Post 26: Mock Climate Conference

Today we visited Unila, a university located within the grounds of Itaipu. It's an international campus, hosting students from all around the world. It's really interesting to visit a school with so many nationalities represented, especially when their campus is not even technically part of Brazil or Paraguay. 

While we were there, we had a mock climate conference. We were split up into 6 groups, each representing a country or a group of countries (ex: USA, China, India, European Union, other Developed Countries, other Developing Countries). My group represented other Developing Countries such as Brazil, Africa, Central America, etc. Each group came up with a date to stop CO2 production, a date to start decreasing CO2 production, and then a rate at which to decrease it. We also came up with an amount of money to give to help developing countries, or in our case, how much money we'd need to build/rebuild our infrastructure in developing nations. Then, we entered this data into an algorithm that gave us the percent increase in global temperature in the next 100 years. We were aiming for a percent lower than 2 degrees Celsius as a class, but we ended up reaching 2.5 degrees Celsius. The whole experience was really interesting because it showed us just how difficult it can be to figure out logistics like how much money each country deserves. It made me appreciate all the work that was done at the Paris Climate Conference even more. 

After our visit to Unila, we went to lunch at a good buffet place we went to the other day, and after lunch we got to visit a buddhist temple and then a mosque. There are a ton of different nationalities in Foz do Iguazu, so it was cool to be able to experience a few of those cultures as well.