 Hi there, welcome everybody to today's event tackling climate change in fragile states and protracted crisis situation. Today's event is part of the IID debates series. We've got a really fantastic panel lined up so we're delighted to have so many of you joining our virtual space today. So with that, I'm really happy to hand over to Simon Addison who is our moderator for today's session. Simon, over to you please. Thank you so much Juliet, and good afternoon, good morning or good evening to everybody who's joining us around the world depending on which time zone you happen to be in. And welcome to this IID debate in which we'll be examining how the climate emergency can be tackled effectively in fragile states and protracted crisis situations. And what role humanitarian actors both national and international can play in addressing climate risks and climate impacts in contexts where conflict and fragile governance present compounding risks for affected populations. As Juliet said, my name is Simon Addison. I will be your moderator for today's debate. I'm a principal researcher in IID's climate change group where I work on issues relating to climate change governance and finance. We're coming to this debate in the knowledge that fragile and conflict affected states are among the countries that are most vulnerable to climate impacts. So from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, from the Middle East to Asia and Latin America, rural and urban communities are already affected by the impacts of violent conflict and weak governance but are also suffering from the increasingly frequent and intense impacts of climate change. And these put lives at risk, they destroy livelihoods, cause famines and drive displacement. And these climate impacts also undermine the ability of households, communities and states to cope with those risks, adapt to climate change, or to achieve their long-term development aspirations and put place, place further pressure on weak institutions that make it even more difficult to overcome the root causes of the conflict and instability that affect them. In many of these contexts, humanitarian actors, both national and international, have a critical role to play in saving lives, protecting livelihoods, building resilience, and fostering sustainable development. But climate change itself poses a serious challenge to the way that they work. As climate risks grow with each increment of global heating, the need for humanitarian relief and resilience support increases. But humanitarian finance and humanitarian reach are not able to keep pace. Tackling climate change also requires humanitarians to deal not only with the immediate impacts of conflict, displacement and disasters for vulnerable people, but to also help put in place the resources, the capabilities and institutions they need to address climate risks over the medium to long term. So in this debate, we will discuss these and related issues by having a conversation with a panel of distinguished humanitarian and development practitioners, academics and policy experts who bring a wealth of experience and expertise and different perspectives to this important question. Joining us from Nairobi in Kenya is Degan Ali. Degan is an internationally renowned humanitarian leader and organizational development consultant and the executive director of ADESO or African Development Solutions. ADESO is a path breaking African humanitarian and development NGO that operates in Somalia and Northern Kenya and which is committed to changing the way that people think about and deliver aid in Africa, catalyzing innovative, locally led solutions that generate long lasting change at the grassroots level and by challenging the business as usual way that aid is delivered. From Brussels, we're joined by Abdelahman Sharif who is senior director of partnerships and outreach at Internews Europe and he is a former director of the Somalia NGO consortium and was a special advisor to development on development and international relations to the prime minister of Somalia where he provided high level advisory support as a specialist on development and international relations. From Brighton, we're joined by Professor Kleena Raleigh who is a senior professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex. She's also the founder and executive director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project or ACC-LED which she founded in 2014 and which works with nearly 200 local researchers to track conflict events so in 50 countries across the globe. From Oxford, we're joined by Paul Knox-Clarke. Paul is a co-founder and principal of PREPARE which is a new initiative to improve the way humanitarian actors respond to the global climate emergency. A former head of research, evaluation and communications at ALNAP, Paul has earned a number of initiatives to catalyze innovation and reform in the humanitarian sector and has over 20 years experience including roles as a practitioner within the UN and international NGOs. From Geneva, we're joined by Dr Catherine Luna Grayson who is a policy advisor with the International Committee for the Red Cross and Red Crescent where she leads research and policy work on how the Red Cross movement can adapt to respond to the climate crisis and last year she was the lead author on their flagship report on climate change in conflict affected situations when the rain turns to dust. And finally from London, we are joined by Caroline Woot who is a health policy climate and environment advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders and she has a background in social justice and public health and has worked on humanitarian crises around the world since 2008 and currently she is leading work on climate and environmental issues for MSF and is currently coordinator of the MSF Global Health Actors Network. So we're really thrilled and honored to have such a distinguished panel for this discussion and so without further ado we'll move on into the discussion part of the debate. So to kick things off we're going to focus in on one situation, a specific context where climate change has intersected with long-standing challenges of violent conflict and state fragility. We're going to be looking particularly at issues relating to Somalia. Now over the past 30 years communities in Somalia have been living with a triple crisis of violent political conflict and state fragility, large scale population displacements and chronic humanitarian emergencies and climate change that is driving increasingly frequent and ever more severe droughts, floods and environmental degradation. In 2011 this this combination of threats precipitated one of the most serious famines of recent decades and right now millions of people face severe food insecurity across Somalia due to the compounding impacts of drought and floods, desert locusts, violent conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic. So Deggan Ali you've worked at the front line of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia for many years. How do you see climate change impacting communities who are also affected by ongoing conflict and state fragility in Somalia? Yeah thank you Simon. You know as you were talking I was thinking about Edesso's journey and the work that we have been doing from its inception when it was