Wheaton News

Anna Schulz ’02 serves as a principal advisor to group at UN Climate Negotiations

When Anna Schulz ’02 imagined her life after Wheaton, she thought she might become a politician leading policy in a government office or a professor fostering critical thinking on a college campus. She never dreamed she would become a key support for leaders engaged in critical multilateral diplomatic negotiations to combat global warming. And yet, today she dwells in the best of both of her envisioned worlds as the head of the Global Climate Law, Policy and Governance Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Both diplomacy and education are crucial elements in her job at the institute, an independent policy and action research organization that has engaged in sustainable development efforts for more than 50 years. Overall, the programme aims to strengthen the legal and policy foundations for addressing climate change and to promote governance structures that facilitate effective and equitable climate action globally.

Schulz is one of the principal advisors to the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group at the United Nations Climate Negotiations. She and her team bring important technical expertise, backed by research, to the chair of the group as it grapples with the impact of climate change.

The negotiations are a series of international meetings and conferences organized under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty of cooperation among countries and a UN process to discuss, collaborate and combat global warming and address its impact, as well as measure progress.

“The multilateral climate negotiations are the only space where LDCs are guaranteed a voice and where conversations around climate justice and equity can happen,” she explains. “Being able to support and partner with people who should be the moral voice of our planet in terms of solving these issues and enabling that voice to reach a broader audience, is critically important.”

Schulz also mentors emerging leaders within the LDC Group.

“Even though I decided not to go into academia, I’m passionate about mentoring,” says Schulz, who spent a year as a professor. “It’s incredibly inspiring to see the next generation of leaders stepping up and passionately taking up the work.”

On a day-to-day basis, Schulz, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, manages a team of 12 people who research and assist with technical issues, analysis and strategies related to climate negotiations. Their work includes offering training and educational programs to enhance the skills and knowledge of stakeholders, working to increase financial assistance for climate-related loss and damage, and assisting in negotiations to support countries in the process of adapting in order to manage climate-related changes and transition to less carbon-intensive economies.

Her team’s research supports LDC leaders to advance their diplomatic positions at the two main annual climate negotiations that bring together all the UNFCCC governments. One is held each June in Bonn, Germany; the other one in November at the Conference of the Parties, which this year will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Schulz explains that the 45 countries of the LDC group—places like Mali, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Angola and Haiti—have contributed least to climate change, but face its most significant impacts.

The UN states that while the roughly 1.1 billion people who live in these nations have contributed less than four percent of the total world greenhouse gas emissions, over the past 50 years, 69 percent of worldwide deaths caused by climate-related disasters occurred in LDCs. The International Institute for Environment and Development reports that these countries are vulnerable to climate change’s extremes, which include deadly cyclones, flooding and drought, yet they have the least economic capacity to prepare for, recuperate from and adapt to these disasters.

Developed countries bring huge delegations of professional negotiators to these discussions; LDCs generally have two funded negotiators who are doing the work that in a country like the United States is done by dozens, Schulz points out. Therefore, backing by the International Institute for Environment and Development is essential to helping these leaders create and negotiate on their own behalf.

Watershed moments

The foundation of Schulz’s work in climate diplomacy began at Wheaton, where she double majored in international relations and American politics. It was at Wheaton that her interest in water-related issues (which are tied to climate issues) emerged, particularly how conflict can arise over the resource and, conversely, how conflict can be negotiated and resolved.

“The first summer that I was at Wheaton I interned for my local

California state assembly member and decided I was going to be a politician,” she says. “But, by the time I got into my junior year, I realized that I had become really passionate about transboundary water issues. And I decided that was the area I would work in for the rest of my life.”

“The summer after my junior year I spent traveling throughout the Nile River basin on a Davis International Fellowship looking at the complexities of water diplomacy, spending time in Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania,” she says. “Whenever I had a passion for something, Wheaton always stepped up and encouraged me to follow that.”

Schulz also points out that every year she was at Wheaton she successfully secured funding for an internship or international travel that advanced her learning.

Pursuing her passion to explore water issues, Schulz sought and earned a Fulbright Scholarship her senior year to conduct research in Zambia in 2002 after graduation. At the University of Lusaka, she studied the transboundary governance of the Zambezi River, the fourth largest river system in Africa that crosses or forms the boundaries of six countries.

“The Fulbright plunged me into an incredibly different and challenging field research environment—teaching me invaluable lessons about collaborative, intercultural research and the value of lived experiences that were profoundly different from my own,” says Schulz, who was born and raised in Westhaven, Calif. “But it was the more intangible cultural exchange and learning that has driven my passion for the work I do.”

“Darlene Boroviak, who was my advisor in my international relations degree, was pivotal in helping me figure out how to follow what I was passionate about, how to do a self-assessment of what I was interested in,” Schulz says.

Boroviak, now emerita professor of political science, wrote a letter of recommendation for Schulz’s Fulbright application. She recalls Schulz as an intellectual leader.

“It would be difficult not to remember a student who was so bright and eager to learn,” Boroviak says. “Her work was not only thorough but intellectually creative as well, adding new dimensions to standard thinking in the discipline.”

The Fulbright Scholarship itself was essential to Schulz’s trajectory. “Getting a research Fulbright as an undergraduate is very, very rare and I got a tremendous amount of support and resources from Wheaton to make my application work,” she says. “It was amazing. Incredible.”

International stage

Schulz’s experience in Zambia inspired her to pursue a master’s degree in international and comparative water law at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and a master’s degree and doctorate in international environmental policy and negotiation and conflict resolution at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

While at Tufts pursuing her Ph.D., she assisted in the creation of its first water diplomacy course. She also worked for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, where she wrote for its Earth Negotiations Bulletin as a water expert.

However, she quickly realized that water negotiations only happened every couple of years; the real action was in the larger field of climate change.

“So I sold myself as a climate adaptation specialist,” she says. In that position with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, she provided summaries and analysis of major climate negotiations and fell in love with the work.

“I like the puzzle of it,” she says. “The dynamics among stakeholder groups and the strategies leaders use to drive parties to more ambitious agreements are fascinating.”

After completing her Ph.D., she took a position as a professor at Boston College in 2016, where she taught courses in international environmental science and policy, international organizations, and global climate politics. However, she had come to enjoy negotiation work so much that she left academia after just one year.

She went to work at the Global Green Growth Institute, where she was based out of Korea for two years (also working with LDCs) before moving to the International Institute for Environment and Development in 2019.

Her work today in the world of climate diplomacy is a culmination of her many passions, bringing together research, academics and her knowledge of waterways. Through her job she collaborates with a diverse group of people around a common goal.

It’s demanding work. Although in the post-pandemic world some negotiations and workshops are now virtual (and there’s an intentional move to reduce unnecessary carbon-producing travel), she is routinely on the go. Schulz has been to 70 countries and makes up to six international trips a year. Each of the main climate negotiation meetings takes three weeks.

The issue of climate change is complex and the negotiations are methodical and slow moving. But being a part of the process provides valuable life lessons.

“My career has taught me the value of patience and steady work toward a long-term objective,” she says.

She admits that progress and positive impact from her work can be hard to see. However, she has a lot of faith that the small victories—like seeing reports presented this year that are the result of transparency in reporting rules she helped put into place five years ago—are having a cumulative impact. And there are larger wins, like the creation of a loss and damage fund for countries negatively impacted by climate change in 2022 at the 27th Conference of the Parties.

She stays inspired because she knows the significance of her work.

“I look at my little boy and think about his future,” says Schulz, the mother of a 2-year-old. “And I think about the future of the one billion people in LDCs, and it underscores how incredibly urgent all this is.”

—By Christianna McCausland