming compounded by the sensitivity of Arctic ecosystems to warming temperatures. NASA’s latest figures state that sea ice extent is shrinking at a rate of 12.2% per decade. As such the province of Manitoba in Canada marks a key site for the ‘last-chance’ tour ism trend, where climate change is negatively impact ing population sizes of polar bears, notable as Church ill, a city in this province, is probably the single-most accessible place on Earth to see polar bears in the wild. Polar bears are dependent on sea ice for hunting, using it as a platform for their main food source, ringed seals, so warmer temperatures and reduced sea ice extent is sig nificantly limiting the ability of polar bears to hunt. With the population of Canada’s Western Hudson Bay polar bear dropping by 27% in the past five years alone, there is an ev er-growing desire amongst tour ists to travel to Northern regions like Churchill to see them in the wild before it is too late. This situation encapsulates the intriguing contradiction that is ‘last-chance’ tourism, perhaps to a magnified extent, with research demonstrating that a polar bear viewing experience may be up to 34 times more energy intensive than the average global tourist experience. As such,
tive around ‘last-chance’ tourism is unquestionably negative, tourism can increase awareness towards environmental issues; the real-world, in person experience of an individual witnessing nature may be what is required for the consequences of one’s actions to hit home. Existing research has strongly indicated that tourists often create an emotional bond with their environment, which evokes greater personal responses to the knowledge that the environment or ecosystem in question is under imminent threat, resulting in positive changes to an individual’s lifestyle choices and behaviour once they have returned home. There is undoubtedly a knowledge-action gap in climate change – 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree climate change is mainly caused by humans, and 70% of the UK public believe that the world’s climate is changing as a result of human activity, and yet CO2 emissions continue to rise to record highs year after year. This demonstrates how, despite the vast majority of people understanding the risks of many carbon-intensive behaviours, the action taken at present is insufficient. Given that ‘last-chance’ tourism is driven by an understanding of the risks facing a species like polar bears, or an environment like the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps the emotional bond created from an in-person experience is what is needed to close this gap and to fundamentally alter the approach of an individual towards global climate change. While it is easy to counter this with the argument that such a process will never take place on a great enough scale to have
meaningful impact on global climate change, when the fact that the world’s richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66% is considered, it seems significantly more viable. Given that ‘lastchance’ tourism is being carried out by those with the resources to carry out these often high expense trips to inaccessible destinations, clearly with no aversion to carbon intensive travel, the impetus of an emotional bond to change their behaviours may result in a notable impact on a broader scale to reduce emissions. While such arguments do not diminish the scale or importance of the negative impacts delivered by ‘last-
Last-Chance
Tourism:
the desire of tourists to see specific landscapes, seascapes or species before they are gone” “
chance’ tourism on both a local and global scale, perhaps it is worth at least considering the potential benefits it may bring in the long-term. While it may be too late to reverse the changes being observed to many of the environments and species facing imminent risk today, perhaps the emotional bond created between tourist and their site of tourism can provoke the behavioural changes to save nature in years to come.