founded in 1991 and moved to Somalia in 1994 by Fatima Jibril who is probably the most well-known environmental activist in Somalia. She's won many awards for her work and she's also my mother and the founder of Edesso and I you know she was talking about conservation issues, climate change, deforestation, before it was sexy, before anybody knew about it because she understood very clearly and saw with her own eyes the transformation that had happened in the communities. These are pastoralist communities and pastoralism is the most efficient way to use dry lands. It's the most effective way to use dry lands but at the time of the government there was very strong range land management, there was wet season grazing and dry season grazing, there was very strong government regulation on charcoal production, something that has devastated the country first in the north and now in the south and you know after the government collapsed that was holding all of this together that was actually keeping the ecosystem healthy that was making pastoralism actually viable way of you know living. You know the range land management systems disappeared, the NGOs came and the UN came and everybody started drilling burrows wherever they wanted so there was no opportunity to force people to move away from the water. The management of the water systems is intricately linked to grazing and that's not something the international community understands and we were the first organization saying stop drilling burrows, you should have permanent water sources where it's needed but you should be forcing people to move so that the land regenerates. That's what the government was doing and that's just a very what we thought as common sense and come to find out was not well received by the international community and I remember Fatima knocking on the doors of the donors the EU and other donors and telling them we need to invest in natural resource management if you want to stop the cycle of poverty and droughts. The droughts are a link or a reflection or a manifestation of the the poor situation of the ecology in Somalia and we used to do a lot of research on on some of this and as a way to do advocacy and all of that and you know the response from donors Somalia is a fragile context your humanitarian emergency context we only give you humanitarian funding we're not interested in long-term funding so this is just it's shocking to me that then that donors didn't understand the direct links between humanitarian emergencies such as droughts and the poor condition of the environment and the ecosystem and it's like they didn't want to understand they just did not want to get it and no matter how much we try to educate them and so for me I'm I'm happy to see that there's interest now under the auspices of climate change I'm not really sure if this is all as a result of climate change much of it is is a lack of regulations and a lack of strong governance systems that are not in place to control the things the way that they used to be controlled by the former government so so yeah I think there is a direct link between humanitarian crisis particularly in fragile contexts and and the environment but it's particularly in rural communities and communities that depend on livestock but unfortunately this is not a priority for the aid system when we rely on the international community and the aid sector to really support the communities and get away from you know the handouts and start thinking about what the root causes of these droughts and these famines and these humanitarian crises are thank you so much so much in there you know both in terms of the way in which the collapse of the state and the collapse of the government precipitated problems with environmental management which ultimately have kind of degraded the ability of people to maintain their livelihoods but also the impact of humanitarian interventions undermining the traditional ways of managing the range and managing livelihoods as well we mentioned the borehole drilling and a big challenge there for the international community to to understand the local context understand what communities need and to respond appropriately I wonder to your mind what must humanitarian actors do to tackle the climate crisis in Somalia and other similar contexts um they need to rely on local traditional knowledge my mother is an avid environmentalist not because it's something it's a project that is funded by a donor or it's a way to get funding from a donor or because it's it's an issue area that I've now discovered is of concern to me it's not that it's because she deeply deeply feels that feels very very connected to the land and the changes in the land and it's something that is very painful for her to see what's happening because she has memories of different days as a child she has memories and she knows the plants as a pastoralist because she was a pastoralist child she knows which plants were used for what by her mother which plants were used by other people for different things she knows how they were using the land and the trees to make their homes um on all types of things so um unfortunately that historical knowledge that traditional knowledge is not one thing that the international community first respects values and really understands the importance of it so when we come to the international community and say you're drilling boreholes in the wrong areas drill boreholes people need water we're not saying don't give them water we're not saying don't give livestock water we're not saying make people die of thirst but what we're saying is do it in an environmentally friendly way do semi-permanent water sources to force people to move so that they have water during the dry seasons but they move you know this is all based on understanding of the land and ecology so when so what i feel like the international community needs to do first and foremost is be humble and recognize they have no clue they don't know what the hell they're doing they really don't and when we talk about localization or locally led humanitarian response it's not rhetoric it's based on real practical experience firsthand that we've seen and unfortunately you know what I see is just more and more professionalization more and more hubris more more arrogance more and more you know oh now climate changes the new opportunity to get funding so everybody's fundraising and everybody's being climate experts and hiring climate specialists you know because they see the writing in the wall it becomes another opportunity it's not because the people are deeply moved and affected by it and unfortunately people of my mom's generation they're all dying and or you know so that knowledge is getting lost and the new generation unfortunately in Somalia really doesn't understand this as well and they've just become very westernized and they just think that oh you know we're just going to go into the urban centers and all of that the knowledge is there but we have to we have to salvage it and we have to nourish it and we have to support it and the current system is doesn't exist to do that the current system doesn't is not designed to do that. Thank you so much Deggan it's a really strong call they're clear call for like locally led approaches based on people's knowledge and understanding of the of the