York Philosophy Professor Idil Boran landed in Warsaw, Poland, today for the United Nations climate change conference to follow negotiations as part of her work on decision making and ethics in climate change policy.
This is the second consecutive year that Boran has attended the Conference of the Parties (COP 19) at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a York University observer delegate. She previously attended the meeting in Doha, Qatar, in December 2012 and is excited to watch this year’s negotiations 
unfold.
Idil Boran at DOHA 2012
“This is a great opportunity to follow up on specific themes that were front and centre during negotiations between parties, as well as in official side-events at COP 18 in Doha,” says Boran. “As the international community is moving toward 2015, where a new agreement on the architecture of cooperation on climate change is to be reached, any progress achieved in Warsaw will be highly significant.”
The themes she is interested in following include:
- the role of new financial mechanisms for effective mitigations programs;
- steps toward an international cooperation to address loss and damage due to the effects of climate change in developing countries; and
- empowering women for climate change resilience in developing countries.
She finds the continuity afforded by watching the negotiations take place from one year to the next particularly valuable to her work and wonders if the destruction in the aftermath of typhoon Haiyan will heighten the tone of this year’s negotiations. The UNFCCC started Nov. 11 and will run until Nov. 22.
Boran, director of the Certificate Program in Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, is working on integrating problems of decision-making into a conception of an ethics of climate change policy.
The York University delegation for the UNFCCC has been coordinated by the Institute for Research & Innovation on Sustainability (IRIS) since 2009. Boran will be posting updates to the IRIS website.
Her research is supported by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada and IRIS.
For further information on Warsaw 2013, contact iboran@yorku.ca. Anyone interested in attending next year should watch the UNFCCC website or contact Boran.