February 23, 2016  

Purdue social scientists to share takeaways from Paris Climate Summit

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University delegates who attended the Paris Climate Summit (COP21) in December will share their findings in the event, "Field Notes from COP21," from 3:30-5 p.m. Friday (Feb. 26) in Rawls Hall, Room 2070.

Jeffrey Dukes, director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center in Discovery Park and a professor of forestry and natural resources, will moderate the event, which is free and open to the public. He will be joined by scheduled panelists and PCCRC members Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya, an assistant professor of political science; Laura Zanotti, an associate professor of anthropology; and Robert Marzec, an associate professor in the Department of English.

Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti attended COP21 as part of their Presence2Influence project, which focuses on the ways marginalized and underrepresented groups influence environmental policy that affects their way of living. The team's interest is indigenous rights related to forests and biodiversity.

"The United Nations has identified indigenous peoples and women as two groups most affected by environmental change, including climate change," said Marion Suiseeya, who focuses on environmental justice and community resilience.

While indigenous peoples make up about 5 percent of the global population, they constitute more than one-third of the world's poorest people and govern and occupy or use nearly 22 percent of global land area. "These factors suggest that indigenous peoples, and indigenous women in particular, are key stakeholders in global environmental governance," Suiseeya said.

During the 90-minute discussion, the team will share highlights - including photos - from COP21, and share information and insight they gained at the international event. They also will outline how they conducted their research.

"We used collaborative event ethnography - a team-based approach to study mega events," said Zanotti, an environmental anthropologist. "We were able to sit in on official COP21 negotiations and cover civil society events. We were especially interested in aspects related to tension, negotiation and debate as a part of how underrepresented and marginalized groups pursue justice and influence international environmental negotiations." 

Marzec attended COP21 to examine how summit participants addressed the importance and necessity of bringing scientific, political and artistic representations together to combat the inertia of policy.

"My project developed this broad concern in two specific directions - indigenous people's efforts at COP21 that were officially sanctioned by the U.N., and offsite events throughout the city that involved both scientific, political and artistic efforts to expand and thread climate change beyond its official methods of incorporation and representation by the U.N.," Marzec said.

Marzec has recently published "Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State," an extensive historical study of scientific, military, political and economic formations across five centuries that reveals how what he terms "environmentality" has been instrumental in the development of today's security society, and security-governed environmental policies. Investigating alternatives to environmentality in an ecological philosophy he refers to as "inhabitancy," he traces the existence of this philosophy in historical court cases, in contemporary movements such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, and in various philosophical environmental engagements.

Presence2Influence is a long-term research project that also will include the September 2016 World Conservation Congress. The team can be followed on Twitter at @COP21Research.

Others on the Presence2Influence team are Sarah Huang, a graduate student in cultural anthropology; Fernando Tormos, a doctoral candidate in political science; Scott Benzing, an undergraduate student in natural resources planning and decision making; Suraya Williams, an undergraduate student in ecology, evolution and environmental biology; and Elizabeth Wulbrecht, a graduate student in political science.

In addition to the PCCRC, the project is supported by the Department of Political Science, the Purdue Center for the Environment, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Anthropology.

The PCCRC is a collaborative hub for interdisciplinary research on climate change. From its inception, the Discovery Park center has focused on building a community of researchers working with the perspective that human and natural systems should be studied as an integrated whole. 

Writers: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Anna Schultz, 765-494-4719, schult70@purdue.edu 

Sources: Jeffrey Dukes, 765-494-1446, jsdukes@purdue.edu         

Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, 765-496-3921, kmarions@purdue.edu

Laura Zanotti, 765-496-7400, lzanotti@purdue.edu

Bob Marzec, 765-494-3759, rmarzec@purdue.edu 

Related news release:
Purdue professors at Paris Climate Summit to study climate change and indigenous people 

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