context in the situation. Let's move on to Abda Rahman you were director of Somalia's NGO forum for for quite some time and and advised the government on aid and development issues what do you see as being the major challenges that the government and local organizations have faced in tackling the climate crisis in Somalia? Well I think you know just first of all as Deggan has said one of the challenges you have is that you know that this issue of environment requires a longer term approach to address it and the context in Somalia is unfortunately you know still predominantly seen as a humanitarian contract context I mean you know in the minds of donors when you think they think about Somalia I'm sure all they think about is food insecurity it's security terrorism so for the government the challenge has been that because of the current circumstances the number one priority has been you know security and for local actors however they managed you know to fill in the gap because they've been the backbone of social infrastructure in the country providing you know social services which for them has been the number one priority and I think you know that Adesu as as Deggan has said rightly has been one of the very few organizations from the very beginning who has been you know trying to highlight the issues around climate change and and how to better manage environment but also renewable energy to through the work of her mother so so because of the issue from the government side prioritizing actually the security aspects and and the fact of having a budget that's extremely limited it's impossible to really deal with the environment at the appropriate scale but also there is no incentives from donors to really push on the environmental addressing environmental issues which are longer term issues that that Somalia is affected by you know if you look at just the data since since 2000 you know you you'll see that there's been at least you know 19 severe floods 17 droughts three times more the number of climate hazards that Somalia has experienced between 1970 and 1990 and and recurrently over the years we've been just looking at it from the humanitarian perspective but not from the climate change and environmental and why you know these these instances have been actually accelerating more and more over the years so I'd say these are these are some of the challenges and I think you know that the local actors who are you know who know the the the issue better than anyone are not part of these conversations to address you know climate change you obviously need you know local local action local communities to be able to participate in anticipating the disaster informing and coordinating with governments and and and other international actors to better to create better coping mechanisms to address some of these these challenges thank you so much Abdelrahman we you've spoken clearly there about some of the challenges that come from in the way that international actors understand the situation in Somalia and they're really the real importance of trying to address those environmental issues that that Deghan spoke about so so clearly I want on from the position of government or local NGOs how do the conflict and you know governance challenges in Somalia affect their ability to address climate climate risks um so so one of one of the the issue is although there's not a direct correlation between environment and and conflict we know that there is there is a link so it's not direct but people affected by climate change may believe actually that they have less to lose by joining armed groups to survive when their livelihoods are affected and that's where we we we see and we'll be able to observe you know the impact in these instances so Deghan mentioned rightly over you know grazing and water issues in the country there are a lot of local conflicts localized conflicts that are over water and grazing actually because of the scarcity of water that is not not available throughout the country and so what you have is in addition to just building boreholes anywhere a lack of understanding of the the peace building elements of the activities that you do but also the impact that you can have on local conflicts when you build a borehole that ultimately obviously is accessible to one community versus the other and when we were dealing with with with some of these issues at government one of the common issues that would come is you know this other community that is next to us has a borehole but we don't can you build one for us or a hospital and we don't can you build one for us so so it's proved to be to be a challenge and and I think you know that there is there is a link there is a strong link and that's that's also generating conflict out there particularly in areas that are severely affected by climate dynamics and there may be reasons why for example people feel that you know they're not been supported enough in addressing the issues and would go to the other side for support it's really interesting I guess one of the things that we think about at IID about in terms of trying to tackle climate change generally is that to tackle climate change you really need to have an understanding of climate risks and like how the climate is going to change and and how it might affect you particularly for vulnerable communities or let's say areas that are particularly exposed to climate hazards what are some of the challenges that say local governments or local NGOs have in actual communities in understanding those climate risks? I think yes obviously it's important one of the challenges is the communication and how we communicate with communities to understand these challenges but also the issue is also that whilst you know a government can be centralized it's very difficult to understand what's happening in specific contexts around the country and and that's where you know where the the job I'm doing currently at at NGOs comes in because we're supporting actually journalists to report on issues around climate change and hold also power to account so when there are issues around climate change that are not going right or whenever actors whether it be government or international actors are doing things that are not right they need to be held accountable and what we are seeing is that that's not happening to the scale that is wanted or that is needed and I've seen that that's that on the on the discussion there are a few journalists to present and one of the issue we have actually in the global south is that climate change and environment is seen as an issue that comes from the north and doesn't affect the global south right and so when journalists go to the editors for example and want to report on climate change the editors will say no our priority are security issues or political issues climate change is something that happens in north doesn't affect us and so there is there is this lack of understanding overall which is impacting on the way we see things I think in in places like Somalia and one of the examples is for example you know we've been pushing for years to have a ministry of environment and it sits in the office of the prime minister and it's been very very difficult amongst you know the lots of other priorities to set aside climate change as an important issue that needs to be tackled where