“Leading this class is one of the coolest parts of my job,” says Jackson Ewing, Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. The class is a practicum course focused around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the primary UN body for climate diplomacy around the world. Each year, the UNFCCC hosts a summit, known as COP (Conference of Parties). The summit brings together tens of thousands of people from all over the world, with numerous countries represented, companies from global conglomerates to startups, and nonprofits and NGOs big and small. This year’s summit is COP30 – the 30th year of meetings.
The main thing we try to do in the class is put the students in a position to have to understand the other side and embrace, understand, and accept the complexity.
Students in the immersive practicum come from all over Duke. They are undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students from the Sanford School, Nicholas School of the Environment, Pratt School of Engineering, Fuqua School of Business, Law, Humanities and beyond. Roughly 15 are accepted into the course each year, during which they work in partnership with one of the active participants in COP. Each week, students are taught by leaders in climate policy from across sectors, learning from visiting real-world practitioners how climate work gets done. During the course, students also travel to Washington, DC to meet with policymakers, and to COP to see real-world policymaking in action.
“There’s no substitute for actually being at one of these summits,” Ewing says. “You cannot understand it until you’ve been there. Well, maybe not understand – I’ve been going over 15 years and I am not sure I understand it,” Ewing jokes, “but really, the access is unique and being able to see the policy work in action is invaluable.”
Ewing has run the practicum for the last three years. The class began eight years ago as a student initiative and has evolved into the credit-bearing intensive course it is today. Ewing loves the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds of the students, a diversity he says matches the wide array and divergent worldviews of players in the climate and energy space.
“We have students who want to be corporate sustainability officers. We have others who just want to burn the whole system down.” Ewing sees value in that tension. “The main thing we try to do in the class is put the students in a position to have to understand the other side and embrace, understand, and accept the complexity. You have to deal with the reality as it is and not let what you would like to see in a perfect world drive you to constant frustration or lead you to really unpragmatic approaches.”
This semester, one of the guest lecturers in the course is a current Duke undergraduate. She’s a Brazilian national who took the course last year. With the COP summit in Brazil this year, she took a pause on her degree to work full-time in Brazil on efforts to prepare and execute COP30. Ewing says, “she’ll return to her studies as an example of what our practicum students can do, and as a tangible example of the external engagement piece of the Climate Commitment.”
Ewing’s own research portfolio spans both domestic and international work. In the U.S., he collaborates with colleagues around expanding clean firm power deployment, enhancing grid flexibility, and improving power market policies. He also helps lead “From Billions to Trillions,” a series of Duke University convenings that have brought together thought leaders for productive exchanges about accelerating private climate investment. Internationally, he works with emerging economies in the Global South, particularly in Asia, on meeting their unique energy transition challenges. He claims his work can be fairly “technical and wonky” but its impact at a systems and individual level is unmistakable.
“From a human perspective, those are countries with some of the greatest climate vulnerabilities and the greatest development needs, which dovetail with climate realities in the sense that they need energy access. They need stronger agricultural resilience. They are a lot of the various health and human development indicators that hinge on the provision of reliable and affordable energy. By working in some of those places, if you’re able to be effective, then you’re contributing to better lives for the people that live there. That’s a sandbox worth playing in.”
Photos courtesy of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.