TCEH’s Participation in COP30 & the 2026 Trinity Sustainability Leadership Awards

Author Sophia Chapple

One of the PhD Candidates in the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, Sophia Chapple, was awarded the 2026 Trinity Sustainability Leadership Award, as a part of a wider COP30 working group.

There were over 150 nominations and only 20 awards were given out at the Awards Ceremony on 9 March 2026.

The COP30 working group is made up of 22 postgraduate students from a range of disciplines who were selected from a group of 150 applicants. The working group was established to inform Trinity’s Observer Status under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where the students serve as Trinity’s delegates to the UNFCCC.

The members of the working group were tasked with developing white papers on 5 key topics: Human Rights, Health, Biodiversity and Nature, Small Island Nations, and Education. Sophia was a member of the Human Rights subgroup, and her research on historical small-scale fisher-farmers fed into her input on how the current climate crisis may impact these types of individuals in present day, and how to best go about creating and implementing protocols to mitigate against current and looming climatic and environmental adversity.

The White Papers created by each working group can be found at this link: https://www.tcd.ie/sustainability/initiatives/conference-of-parties-cop/cop-30-student-white-papers-/