you know bills need to be issued in parliament and some areas and need to be addressed I think one of the major achievements that has been done in Somalia over the past years and and because of a lot of advocacy lobbying from different actors local civil society and international has been the ban on charcoal and has reduced I would say dramatically the exportation of charcoal to other countries although it's still happening on an illegal basis in that sense so I think you know the information management of that is critical thank you so much Abdelrahman that's really fascinating we're going to pull out the the focus a little bit now from Somalia to think more more broadly about this interrelationship between conflict fragility and climate change and humanitarian crisis and move to cleaner professor clean a rally you've been examining patterns of violent conflict across fragile states for many years and have analyzed the complex into linkages between governance conflict and environmental factors in many contexts what does your research tell you about the role that climate change plays in shaping conflict fragility and humanitarian emergencies that's a great question thank you very much for having me so I would say that it's very important to recognize that the primary and dominant and most widespread reaction to climate change is local cooperation it's not conflict in any way shape or form the conflict patterns that we're seeing which are accelerating across many African states and many states around the world do not appear to be driven by the environmental issues per se and I think that's an important thing to just be very very clear about and the research doesn't support that either what the research does support is very much along what Dejan was saying which is that if you don't have institutions in the first place to deal with issues that become crises to people then you're likely to have more instability or deeper instability or longer lasting instability and that is especially marked if you do not listen to what actual communities say about what they believe their risks are and how they want to solve them collectively and I'm going to share my screen for just a second because we have we've done some work about trying to be especially clear about this relationship I hope you can see where the the research at the moment does not support any sort of direct link between climate and conflict indeed it even is very very tenuous about the indirect links through migration or effects on income etc what we do know of course is that climate more than anything else in the global south is affecting local community cooperation abilities and adaptation abilities and if institutions are not supported by national and international efforts then in fact they might they might exacerbate some tensions already there some political tensions that exist or in fact they might might encourage cooperation and further aid and so rather than asking what is the relationship between climate change and conflict I think it's it's much it's a much better in to ask what are the political consequences of dealing with climate change in any given country because it's going to be markedly different for South Sudan than it is for Cameroon than it is for Afghanistan and so having a blanket policy is not particularly helpful because it's going to be shaped by the domestic political circumstances and in particular I think many people who look at the relationship between climate and conflict really miss that the way in which countries and localities are going to adapt to climate change is going to be through existing institutions and whether or not those existing institutions are strong enough to deal with this additional crisis and the existing institutions are things like natural resource management land access ministries and quality debates adaptation and mitigation policy debates discussions about yields and profit productivity and how people are already trying to change those through typical development means demographic and capacity debates and disaster management institutions and so climate change in and of itself doesn't arrive in a developing state and people have to deal with it it's integrated into all of these different issues which themselves have a particular type of political and conflict likelihood especially as it's affecting different elites and power relationships and that is distinct from assuming that environmental change creates violence which is overly broad as a way to think about it and I and I want to just say here that many times I'm no climate expert I really want to be clear about that at the moment and emphasize that the conflicts that we're seeing in the global south but also of course in the global north are becoming far more widespread they're becoming much more persistent but unlike the conflicts of 20 years ago they're now perpetrated by many more groups than they used to be gangs and militias etc and what that means is that a country like Mexico can on different different months be as violent as Syria can be during its very very kind of traditional civil war and so as Dagon was mentioning this placing countries into buckets of fragile and not fragile is missing how conflict has changed quite rapidly over the last decade or two and in fact people are dealing with multiple crises concurrently but that doesn't mean they're related crises so people have to deal with of course conflict risks and of course the most conflict that people experience is likely to be low fatality or no fatality and perpetrated by one of these gangs and the threats to governments are really within governments increasingly rather than from outside and that changes how policies about climate change and about climate change financing and about adaptation are going to influence the politics of those states and then how that might influence the conflict likelihood fascinating insights they're clean really really very clear as well about that that that testy question that we've been hearing about for 20 years about that relationship between climate change and conflict and really really good to hear kind of a building picture there from what Dagon shared with us and what Abdulrahman shared to to what you're saying now about really the importance of the institutional structures and frameworks that underpin social cooperation rather than and the way that intersects with climate change and the challenges that climate change presents them really really powerful I'm wondering in relation to what you were saying right at the end there what kinds of challenges do these multiple and new forms of conflict and the the different manifestations of I don't want to say fragility now but kind of let's say governance pose for the efforts of governments and humanitarian actors in addressing this kind of existential challenge of climate change that's a really good question and I think that the first thing that needs to be done is a reconceptualization of these conflict risks as I was mentioning before I think we have for many years presented conflict especially domestic conflict as a manifestation of grievance rather than what I think it's being driven by which is elite competition and so if we are to reframe conflict in that way and trying to protect communities from it rather than trying to de-radicalize communities that aren't radicalized in the first place then we really need to invest I would say far more in regional sub-regional and local governance structures because that's the front line of adaptation and and mitigation of climate change and I would say again that I really want to emphasize that when you when you invest in local governance co-op when you invest in local cooperation for climate change it may in fact contribute a little to conflict risks I mean you really I don't I don't know of any solution that both deals with climate risks and deals with conflict risks in a way that is going to mitigate both and not in some ways exacerbate the power the political dimensions that are underlying both of those things climate change adaptation and climate change policies are a political issue conflict is a competition for authority and so those things together are not are not necessarily going to cooperate when it comes to solutions that are going to be viable and so sometimes those local solutions which are the most readily available for climate change are going to be unfair and there they may in fact underlie some competition dynamics and and authority debates or debates is a nice word for it but authority disputes that may have occurred anyway but may may not necessarily be brought to the fore as quickly as they would when there's new policies new formal roles and new money involved that's a really important point I think you're making there about the conflict being driven by elite competition and competitions over authority and that really just pose us as climate people doing climate programming to think about the conflict sensitivity of what we do and to really understand the political economy that underpins everything that we're engaging with whether we're doing humanitarian interventions or climate adaptation thanks so much Kleena I'm going to move over now to Paul you've launched the prepare initiative recently which is aiming to help humanitarian agencies to respond more effectively to the global climate emergency and particularly in these kinds of complex contexts what challenges does climate change pose for humanitarian agencies that are operating in fragile and conflict affected states from from what you've been hearing thanks Simon and and hello everyone I I am concerned I must say that for a debate I think we're having going to have a massive sort of explosion of consensus around these issues but let's see how we go when I think I'll take a leaf out of Catherine Luna's book who's been looking at at the sort of incidents of conflict and climate change if I may to start with and just say that you know by an accident of geography the countries which are on the in the World Bank's fragile and conflict affected lists are about twice as likely as average to be exposed to the risks of climate change but those same countries the conflict and the conflict affected countries are four and a half times more likely than average to suffer from those effects and and the gap of course is coming from challenges around governance and challenges around response so so conflict affected countries are peculiarly at risk and peculiarly have very specific difficulties in terms of addressing the climate risk not necessarily as and I thought that was fascinating what Kleena was saying not necessarily because conflict causes climate as sorry because climate causes conflict um but because the common denominator of climate change and of conflict is suffering it's human suffering and what's happening is that the climate is affecting people who are already at very very heightened vulnerability as a result of the conflict because of displacement because of lack of access traditional coping capacities and where climate is affecting these states the states also have less ability to as we've heard to to respond to adapt to climate change so these things are forming this horrible vicious puzzle of of suffering and that's that's I think where they come together and maybe what leads to what is less important than the fact that they are all of these things enhance one another um so so what that means for humanitarians briefly I think five things um firstly if you like the the formal typical humanitarians need working in conflict environments need to recognize that climate is an issue for them a lot of the consultation a lot of the the interviews that we've done in prepare and I know that other agencies concern has been working on this as well talking to humanitarians working in conflict affected environments they see climate and conflict as somehow different things and if we're doing conflict if we're working in conflict then climate is something else and worryingly sometimes they see them almost kind of opposed things you know if you think about climate you're not really worrying about the conflict and so there is a mindset piece I think that's the first one the second is that I think we as humanitarians need to get over this magic bullet idea there isn't a single programmatic approach uh which is going to address the suffering caused by conflict and climate together um we know remote responses are not good enough they're not big enough as you said earlier on they're too stretched that's that's not the answer anticipation is not the answer it's not going to do it uh DRR is not going to do it and yet often these various approaches are pitched against each other what we really need to be doing is coming up with layered strategies where all of these things support one another in order to do it and I think this is the third thing humanitarians need we need to see ourselves as a small supporting actors spear carriers if you like in the larger picture and not the stars of the show um the humanitarians do not own these crises and are often extremely peripheral actually to the reality of how the crisis is working out there is a contribution to be made but the piece that Deggan was saying about understanding where you are and how can your small contribution fit is probably the first step to effective programming in these situations if nothing else don't get in the way don't make it worse possibly conversations around the nexus are one of the doorways to improving this the fourth and by no means new point that I'd like to to suggest for humanitarians is that finally we need to put frontline actors at the front of the line of funding um you know it's it's well evidenced now that in the majority of humanitarian situations it is civil society organizations on the frontline who are doing most of the work anyway and with the climate situation getting worse and worse and locked in whatever we do that is locked in um with the the massive increase in need that is forecast with the lack of access that's forecast potentially with declining funding going to internationals internationals need to be working out how they can very rapidly be putting their efforts into the support of civil society and frontline response and then finally um this is particularly challenging I think in a conflict environment um because unfortunately civil society response is not enough you know all of the evaluations of humanitarian action around climate and around resilience almost all of them suggest you can't be effective unless you're working with civil society or civil society is working under the overall planning and management of the state so the question is what do you do where the state is less able to do that or or potentially not present and I think that's a thing that we haven't worked out and we all need to be thinking about how to work that out quite soon but but part of that needs to be perhaps being a little bit more thoughtful about which elements of government are working you know um are their social welfare parts of the government that are working is local government working even if central government isn't and how can they be supported or to articulate with civil society and second of all if there's really nothing there what is the role of external humanitarians in helping civil society scale up to a point where it's actually at a broad scale um which is a huge challenge but one that maybe our other speakers have answers to so those would be five pointers thank you thank you so much paul we're really um clear set of uh opportunities let's say rather than challenge opportunities for the humanitarian sector to to respond to so happily we we have two excellent you know representatives from from the humanitarian sector to to kind of come in now catherine loon and and caroline boot you're both working with major humanitarian agencies to try and change the way that you address the risks posed by climate change for the most vulnerable people in complex and conflict affected contexts i'll put the this question to to both of you how does climate change complicate the work of your agencies or other agencies in responding to humanitarian needs whether they're caused by conflict or caused by other other causes maybe you know climate related disasters the catherine could you share thank you and thank you very much for the for the invitation now it's becoming a bit of a hard task in the sense that we've heard a lot already so i'll probably be reinforcing a number of points made by others in answering your your first question or giving talk to your first question so how is climate change complicating i will work in situations of conflict um just to to take one or two steps back i think the way we've been trying to envision the the impacts or the humanitarian consequences of converging climate risks and um armed conflict is to to nearly imagine layers of vulnerability that end up compounding one another and ultimately affect all dimensions of people's lives from their safety to their health to their food water economic security and this means that when we're thinking responses we need to be capturing those elements that are coming together amplifying some impacts and in some cases you have a situation that is relatively stable and is suddenly further destabilized by a disaster for instance by a shock um and i think i mean what i've heard from others now is the recognition that conflicts will harm development social cohesion essential services institutions their ability to manage resources and this leads to an increase in needs then climate change will further exacerbate the number of these elements exacerbating food insecurity exacerbating creating fertile grounds for certain diseases you might have disasters destroying infrastructure supply chains so we're basically in a situation where needs seem to be constantly exacerbated and people's vulnerabilities seem to be constantly exacerbated exacerbated and i mean we could also represent the pandemics as another layer of vulnerability that is interacting with these um layers now in looking at what this means for us i think we need to recognize that all situations are different as we know so for instance if we look at situations where you might have an ongoing conflict and a disaster strikes and northern Mozambique with um Cyclone Kenneth was a very good example of that you end up in a place where you have needs related to the disaster and it's extremely hard to respond to these needs because your humanitarian access is extremely limited by the situation of um conflict then you have situations in northern Mali i think that we covered in the the research that we did in uh when rain turns to dust is a good illustration of a place where people have long coped with climate risks and then you have a conflict that will hinder their usual ways of coping that's a place where people in the face of a bad season would normally travel longer distances with their cattle to find grazing land and water this becomes impossible when you have a conflict that's preventing people from moving safely with their um animals and there again the conflict will limit the capacity of the state the capacity of humanitarian actors to um to assist then if we're looking at situations that if we're looking at disasters in particular these can also limit our own capacity to operate beyond the the challenges to humanitarian access that might be created by insecurity you also have situations where roads are being destroyed infrastructure is being destroyed um and we've had cases where heat turned into a significant problem so we had to stop using the tar the using planes sorry um in southern Iraq a few years ago because the heat was such that it was dangerous for tires to explode so you have those situations where um operating can um can be quite challenged by the by disasters themselves and then you have a greater complexity of needs that must be taken into account I think the one thing I done the score there and Paul was alluding to that is the challenge we have as humanitarian actors in somehow working on different temporalities we need to be addressing urgent needs that's how we're designed and so we will respond to a shock providing emergency assistance now when we're looking at climate risks of course we're looking at immediate impacts but we're also significantly looking at much longer-term impacts and when Dagen was talking of providing access to water to communities it's an extremely good example of that you you need to be building into the design of your program not only the fact that you want to be providing water to communities immediately but you also need to be looking into what are the projections in terms of how water tables will be evolving in the future if I want to be providing water in a sustainable manner and although I think in theory we all agree to this we all agree to the fact that it's about tackling emergency needs as well as building resilience to longer-term risks I don't think we're that good at doing that for the time being so there's still that element of let's first respond to the emergency and then let's look at the longer term needs but the reality of crisis is that you often have a repetition of shocks so you might not have a law where you say okay now we will be tackling longer-term needs I'll stop here that was a bit of a convoluted answer to your question but I hope that helps I was really fascinating and you covered a lot of ground quite quickly let's go over to Caroline and how is MSF addressing these these complications that these complexities that Catherine has mentioned I'm thinking particularly from an operational perspective and that last issue that Catherine raised about how you deal with those different temporalities but responding but also supporting the development of those institutional or other kinds of capabilities over the long term that we need to address climate change how are you tackling those issues yeah I