At COP30, Duke students participate even as the U.S. skips negotiations

In mid-November more than a dozen Duke students traveled to Belém, Brazil to attend the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP30. There, they observed international negotiations and participated in panels on topics related to climate diplomacy.

The students ranged from undergraduates to doctoral candidates that all took the flight to COP30 as part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change practicum course. The course began as a student initiative and is now sponsored by Bass Connections, seeing more than 100 students apply for roughly 15 spots.

“COP is quite important because it is the central vehicle by which the global community attempts to come to resolutions on climate,” said Jackson Ewing, instructor of the practicum course and director of energy and climate policy at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. “… I truly believe that there’s no substitute for going to a large international summit like this if you do want to work in a given space.”

The Conference of Parties, or COP, was first held in 1995 and has since served as the annual U.N. convention on climate change. In addition to countries, nongovernmental organizations, private sector companies and activist groups often send delegations. This year, that surmounted to more than 56,000 delegates, making it the second-largest COP held thus far.

Absent, though, was a delegation from the United States — the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases and the second largest emitter annually. The lack of a U.S. delegation comes amid a broader pullback on federal efforts to tackle climate change under the Trump administration which included a withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Because the U.S. did not send a delegation, Anna-Paden Carson, a fifth-year doctoral student in the course, expressed that it was even more important for Duke students to attend COP this year. 

“We were able as Duke students to be meeting these major players in the climate space on the ground and say that we are from an institution from the United States,” Carson said. “… it was a really valuable experience, both for us, but also for the people that we met.”

Students prepared to attend COP through the practicum course, which Ewing crafted to include lessons on topics like fossil fuel phase outs and climate adaptation finance and often featured guest speakers with expertise in the field. The students also participated in a simulated negotiation, with each assigned to represent a different country’s delegation. The exercise highlighted the difficulty of international climate diplomacy.

“Hav[ing] an understanding of how challenging it was just for 14 of us in a class to come to an agreement on a three or four page document, … gave me greater empathy for the challenges of international climate diplomacy,” Carson said. 

Once students arrived at COP30, they were each assigned to a client who gave them tasks to complete throughout the conference. Senior Chloe Young worked for a client focused on climate disaster and adaptation finance — a field she is currently researching for her thesis.

“I’ve had my eye on [climate adaptation finance negotiations] year after year, and finally getting the chance to go and see it for myself and form my own opinions on it was something that I’m really grateful I had the opportunity to do,” Young said.

Although COP30 was billed as the “implementation COP,” the outcomes were mixed, with the final compromise agreement — signed by all countries — not including any plan to phase out fossil fuels. In fact, the term “fossil fuels” was absent from the final text altogether, frustrating students who attended.

“For us to go toward our objectives of limiting climate change, we have to phase out fossil fuels,” said Aashish Yadav, a master’s student at the Nicholas School of the Environment.

However, Young noted that progress was still made. Despite her disappointment with the final agreement, she highlighted that Brazil had promised to design a roadmap for a fossil fuel phaseout to be delivered at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, which she said is “something that the headlines are missing.” International negotiation processes like COP can be “slow and slightly painful,” she added, but the COP does lead to progress and consensus.

For Carson it was the locals that drove home the importance of the convention.

“Climate solutions take us all, not just the high-level negotiators. So, to see the average man and woman really excited about climate and climate solutions was exciting and inspiring for me,” Carson said.

Ewing echoed the students’ sentiment: “A world that has annual COPs is better than a world that doesn’t,” he said.