The Profile
A school of complexity and diplomacy
An interview with Laurence Tubiana
The architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement takes on a new role as the Dean of Europe’s first-ever climate school
By Anton John Crace
"It's a momentous statement to create this school at this particular moment"
"I think people are looking for a place where you can discuss calmly, fact-based solutions."
Laurence Tubiana has spent a lifetime moving between academia, government and the private sector, as well as her own institute. Passionate about the environment and climate action from early in her career, the French economist, diplomat and professor’s ability to bring the right people together culminated in her being selected as one of the architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement at COP21.
Announced as the inaugural Dean of the Paris Climate School, established by Sciences Po and the first of its kind in Europe, she sits down with QS Insights to discuss her ambitions for the school, her career, and the importance of diplomacy between science and politics.
QS: Why was the Paris Climate School established?
Laurence Tubiana: It has happened through a positive alignment of the stars. We saw that some other climate schools had been created in several parts of the world, in particular in the United States but there was no equivalent in Europe.
When the new Director of Sciences Po presented his project as a candidate to be elected, this was a flagship of his project. And why? Because he felt that these are the new issues that the next generation of leaders and people who enter into business, finance and politics will have to face.
It's a momentous statement to create this school at this particular moment. We have been rushing the creation; all the scientific bodies of Sciences Po voted for it in less than eight months, which is a record in any university. It was really a feeling that in this particular moment in history where we have leaders in the world that say that climate change doesn't exist, that science should not be supported, that are dismantling big databases and big institutions that can provide the evidence, it was really important to say we don't believe this trend is useful. We have to prepare for better times, but at least to maintain the idea that science is a base of any rational decision, whether in politics, in economics and elsewhere.
QS: You’ve touched on two interesting points. The first is the professionalisation of climate action, and also the philosophy around how do you engage within that? It's not simply just sciences, but it's also politics, and it's also community, and a number of other things that really don't have much to do with the science. Did you have to find people or did they come to you?
LT: We have to resist proposals from the students we have already just a lot of proposals from faculty, from practitioners that have good ideas that they would want to share. So, we are just starting and putting the curriculum in place. There is a lot of enthusiasm. I think people are looking for a place where you can discuss calmly, fact-based solutions.
We prepared this through quite a careful exercise associating the business people, the finance sector and the faculty of Sciences Po to try to define what kind of jobs the students can find. The response was, we need people that understand complexity, that are not specialists who know how to do geothermal engineering – there are very good engineering schools that do that – but who understand that it's not simple
QS: You famously served as the French climate ambassador and Special Representative for COP21 and were one of the architects of the Paris Agreement. Your role as the dean of the Paris Climate School sees you return to academia. What are your aspirations in this position?
LT: I have been in academia many years, and I was teaching at Columbia University when the French government asked me to come. I followed that, because I do think that the academic discipline, in which you really think about your concept, is essential for diplomacy. If not, you try to look for compromise, and you don't have the sense of the direction you want.
Second is we are at a difficult moment for climate action, clearly. Confrontational. Doubts. It’s a moment where, we made enormous progress in Paris – that's for sure, but we have to do much more in a now very limited number of years. We are at a relatively difficult moment, at a crucial moment.
We have seen over the past 30 years many cycles, ups and downs. After the meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 there was a big depression of what we could not do, we could not agree, etcetera. Then you see how you build the next cycle. And that way I see this, for me, the importance of doing this job now is to prepare the next cycle. The next cycle will be a new generation of people that will be in power, that will work in companies, that will make financial decisions and, combined, do something solidly-grounded on being really committed to find solutions. I think, for me, it’s more important than [for me] to do things directly.
QS: To sort of synthesise your observations, there’s a need for perseverance and also an ability to just continue. It's a lesson for your students.
LT: Yes, they ask me all of the time: ‘Why do you continue? How do you find the energy?’ When you look back, you see how much has been achieved. There are now initiatives, societal involvement, societal awareness that didn't exist 10 years, 15 years, 20 years before. It was a niche discussion in 1997.
When you begin to study and act on climate change or all these global issues, it's something you don't stop. I don't see anybody stopping to do that when they have begun. So, it's probably somehow an addiction. But most seriously, I think you get energy because of the students and they give it to you. That's why it's so important to continue teaching and organising the school.