mean a lot has already been covered here by all the wonderful panelists but thanks for asking I'll share a little bit about then the MSF experience which as a medical humanitarian organization you know we've found over time obviously we work in multiple countries where we're already actually responding to situations that are likely linked to the changing environment so it's perhaps not about fundamentally reinventing operations but recognizing this fact and expanding perspectives to tailor actions a little bit more specifically around climate and environmental impacts so adding an additional lens to the way that we work so to speak the problem for humanitarians and for healthcare practitioners alike is that we tend to intervene at the end of the equation so the outcome of the crisis is already in front of us the impacts are hard to see until they're already in front of you so it's often difficult to sort through the confounding factors and really make the link with the attribution signs to say what we're responding to here right now is actually linked to XYZ related to the climate crisis however it has and particularly for a fiercely independent organization like MSF it has really reminded us of the importance of partnership with people and organizations and centers of expertise that can provide this science and specifically at national and local levels the everybody's spoken a little bit about this already but one of the most complex factors that we see these days is obviously that emergencies that we face are becoming more severe and erratic over time you know this includes infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue and cholera which result from changing rainfall and temperature patterns it includes zoonotic diseases that change due to increased pressure on the environment extreme weather events we've spoken a little bit about you know cyclones and hurricanes and then malnutrition and the links with drought so these erratic cycles and these continued events they really take a toll on people and no one gets time to recover in between as Catherine said earlier so it's no time between one crisis and the next and we know that this is going to continue and get worse what we've seen the same impacts also in terms of health care settings health systems are squeezed by connected and compounding health crises in many countries we saw already health systems are under considerable strain we saw how everyone tried to manage COVID but you can imagine adding you know general health care management for the environment where you're working for the geography that you're supposed to cover but add a flooded health center or hospital to that or add an additional outbreak of climate sensitive disease that is larger than predicted or new to your environment or adds that you were supposed to cover you know X thousands of people in your geographic region but people have been displaced suddenly and you must manage also the health needs of the displaced population so there are many different kind of complicating factors in terms of how MSF has tried to approach this we're looking at it from three different levels so we've kind of got our three tiered response operations analysis and research in our footprint in our perspective because we operate under the principle of do no harm this requires the organization to lead at medical activities today that are in such a way that we protect the health and lives of people tomorrow and I say that it's a process we're very imperfect at it at the moment but we've committed to really rise to this challenge the best of our ability humanitarian action as it's designed at the moment is very carbon intensive and the nature of MSF's work responding to prices around the world remains quite carbon intensive so addressing our environmental footprint is priority but presents a lot of challenges so but it's important first step measure and mitigating going forwards from that direction MSF is also looking at our operational strategies like I said tailoring looking at as the needs change you know so will our medical action tailoring our operations to better respond to realities that we did not keep in our in our minds eye before and we're looking at adjusting research agendas specifically because you know there are big gaps in knowledge and neglected areas within the global health and humanitarian system for vulnerable people that are affected by climate change and environmental degradation and there is quite a lot to contribute there that will very strongly influence broader policy advocacy or legal initiatives so we do see an added value in ensuring our work contributes to furthering that knowledge gap or filling that knowledge gap thank you so much Carol I'm really interesting to hear those practical ways in which you're trying to address that we've heard a number of different things today from the real need to localize humanitarian action or action across the board in these kinds of contexts to challenges with donor funding donor priorities and the humanitarian financing gap for instance we've we've heard about particular kinds of different perspectives from those who are funding or supporting action in these kinds of contexts so issues at the local level from the local to the to the international level which pose a real challenge to the humanitarian system as a whole I wonder how Catherine ICRC or MSF is thinking about how climate change poses a challenge to that humanitarian system do you have what it takes to to respond to this challenge in the ways that you need to particularly in these contexts where maybe there aren't many development actors where states are as Paul put it not you know don't have the reach or the capability to do what might be needed in a in a in a in a more stable context how do you see that as humanitarian organizations and what might we think about as a community in terms of addressing structural problems within the sector I think to start to see that as a huge challenge there's an I'd like to say we own all the answers and know how to do this but I don't think that would be right I think as Paul alluded to and we've heard from Abdulrahman and Deghan as well the humanitarian response is a small part of the equation we need to get it right now I think one of the challenges we have is that in a number of places where we'd like to say a big development actor will make sure that there's a sustainable access to water for the whole community this might not be happening because we do know that development efforts are often quite significantly hampered by insecurity so we are very much in a place as an organization we have committed to factoring climate and environmental risks across programs I think that's one small step we've also been working quite strongly with the humanitarian sector to try to guide responses steer responses when it comes to climate action and this is the work we've done through the development of the the climate and environment charter for humanitarian organizations now the charter itself does flag the need to mobilize other activities because we're completely aware that this is a large part of the equation but to be able to do this we need to convince everyone that there has to be an acceptance of a certain level of risks there has to be an acceptance of the fact that you might be working with