Copenhagen and Climate Changes: The Stakes, the Politics

This symposium was hosted by the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies, which is part of the Department of International Politics, on 6 November 2009. The participants examined all sides of the debate and where this increasingly important international issue is headed in the future. The event was held in anticipation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which took place in Copenhagen on 7 and 8 December 2009.

Participants included the internationally renowned scholars of environmental policy and green politics, Professor Robyn Eckersley and Professor Peter Christoff of the University of Melbourne, both of whom are currently based at the University of Oxford, and Ian Clark, E. H. Carr Professor at the Department of International Politics and an Associate of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies.

Professor Ekersley is the author of The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (2004) and was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Dr. Christoff has previously worked as Assistant to the Commissioner to the Environment in Victoria and is the past director of Greenpeace Australia-Pacific.

The symposium closed with a round table discussion featuring Sir John Houghton, former Chief Executive of the Met Office and former co-chair of the Scientific Assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir Emyr Jones-Parry, former British Permanent Representative to the United Nations and President of Aberystwyth University, and Dr Marek Kohn of the University of Brighton. The session was chaired by Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler, then Director of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies.

You can still download the programme or read the coverage of the conference on the BBC Mid-Wales website.A vidcast of the conference is available for viewing using the links below: