Two Key Lessons in my Two Weeks at IEEP
About the author: Mireille Vargas ‘21 is an FSI The Europe Center Intern at the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Brussels, Belgium. She is currently an Earth Systems major at Stanford University.
The end of July and beginning of August is usually a quiet time in the Brussels area. Members of the European Union are having their final meetings before commencing their annual vacation, and institutional offices have more empty seats than occupied ones. That is not the case for the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP). Focusing on environmental policy ranging from biodiversity to water resources to sustainable consumption, IEEP knows that there is no slowing down when there are environmental crises happening all the time. In fact this past July, Western Europe experienced record breaking temperatures, demonstrating once again how grave the effects of climate change are.
The topic of climate change, loss of biodiversity, water pollution, and more is a constant topic in my job as a communications intern at IEEP. Managing IEEP’s twitter and writing articles for the groups’ projects, I have been bombarded with news of the dire conditions of our Earth. The topic of sustainability and environmental policy does not stop during working hours. Lunch is filled with talk on the new elected president of the European Commission’s goals on environmental policy and how the European Union can create a Paris-like agenda for biodiversity.
Overall, these first few weeks have shown me how important communication is when addressing environmental policy. In my time here at IEEP, I have worked on two mini-projects: researching the climate change and biodiversity agenda at the European Union level and analyzing sustainable consumption in a global context. Both of these projects are similar to research I have done in my time at Stanford-read research papers, synthesize information, ask questions-but the projects have also shown me new information that is also important when communicating research.
1. Don’t reinvent the wheel
IEEP has done a lot of environmental policy recommendations and research. In fact, this past year they partnered up with other organizations to create the platform Think 2030 which is a set of environmental policy recommendations for the new European Commission and Parliament to implement and address Europe’s environmental needs. Often times when I was researching information on the two projects, I would refer back to IEEP’s publications. All the research and policy recommendations were there, it was just a matter of bringing back the information and consistently presenting it to the government for action to be made.
The other lesson I have learned in communicating research has occurred, unsurprisingly, during my tasks under communications.
2. Be concise
When it comes to writing, I tend to revert to long winded, complex sentences that don’t get the idea across until half way through. That style doesn’t exactly work when it comes to social media. In my two weeks at IEEP, I’ve had to learn how to communicate pages of research in 280 characters. In some ways, it’s harder than it seems. It’s important to communicate what IEEP is doing on a global scale, but social media users don’t have the interest and time to read an abstract and methodology. Instead, messages have to be concise, direct, and provide only the needed information. What is important for the reader to know? Which statistics will catch their attention? How many hashtags and emojis can I put?
I have only been at IEEP for two weeks, but I already feel that I have learned a lot about European environmental policy and communicating it to different types of audiences.
