Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Global Climate Summit is to be held today and tomorrow at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
The governor and representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Indonesia, Mexico and the European Union are coming together to discuss global warming and climate change.
The summit will be available for students to watch live via webcast at UCTV.TV/CLIMATE.
The summit is being held to create a plan for the next global agreement on climate change solutions, according to a Global Climate Summit statement.
The event will consist of several different panels, and each will discuss issues including creating standards and protocols for reporting greenhouse gases and how to reduce emissions.
According to the Global Climate Summit Web site, energy will be a crucial component of the discussion.
The panel will be discussing new approaches to affordable energy and how to lower emissions.
The link between greenhouse emissions and transportation will be another topic of focus, along with clean transportation technologies and policies towards personal mobility and movement of goods, according to the Web site.
Forestry and agriculture will also be discussed as well as cement, iron, steel and aluminum, the most globally traded commodities.
Suzanne Smith, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research administrative assistant, said the office is hosting a screening of the webcast for UCLA faculty and staff as well, since not everyone can afford to attend the actual summit.
She said she expects a lot of faculty and staff to be coming in and out during the day to keep a watch on the summit.
But students are the target audience for watching the summit at UCLA because they make up the majority of the “carbon footprint” for UCLA, said Jennifer Cully Nordby, academic director of the UCLA institute of the environment and chair of the UCLA Campus Sustainability Committee.
“It is important for students to watch the summit because they should really understand why we need to address global climate change and having the webcast available is a great way to do that”, Nordby said.
Watching the webcast will be important to UCLA because it is gearing up to launch its own action plan against climate change by making the campus more sustainable and as climate-neutral as possible, she said.