UCL Laws staff and students take part in UCL Global Citizenship programme
17 June 2019
Members of UCL Laws were involved in running a course on the Power to the Planet! strand of UCL’s Global Citizenship programme.
Between the 28th May and 7th June, over 100 undergraduate and postgraduate students from UCL Laws and across UCL took part in the Power to the Planet! Policymaking for the People and the Environment strand of the UCL Global Citizenship Programme. This was the fourth year that a strand focussing on global environmental issues had been run under the auspices of UCL Laws.
The strand’s academic lead was Dr Rob Amos, an associate staff member of UCL Laws, supported by Priscila Carvalho, a PhD candidate in the Energy Institute and former UCL Laws LLM student. Dr Amos designed the curriculum and led the two-week course.
During the mornings, students heard from a range of speakers on different aspects of environmental policymaking. These included talks on the policy responses to the global health impacts of climate change and the role of environmental activism in influencing the policy process. Afternoons consisted of tutorials and research projects designed by the students on issues such as Japan’s energy policy following the Fukushima disaster, deforestation in Indonesia and the rights of indigenous and uncontacted tribes in the Andaman Islands.
The strand’s main event was a partner-engagement day. Each group of students worked with an external policy partner on a real-world issue. Partners included Carbon Neutral Cambridge, Nourish Our World and Wretched of the Earth, with students engaging with, inter alia, international climate change politics, river management and global food security. The day’s events were filmed by a media group so that the students’ experiences could be shared with the other strands on the GCP.