QS: I want to talk about you specifically now, and we'll go back to earlier in your career. What really sparked your interest in action for climate change?
LT: In a way, sort of opportunities, but I started taking care of the environment when I was a researcher in the National Institute of Agronomic Research and a professor in an agronomic school. I'm not an agronomist, I'm an economist by training, but I was very interested in the impact on trade, on societies, on global elements. That's the first entry point. The second was how much these new issues of biodiversity was important for the political global discussion.
I've been quite active on this issue of biodiversity, entering into the government as an advisor to the French Prime Minister [Lionel Jospin] in 1997. I stayed five years with him, and I discovered the diplomacy of it, which I didn't know. I began to engage with that and saw that academia is important, research is important, civil society activities are important, but diplomacy is important as well, because you need the government to act.
I began to be really captured by that diplomatic element. I proposed reforms on the foreign affairs ministry, which were conducted that finally to create a global, global public goods department like you have in US or in Japan or many others countries. We had a more classical diplomacy at that time, which was very much bilateral or economic.
After we lost the election, I created an institute on international relations and sustainability, and then I went back and forth from government to academia and my institute. So that was a life of changing scenes with a view when I could be useful and have an influence
I was back totally in academia at that time when the French president [François Hollande] and the French Minister of Foreign Affairs [Laurent Fabius] told me to help for the climate COP. They didn't know exactly how to organise it. And they didn't have a clear view, because, again, the diplomacy of France is not like the British, which has experience and knowledge from now a number of years.
And I realised, working with the prime minister, that the scientific community in France are very good on climate, very high level, but they were not connected to the politics at all. The diplomats were talking about issues they didn't know, and that was quite evident in the diplomacy. I began to realise that we have to do reforms, but at the same time, thinking that I accepted the job to try to make something sensible, in a moment where there was a huge pessimism about the capacity to Create a global agreement.
Having done research, having done teaching, being in academia helps, because you come with a plan, which normally the diplomats don't have. They try to understand and make compromise. But that was not the issue they knew. So it was a big trust in my capacity
QS: How do you translate that, because the scientific community isn't necessarily engaged in compromising; the science is the science. And then there's the economics of it, which tries to find compromise. And how do you, how do you get those two to sort of see eye to eye?
LT: The diplomacy of these global public goods, they are global. It's not one government or one actor. Responsibility is across the board. The first issue was to convince the diplomats that they have to talk to many different people, and they could not have the classical channel of the government and the people they know in the government. They have to talk to business, parliamentarians, civil societies, NGOs, military people.
I developed this concept of 360-degrees diplomacy that helped them, inviting all these stakeholders in their embassies. That was diplomacy vis a vis the rest of the world. Then there was, of course, the scientists of these countries talking to the ambassadors. I think the essential is to explain the problems of a particular circle to another circle so that they can integrate the constraints.
If we want to negotiate, we have to know at least a minimum about each other, what is happening to each other, because then you get much more interesting solutions than just comparing the red lines.
For the scientific committees that was the same. Bring them and discuss with them very frequently about what their targets would be, what their analysis would be and how they could think of a process that is a learning process [for stakeholders], and not an immediate response to their facts and data.
QS: How have you seen the delivery of education change over time, and how would you like to continue see it continue to change, particularly around this area of climate change?
LT: What we see as big progress is that the different domains were quite separate. You now have all this analysis and logic of the concentration of the different greenhouse gases and the ways to respond to them.
More progressively, we began to integrate the problem of resilience, which has grown enormously as a field of research, and the way that resilience implies that you have to understand the reaction of the ecosystem and the potential solution to that; the wrong response to climate events or climate change, the connection between many elements, health and climate. This integration element of the complexity seems to me the new frontier.
There’s a big challenge that the digital economy is posing, because it's transforming all the economy, all the society, all the management of so many things. On one side, it's an enormous energy consumer, and not always helping to solve the big issues about energy efficiency or better energy systems. We will see a number of collaborations between all these fields.
QS: What will the Paris Climate School’s legacy be?
LT: I hope it is a new generation of informed people that can have the energy, the enthusiasm, the willingness to change things, and that they feel entitled to do so. I think the legacy will be this new generation. Plus, of course, as I say, when it is such a cultural battle around all these issues of common goods and in particular climate, we need a place where we have a normal discussion.