Trinity student delegates attend COP30 in Belém

Posted on: 10 November 2025

Front row: Sustainability Manager Jane Hackett with Daragh Fitzgerald, Tooba Akhtar, Naomi Blumlein, Isabella Barra Fulton, Fernanda de Oliveira Azevedo, Shafkat Sharif, Saumya Shendurnikar.  Back row: Oluyumi Adetule, Faolan Doecke Launders, David Coffey.  

Law student Isabella Barra Fulton, from Rio de Janeiro, will be attending the conference this week.  Her focus is climate change and environmental law and its interaction with commercial law.  She is interested in how international environmental instruments can be brought into arbitration to strengthen climate governance.  As a practising lawyer in Brazil, she works in litigation and arbitration involving complex environmental disputes, including the Mariana Dam case, which remains the largest environmental dispute in Brazil. Isabella dealt with reparation, long term monitoring, affected communities and the way corporate interests relate to environmental damage.

She says “This combination of research and case work is what I will bring to COP30, with a particular interest in how the mitigation, adaptation and reparation commitments discussed there can be made workable and supported in arrangements between private parties.”

Postgraduate student Lukian Pudliak will also be attending in-person.  Lukian is doing his PhD on “Legal Pathways for Enforcing Climate Commitments under International Environmental Agreements” and is interested in the 10^th anniversary of the Paris Agreement in terms of how far we have come and how much more we must achieve. 

The virtual delegates will be made up of members of the COP Working Group, led by Professor Karen Wiltshire and Sustainability Manager Jane Hackett.  The working group produced five white papers on Climate under the following themes:  Education; Health; Human Rights; Small Island Nations and Nature and Biodiversity.  These papers will be published on the Sustainability website in the coming days. 

History student Daragh Fitzgerald was in the group researching Small Island Developing States and said “The process of engaging with fellow students passionate about tackling the climate catastrophe and collaborating on these white papers was both rewarding and empowering.” 

Student Fernanda de Oliveira Azevedo was a member of the group researching Nature and Biodiversity.  She says their paper “urges Ireland, in line with the priorities of COP30, to scale up restoration, embed biodiversity in education and policy, expand circular economy initiatives, and showcase Ireland as a model for nature-positive, climate-resilient development."

Students in the COP working group got the chance to hear from former leader of the Green Party Eamon Ryan, who attended one of the working group’s meetings to discuss his work as EU negotiator at  previous conferences.  They also worked closely with Professor of Climate Science Karen Wiltshire, who is now spearheading the Climate Gateway. 

Members of the COP working group and virtual delegates include: 

Katie Essene Deevy, Niamh Donnelly, Sophia Chapple, David Coffey, Eva Woods, Adam Gordon, Ahafkat Sharif, Julie Auerbach, Eleanor Lampard, Naoimi Blumlein, Daragh Fitzgerald, Tooba Akhtar, Jennifer Clarke, Faolan Doecke Launders, Keith Keogh, Morgiane Noel, Breanne Pitt, Saumya Shendurnikar, Rose Dunne, Fernanda De Oliveira Azevedo and Oluyemi Adetule.

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