 Hello. My name is James Persad. I'm Director of Communications at the International Institute for Environment and Development. I have been here for a year now and I'm supporting the communications team and the wider research body to communicate its work with impact and also the IDEs work with its partners. Prior to IRED, I was working in a charity that redistributes surplus food to vulnerable communities across the UK and was responsible for a big campaign that got a lot of momentum and success in attracting funding from the UK government. And for eight and a half years before that, I worked in a carbon reduction NGO. And then a long time ago, I worked in advertising agencies and marketing agencies for 11 years. I'm delighted to be talking to you about our new campaign, the Hidden Hand Breaks campaign, exposing the unseen barriers, slowing progress towards the sustainable development goals. This is a campaign that is going to be running for a minimum of two years. We've been fortunate in receiving funding from our partner, which is enabling us to build capacity in the communications team and also in some of our research teams to help us to tackle some of the lesser known issues that we believe are slowing down progress. We all know where we are. It's incredibly frustrating. We have degradation in biodiversity. We have accelerating warming and we have growing income inequality. We have multiple multilateral agreements, yet every biodiversity target set today has been missed and 48% of speeches are in decline. New coal, gas and oil licenses are being granted whilst climate accelerates beyond one and a half degrees of warming towards three degrees. And the UN has recently published that 71% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has grown. And the trajectory is awful. And we have good levels of knowledge about what the problems are and the resources are available to tackle the issues. So what is it that's slowing down? Swift of progress here. This is what the campaign is intended to do. To shine a spotlight on the Hidden Hand Breaks that are complex, technical, shrouded in legalese or corporate jargon and make it hard to move in terms of public attention and public pressure. And we're going to create a platform where these hidden handbrake ideas can be shared and discussed and scrutinized and hopefully stimulate conversations and build a community of campaigners who can advocate in different regions around the world in order to get movement from their governments on some of these blockers. Many of the blockers to effective climate action are well known, but some aren't very well known and they prevent research, collaboration, innovation and action taking place. And without finding ways to release these hidden handbrakes quickly, the chances of keeping warming under two degrees are remote with the consequences that we know we're starting to see across the world now. What is it that's holding progress back? We believe ID that fighting these blockers starts with naming them. So as I mentioned, we were successful in receiving some funding to support research and communications campaign focused on exploring these, generating new evidence about these and then using that evidence to inform communications campaigns about each one. We're also going to be developing a web based platform where other actors around the world can input their ideas as to what these hidden handbrakes might be into that platform so that they can be shared and discussed with other advocacy bodies and agencies and journalists and researchers that are keen to see swifter progress in the areas of climate justice, social justice and economic justice. We're going to have a couple of examples to help bring these hidden handbrake issues to life. This one is called paying the polluter. So this is where energy treaties and the disputes that arise from challenging historic energy treaties leads to a bit of paralysis on the part of national governments that want to do the right thing by investing in cleaner energy production but are locked into very pernicious legal agreements with the fossil fuel companies sometimes with 20 year sunset clauses. So if you have signed up as a country to one of these energy treaties if you want to withdraw from that commitment in order to invest funds in more clean forms of energy production the threat of legal action by the fossil fuel company can often be enough to put you off withdrawing in the first place and indeed fossil fuel companies have sued state governments and been successful in doing so and even when some countries have been able to withdraw from a treaty that's subject to this 20 year sunset clause now we are doing new work in this area and we'll be publishing some exciting insights in September but just to give you an illustration an example of one of these treaties is the energy charter treaty which includes most of the countries in the EU plus over 20 other countries which protects $400 billion worth of fossil fuel infrastructure and it has this devastating 20 year sunset clause so recently when a country tried to withdraw from the treaty they were subject to a compensatory payment of 20 years of revenues to the fossil fuel company another example of a hidden handbrake is described as the debt handcuffs so this is where the interest repayments on debts by typically least developed countries or small island developing states outweigh the ability of that country to invest in adaptation on mitigation activities in their own country so for example in 2021 alone 59 of the 76 countries within the LDCs and the SIDS groups had combined debt repayment of 33 billion US dollars whereas they received 20 billion in climate finance so more is going to wealth nations and corporate investors then is actually coming back by way of climate change, climate finance so it's creating this worsening position for the LDCs and the SIDS as time goes on now we are again doing research in this area and have published some data which has sparked media interest in the hidden handbrakes campaign we've had some work cited in the independent and in carbon brief and in Thompson Reuters and we will continue this work over the course of the year this is the landing page for the beta version of the platform that we are developing so we launched the beta version in July and we hope to do the hard launch of the platform in September in New York at Climate Week the platform enables actors around the world to input their own interpretations of a hidden handbrake so we encourage journalists and researchers, campaigners and other supporters of climate justice and environmental justice to put their own ideas in in order that they can be shared, picked up by others and taken forward in campaigns under their own steam the next thing we are going to do is reveal and release these hidden handbrakes over a two year period and beyond and use evidence to support our assertions developed by the ID research teams in partnership with other partners and we are seeking multiple partners to create movements to tackle each of these issues we will be developing press releases and marketing campaigns through our own social media channels to bring attention to some of the shocking injustices that are occurring as a result of these hidden handbrakes and really building a campaign and a movement to tackle them so as I mentioned the hard launch of the platform will be in September in 2023, later this month and we will be launching it at an event in New York Climate Week we are going to be hosting a panel hybrid event and we will send you the invitations as soon as they are available the campaign is really intended to create a community of research and action so we really want researchers to go on to the platform, have a look at the different handbrakes and use the ideas the concepts that are there to stimulate ideas for further research and further policy recommendations and also to journalists and advocates to build campaigns around these lesser known issues that are nonetheless hugely damaging to the progress the world needs to see reversing climate change and nature degradation and increasing equality and then the final point is that it is only by working together that we are going to be able to create this movement so please do share it with your networks far and wide and encourage participation with the platform and encourage your partners to input their own handbrakes into the website so here is the QR code which will take you to the landing page on the IID website posting the hidden handbrakes platform where you can find out more information about the launch itself so browse the hidden handbrakes that have been completed to date in order that it might spark ideas of your own for work to be done to release these significant barriers to swift progress to action on climate change thank you