Interview with Charlotte Halpern, back from the COP27

Last month, Charlotte Halpern, FNSP tenured researcher at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, attended the climate change conference in Sharm El-Sheikh. Charlotte specialises in comparative public policy processes. In this interview, she reflects on her experience at the COP27 and how she show-cased the work of the SUMP-PLUS project.

Interview by Charlène Lavoir, Communications Department, Sciences Po

What was your role at COP27?

Accreditation opportunities for the COP are few and far between, so my presence at COP27 is the result of a wonderful combination of circumstances.

Let me first explain how COP27 works: there is the ‘on’ and the ‘off’. The ‘on’ is the official programme — the negotiations between the parties, and the ‘off’ part allows all the observers to host side events on the subjects of their choice — agriculture, health, mobility, development, etc. This gives expert observers the opportunity to speak on their areas of expertise and to exchange views with peers and a highly mobilised audience.

I was invited to present my research results at a side event organised by Anneliese Depoux, Director of the Virchow-Villermé Centre for Public Health Paris-Berlin of the Université Paris Cité. Anneliese is in charge of health issues within the Earth Politics Centre, of which we are both board members, and this round table organised in partnership with the University of California was about the decarbonisation of health systems.

What was the focus of your presentation?

I focused my presentation on SUMP-PLUS, a project within which I coordinate the governance and political capacities of cities to drive a sustainable and decarbonised urban mobility trajectory, and where a large part of the work is dedicated to the decarbonisation of local health systems.

For the most experienced cities in sustainable urban mobility, it is becoming essential to identify additional reservoirs for reducing their carbon emissions to intensify and accelerate decarbonisation. They do this by forging strategic partnerships with sectors of activity that generate mobility, for example health, education, tourism or logistics, etc. For the health system, this concerns the transport and delivery of medicines, home care and emergency services, journeys by health workers and patients to hospitals, nursing homes and doctors' surgeries, the transport of health care waste, etc. Other aspects include for example energy efficiency in buildings, public procurement and waste management. Reducing carbon emissions requires integrated, cross-sectoral approaches: their design and, above all, their implementation is a major challenge for actors who do not speak the same ‘language’ and rarely cross paths.

The SUMP-PLUS project gave me the opportunity to understand this challenge from a British case, based in the Manchester City Lab and led by our SUMP PLUS partner, Stuart Blackadder from Transport for Greater Manchester: following the adoption in 2020 of a decarbonisation plan by the National Health Service (NHS), Transport for Greater Manchester launched a pilot project to decarbonise health-related travel within its territory. Thanks to SUMP-PLUS, it has been possible to bring together all the stakeholders in this cross-sectoral project: health care staff, hospital management, municipal and regional health authorities, economic stakeholders and patient representatives. The city lab has laid the foundations for a joint action plan and drawn lessons from pre-existing pilot projects. The city lab has also worked across sectors with all the city's departments and the Mayor's office to propose a governance system dedicated to steering this decarbonisation process by 2038.

My role, in collaboration with Prof. Peter Jones from University College London and other SUMP-PLUS partners was to accompany the city in this process. I relied on two competences: as a researcher specialised in public action, to identify the issues specific to cross-sectoral public action; and as the scientific manager of an executive Master's degree at Sciences Po on urban governance, to train professionals from the public and private sectors in the management of highly complex territorial projects.

During this side event, I presented the research results of the Manchester City Lab, which are the culmination of three years of work. Five other cities are partners in this European project, each having developed its City Lab on an issue identified as a priority - tourism for Lucca (Italy) and Platanias (Crete), logistics for Lucca and Antwerp (Belgium), education for Klaipeda (Lithuania) and for Alba Iulia (Romania). This project is very much grounded in reality, and shows the many implications of a decarbonisation of the transport system on a local scale with practical consequences. This includes the limits of an all-electric strategy, the challenge of deploying alternatives to the car in small and medium-sized cities, and the way in which the rise of the zero-carbon objective requires the overhaul of governance structures and processes on the scale of the whole city.

