The north Hungarian sky may have been gun-metal grey over Esztergom, but the focus was entirely green as the Climate Policy Institute held its annual Spring Academy for MCC students on the weekend of 1-3 March.
Things kicked off on Friday night, with MCC’s senior climate researcher, Kovács Erik, assisted by CPI junior researcher Kun Viktoria, sketching the broader natural and anthropogenic factors of the climate system, and presenting various future scenarios, before engaging in an interactive analysis of current and future climate policies with the students.
On the Saturday morning, Basa Martón, CPI’s resident agriculture analyst, introduced the students to the concept of ‘carbon neutrality’, and explored the ways in which agriculture creates carbon emissions, the effect of this, and how such emissions can be reduced.
Saturday’s morning schedule continued with CPI’s senior energy analyst, Toldi Ottó, discussing how we can achieve sustainability and climate neutrality by 2050, particularly given the challenges of providing healthy food, clean drinking water, and sufficient energy to a global population that is expected to grow from 9.4 to 12.7 billion by 2100.
Following lunch, CPI’s Director, Dr Calum T.M. Nicholson, introduced the students to the politics of climate change. In this talk, he pointed to the symmetrical challenges of both ‘sides’ of the climate politics: while ‘deniers’ have too little faith in the science, climate activists often have too much faith in the social science. He argued that while the science of climate change is actually very good, the social science of its impact on society is much more ambiguous than is commonly believed. Debating the latter, therefore, isn’t just possible, but necessary, not because climate change doesn’t matter, but precisely because it does.
The Academy's Saturday programme concluded with Szebenyi Péter, CPI’s environmental engineer and ‘greenfluencer’, talking about waste recycling, from the global scale of the waste problem, to the local ways in which waste can be both prevented and recycled.
Closing the Academy on Sunday, Dr Nicholson delivered a lecture on climate and security, in which he discussed the changing security priorities of the West after the end of the Cold War, and the security concerns that underlie much of the policy discourse on climate change.
After an intense couple of days, the students were then taken to the local Danube Museum to wrap up the Spring Academy, before they made their way back to their home cities, some as near as Budapest, and others as far as Kolozsvár.
