By Claire Roby
Carbon Accounting Coordinator,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Last week we held the closing reception for our third year of the Clean Air-Cool Planet Summer Climate Fellowship program. We had great projects and Fellows in 2008 and 2009, but I think something truly special happened with this year’s six fellows.
As always at the conclusion of a summer’s Fellowship program, the staff at CA-CP and invited guests heard the results of each fellow’s project, from analyzing life cycle data for CA-CP’s CHEFS project to working with our partner VHB to research how innovative carbon management solutions can be transferred from one sector to another. You can read more about each of their projects here.
Like their predecessors in “classes” past, this year’s Fellows – in addition to the valuable on-site job experience – also received several different opportunities for professional development, from presentations by CA-CP’s Brooks Yeager on short-lived climate forcers to a discussion led by CA-CP’s Dr. Anne Stephenson and former climate fellow Dovev Levine on how to choose a graduate program.
Anne with the 2010 Fellows
But the most fulfilling part for me, as a former Fellow and a current CA-CP staff member, was coming back three months after meeting the summer fellows to witness their transformation into a team of six committed climate professionals. At the closing reception in Portsmouth’s 100 Club, the six of them presented our office with a beautiful potted plant—autographed in sharpie! They thanked CA-CP for the mentorship and support they had received over the summer, and the next morning most of them launched an impromptu trip to Boston to hang out with each other for the weekend.
Perhaps it was the camp-like initiation they underwent back in June at Laudholm Farm in Wells, Maine; maybe it was the smaller “class” size; maybe it was that five of the six worked on projects close to Portsmouth and so got to know and spend time with each other. Whatever the case, this group “clicked” in a way that truly made their work and experience “larger than the sum of its parts.”
The Fellows with CA-CP staff
This is not, of course, to take away in anyway from the amazing work of our past fellows – several of whom joined us on the 19th for the soiree send off for this year’s group. We still cite the work of our Fellows past – and enjoy hearing of their continued successes, which only serves to confirm Clean Air-Cool Planet’s good fortune in having found, year after year, talented, bright and energetic young people for our Climate Fellows program.
I think I can speak for our whole office when I say that we were delighted to send this year’s Fellows off as a new class of trained, inspired young climate professionals. While each of the CA-CP and partner programs are delivering solutions to global warming, contributing to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, what is even more important is leveraging these programs to create a cadre of the experienced professionals necessary to implement the economy-wide reductions and adaptations we so vitally need.
Cool Planet 