I was also able to meet other researchers interested in decarbonising the healthcare system. This may lead to new research opportunities in the future. So this side event was very useful!

How was Sciences Po represented at COP27?

Sciences Po was present in various ways. Carola Klöck, Assistant Professor at CERI, participated with PhD students whose research focuses on international negotiations. Carola's research focuses on climate change adaptation and climate change policy more generally, and she also studies the role of developing island states in international climate negotiations. COP27 is an object of study in itself!

Thanks to the support of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate Change (GAUC), of which Sciences Po is a member, Sciences Po's International Affairs Department was able to obtain additional accreditations for three students who took part last summer in a "Climate x" Leadership training pilot initiative co-sponsored by Sciences Po and Tsinghua University. Sciences Po is one of the founding members of the GAUC, an international alliance of 15 world-class universities, including many close partners of Sciences Po, which have been uniting around climate change issues since 2019. The "Climate x" leadership training pilot aims to train a student community from all parts of the world on climate change issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. More than 150 students from 15 member universities around the world, including 30 from Sciences Po, participated in this first edition, with interventions from permanent faculty members from the different partner institutions, among which Carola and myself, to address issues related to energy, finance, nature, biodiversity and food, adaptation and resilience, and finally, international negotiations and public policies on climate. Students also worked in groups on their own projects, and two Sciences Po students were able to present their work at COP27, in a side event organised on Youth Day, November 9th.

Another important alliance for Sciences Po was present at COP27: the U7+ Alliance, founded by our university in 2019, hosted a side event. In a more informal capacity, several exchanges took place between representatives of the U7+ member universities present at the COP in a process of pooling knowledge and resources that are spread across the 50 members of the U7+ Alliance, for the benefit of university action on environmental transformations.

What is the role of research in addressing the challenges of environmental transformations?

The IPCC and, in France, the Haut Conseil pour le Climat (High Council for Climate), to name but two bodies, have constantly alerted public authorities about the need to inform policy making of the results of research on environmental transformations i There has never been so much data on the urgency of climate and ecological issues, across multiple disciplines. Beyond this effort to conceptualise, produce data and analytical work, the academic world is bubbling with proposals and avenues to explore new solutions.

Henceforth, for those of us who are interested in public policy processes, there is nothing mechanical about transposing this knowledge into public action, an endeavor facing many obstacles. Taking climate change into account at all levels implies such a profound upheaval of our economic, political, social and legal systems that many governments are hesitant. How can we reconcile these long-term objectives with short-term contingencies? How do we move from incentives to restrictions on activities bearing the most detrimental environmental impact? How can scientific models, such as that of planetary limits, currently in vogue among practitioners, be translated into operational terms? What accompanying measures should be planned, and in what timeframe, to support the conversion of jobs and professions directly affected, and to support the most vulnerable social groups and territories?

Faced with the magnitude of the task, there is unfortunately a strong temptation to limit oneself to small short-term measures, to "quick wins", to serve one's own clientele or to favour routine solutions, a shortcoming that has been highlighted many times by public policy research.

Environmental issues are now featured in the media and in the public debate on a regular basis: has this changed your work?

When I arrived at Sciences Po in 2012, there were not many of us working on the subject, all disciplines combined. Today, there are more than forty permanent faculty members. The attention paid to environmental issues has continued to grow, particularly thanks to the commitment of students, and has opened many doors for us: we have more spaces for exchange and dialogue. There is also more funding available for research.

Sciences Po is a good example of this ever-growing interest in environmental issues over the last ten years: the permanent faculty has grown in numbers, an interdisciplinary research group, AIRE, has been created to complement what is already being done in the research centres, and interdisciplinary programmes, open to other scientific disciplines, have been created in partnership with Université Paris Cité. Thanks to the launch of the Bruno Latour Fund, ten post-doctoral researchers will strengthen this collective dynamic. On the teaching side too, courses have grown significantly, as have dedicated programmes. This also entails a great deal of commitment, particularly in terms of monitoring the academic production of students at all levels — university college, masters, doctorate — and supporting their initiatives.