COP27 Negotiations: IGP's Jacquie McGlade acts on Finance, Agriculture & Food, Science & Technology

Jacqueline McGlade (Professor of Natural Prosperity, Sustainable Development and Knowledge Systems at the Institute for Global Prosperity) is attending the 27^th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27) as a UCL delegate.

Professor McGlade is a Carbon and Biodiversity Expert and focuses especially on unleashing the power of healthy soils and ecosystems to store carbon by shifting to regenerative farming practices and nature-based solutions underpinned by accurate data and evidence from the field. 

She is determined to help food growers shift to regenerative farming practices and nature-based solutions after working closely with farmers and seeing the opportunity to expand collaborations with food growers who ‘want to do the right thing’.

She has three key areas of interest at COP27:

1. Finance - Ethical carbon trade. Creating a carbon credit scheme for straightforward and transparent carbon tracking and trading.

2. Agriculture and food - Carbon sequestration. Developing sustainable farming solutions such as healthy pastures and effective water system that is replicable for wider international use.

3. Science and technology - New measures of change. Using digital twin and blockchain technologies to leverage data for process improvement. 

Ahead of COP27, Prof. McGlade spoke at the 'Meet the UCL Delegation' event on 2 November which gave students from across UCL the chance to learn more about climate change negotiations and to discuss COP27 themes and share their views with the UCL researchers attending.

When asked if she was optimistic about climate change, she said “I would prefer to say that I am determined. I am closely working with farmers and there are 2.8 billion people growing food that want to do the right thing. Therefore, I want to pull out every possible avenue to take action. Now is the time to act.”

Addressing critiques of COP as a ‘carbon polluting’ event, she said ”There are many critiques of people going to COP27 from the perspective of direct carbon emission of the travel and the event. We are paying the price by speaking out our voices and doing negotiations on behalf of countries. I think bringing stakeholders into the same room is very important.”

Prof. McGlade is part of the UCL team that has developed the COP27 carbon footprint calculator - a tool to calculate the carbon footprint of travel to this year’s COP in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. It shines a spotlight on the impact of travel and provides the means to mitigate and offset this part of its footprint.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/climate-change/cop27-carbon-footprint-calculator

Read more about UCL's contribution to COP27

Photo by Dr Ida Kubiszewski