By Shawn Kelly
It’s a typical academic lecture for Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, one of the world’s most sought after climate change scientists. Speaking in New Delhi, the dapper chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, eases into his presentation. Attentive students and fellow academics listen intently, drawn in by the words of the man who, along with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, best personifies the scientific warnings of man-induced global warming to our planet. “Next slide please,” professor Pachauri politely requests the projection screen computer operator. But he’s not talking to a colleague in India - he’s speaking directly to the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Pathumthani.
In fact, under the auspices of the innovative Asia Pacific Initiative consortium (API), Dr. Pachuari's recent special lecture on November 2nd titled "The IPCC Fourth Assessment and Beyond” was broadcast live via video conference to eight international academic centers of higher learning scattered around the corners of the Asia-Pacific region. With AIT serving as the visual mediation point for the multi-institution collaborative lecture, Dr. Pachauri’s talk from The Energy Research Institute (TERI) http://www.teriin.org instantaneously criss-crossed nine time zones and one international dateline. Chaired in real time by Dr. Kimio Uno, professor emeritus of Keio University, at United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, electronic audiences in place at API members the United Nations University http://www.unu.edu, Keio University http://www.keio.ac.jp, Tokyo Institute of Technology http://www.titech.ac.jp, the University of the Ryukyus http://www.u-ryukyu.ac.jp, the National University of Samoa http://www.nus.edu.ws, the University of Hawaii http:// www.hawaii.edu and Asian Institute of Technology all heard the same exacting details of the UN IPCC’s latest findings on climate change.
“Climate change is unequivocal,” Dr. Pachauri told the digitally-connected class-room, emphatically stressing that a hotter world is indeed a reality, and a major cause of it is very likely to be human driven production of greenhouses gases (GHG). He went to pinpoint the expected trends and impacts of global warming, outlining with a chilling degree of confidence the major ways in which it will impact human lives for years to come. Asia’s key vulnerabilities were particularly well documented as including poor communities, coastal areas, human health, water resources and food production.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. It produces assessment reports on climate change. The latest IPCC report made public this year, known as the Fourth Assessment Report has become a major factor in building worldwide awareness on climate change issues.
Armed the authoritative report, Dr. Pachauri’s overarching message was that because current global warming is unavoidable (due to past emissions of GHGs), it is imperative that the world now adapts to climate change and works to mitigate emissions in the future. Striking a reserved and cautiously optimistic tone throughout, Dr. Pachauri informed that it was possible to stabilize the production of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. It can be done at reasonable cost thorough a mix of various mitigation measures, including the deployment of a portfolio of technologies currently existing (such as in the field of energy supply, transport, and buildings and construction) and those that are expected to be commercialized in the coming decades, Dr. Pachauri explained.
President Said Irandoust (right) addresses the multi-site video conference from AIT.
On this point, AIT’s own President Professor Said Irandoust joined the interactive discussion, explaining to his regional colleagues the perspectives of developing countries and their practical difficulties in implementing new technologies intended to mitigate climate change effects. “Many times we forget that in introducing new technologies to developing countries, it is a fact that systems and accessories to support such technologies are not available locally and if available come at a high cost. Moreover, we overlook the fact that developing countries in the Asia-Pacific regions have weak research and development infrastructure and institutional capacity to absorb these new technologies,” President Irandoust said, reminding all eight connected institutions of the extreme regional need for capacity building to support sustainable development efforts, which will contribute to climate change mitigation.
Broadcast to the Milton Bender auditorium on the campus of AIT, a large projection screen was employed for the event, which provided an audience of over 100 a cinema-like experience to the 2007 Nobel Laureate representative’s lecture. Live feeds from each of the eight venues were simultaneously shown in split-screen fashion, allowing the virtual lecture-goers to collectively witness each other’s reactions to some of the dire warnings of Dr. Pachauri, with no noticeable delay. “It was a very intimate experience,” commented an impressed Dr. Salil K. Sen, who studies corporate social responsibility issues related to the environment at AIT. He added, “After a little while you tended to forget that Dr. Pachauri and the others were actually thousands of kilometers away from Thailand.” Indeed, when Dr. Pachauri starkly informed that earth was at its climatic ‘tipping point’, and that humankind had a mere seven year ‘window of opportunity’ to mitigate the impacts of climate change, a palpable silence could be seen to stretch from Samoa to Delhi, and from Hawaii to Tokyo.
Launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002, the Asia-Pacific Initiative (API) encourages extensive collaboration between universities and research institutions in the Asia-Pacific region to build online educational materials on human development and environmental sustainability
Recent outputs from this project include a collaborative semester course on Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance and the Advanced Seminar in International Environmental Studies, which are delivered through weekly multi-site video-conference sessions supported by an open source learning management system. This mode of operation draws on the availability of low cost telecommunication facilities and tools offered through the Internet. The Asian Institute of Technology joined the Asia Pacific Initiative in 2005 and is an active partner in both the course on Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance and the Advanced Seminar in International Environmental Studies.
Chairing IPCC since 2002, Professor Pachauri is also Director-General of The Energy and Research Institute (TERI), a leading research institute in India on issues related to energy, the environment and sustainable development. TERI joined the Asia Pacific Initiative in 2006 as a participant in the Advanced Seminar in International Environmental Studies. Dr. Pachauri’s lecture on November 2nd was a component of a seminar on "the science and politics of climate change" and was actually planned before the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize on October 12th, event organizers at AIT said.
According to Mr. Jean-Philippe Thouard, an advisor to the AIT administration, the results of API activities in online learning are at least three-fold. It enables the creation and delivery of advanced courses at the graduate level by a wide diversity of specialists holding multiple points of view. Thouard believes that no single academic institution would be able to deliver such diverse programs, so API lectures focus on case studies in order to maximize the exchange of practical knowledge between the participants. Second, it facilitates interaction between students from the various participating institutions, thereby sharing their experiences and learning from each other's situations and backgrounds. Lastly, it enables exchanges between lecturers and participating researchers, leading hopefully to coordination of joint research activities and to the facilitation of policy dialogues at the regional level.
Witness a young Filipina exchange student from Japan’s Keio University - who prefaced her comments with a vivid description of freakish snowfalls in her native tropical Philippines this September - asking the 2007 Nobel Laureate representative how the IPCC could influence developed countries to reduce their carbon emissions and adhere to the Kyoto Protocol, and you begin to see the possibilities of such a learning medium connecting Asia’s schools. Later on, a Bangladeshi master’s student in Okinawa followed suit, taking the microphone to query professor Pachauri as to how his country could cope upon being labeled “at extreme risk”. At similar risk, we learned from an online participant at the National University of Samoa, was that South Pacific island’s very eco-syste
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A large crowd witnessed Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri's lecture "The Fourth
Assessment and Beyond" broadcast from New Delhi.
Information technology officials at AIT believe the Pathumthani-based post graduate institute can now take the regional lead in pushing this information and communication platform to the fullest. “Such online lectures are a notable application of e-learning and demonstrate the high added value that information and communication technology can bring to higher education,” Thouard said. He added that it would be extremely difficult and cost prohibitive to organize a lecture of this scale with Dr. Pachauri by traditional means. Instead, the lecture cost virtually nothing, he emphasized, as everything was done using simple and readily available internet technologies, and in such a way that it was unobtrusive to the lecturer who just basically taught "as usual."
Many say the challenges facing higher education in the 21st century are so complex that almost no institution is going to be able to answer them alone. As such, initiatives such as the Asia Pacific Initiative, and its potential as a new mode for higher education, are fully in line with AIT's vision of itself as a Thai-based network university, linking institutions at the global, regional and national levels. AIT President Irandoust explains: “My mission for AIT is to be a regional institute and a network university. Unlike other universities, we are not under a national agenda for research and education of any specific country. It means we can provide a neutral platform for these kinds of things and to be a network kind of university. This is just a model. But in this scenario we aim to provide faculty and students access to the highest levels of expertise, wherever it is available. In this case comes from Dr. Pachauri in New Delhi, India. Today at AIT, along with other universities around Asia, we listened to a Nobel Laureate caliber lecture in the comfort of our own school. That’s all very interesting.”