different partners and this connects us very much to the discussion on local action because it's clear that a large part of this action needs to be driven by very by communities so by very local actors and so all of this requires quite a bit of mobilization I think to to get the the right responses I think at the theoretical level there's an agreement that we need development humanitarian and peace actors to work together in practice work quite far from there so to us there's really been that effort to both get our operations right but also recognizing that this will really not be sufficient so we need to do our part we need to mobilize others so they strengthen their part and the other element that I think is important in the climate and environment charter and this is very much why we've worked on this to bring the sector together is the recognition that we should be helping one another so we should be supporting the efforts of various actors to integrate those risks into their ways of operating knowing that we don't have all the same capacity to be developing tools or to be engaging with researchers so there's very much that idea of a collective endeavor if we want to get the response right and to some extent this connects to what Caroline was saying about the fact that MSF might not be an organization that partners so easily with others that is applicable to the ICRC as well I think and so to us the the move to develop that type of engagement and work is very much that realization of no we need to be partnering with others and that's a case where we need to be learning a lot from others because we can't pretend that we have that knowledge in the ICRC that has been developed for an extended period of time so it's a bit of a shift in terms of how we approach the the question and how we envision our relationship with the rest of the sector but I mean also far beyond the sector all other relevant actors in that case thanks thanks so much Catherine it's really great to hear you really focusing there on the need for partnership and collaboration going beyond just coordination which tends to be the preoccupation of the humanitarian sector and this is something you mentioned too Caroline is the need for partnership how do you see how is MSF trying to achieve those different and improved kinds of partnerships to deal with these issues? Good question and again it's hard to add more to what's been said already very eloquently but I would say there's kind of two levels of partnerships that that we're talking about is really kind of going back to one of the five recommendations from Paul this you know putting front line you know people on the front line which is being led in our priorities and where the action is really needed by people who are living through changes now in terms of the way that emergency operations work it's not usually we're not well renowned for being the most you know taking enough time to really engage with individuals and communities about the issues we tend to arrive assess the issue and set up an emergency operation really quickly but we're working on changing that process to something a bit more organic much more guided by affected populations because you know only when we speak to people in Chad or Honduras or Madagascar you know they're not using terms such as you know the COF academics are to describe their realities and or sometimes they don't even recognize that the driving force behind the issue that they're facing may be some kind of environmental change but they can speak to changes that they're experiencing over time they can speak to the coping strategies that they've had to adopt ditch force them to change their lives their livelihoods and even their family structures so partnership at that level to be led in the right direction and then partnerships with you know not just academic institutions but with green technologies we've got a lot of work to do and looking at our supply chain how to move towards more responsible programming work to do you know we've encountered quite a few medical operations where there was a limited amount we could do at the end aside from keep people healthy but if you look at for instance exposure to you know lead poisoning in in mining situations you know that's an exposure that's going to continue unless there is a policy and legal intervention that comes afterwards so in that respect there needs to be some sort of continuity that MSF is not adapted to present and so it leads back to partnerships it's kind of a continuum of care but not just in a healthcare way great thank you i'd like to return to to Deggan Ali and kind of bring this back to the the realities on the ground in a country like Somalia Deggan what what are your what is your your thinking about what you've heard today from from the other participants and kind of what what do you think needs to happen to change things in terms of building institutions delivering really locally led action to address climate and conflict risks in Somalia yeah i mean i think a lot of it has already been covered and it's hard to follow all of those great presenters i think one of the biggest problems in the sector as a whole is that we oftentimes think that the humanitarian development actors are the duty bearers but they're not it's the government and unfortunately you know when we have fragile contexts where we have weak governments like Somalia we have i haven't seen anyways in my 20 plus years of working in Somalia any systemic and deep investments in the capacity of the of the various ministries the relevant ministries and and and the linkage between the ministries and the federal states at the local level those those mechanisms are extremely weak and you know if we spent even five ten percent of what we spend on aid in just serious capacity the development in the past 10 15 years i think we would have had a very strong institutions but unfortunately what we do in the sector is we undermine government capacity we undermine government sovereignty we undermine in an effort to ensure that we stay relevant and we're funded and and i include the UN in this not just i NGOs in the UN but even the local NGOs who benefit financially from this system so i would say first and foremost we need to really double our efforts and supporting government capacity because it's their responsibility to create the mechanisms the infrastructure that supports the regulations and implement and enforce those regulations we have charcoal regulations in Puntland and Somalia and but they're not enforced why because we don't have any mechanism of monitoring on the ground we don't have range land rangers that we used to have that the former government used to pay their salaries for we don't you know we can have community accountability mechanisms the communities can enforce some of this but they need incentives they need support they need fuel they need vehicles they need all of these things so i mean i think that's where we need to be resourcing as much as possible not the government overall policy at the global level at the national level only but also at the very local level as well making sure that these policies cascade to the local communities and they're implemented properly thank you so much Dagon um i i wonder if i've there up and you've got some thoughts on that from you know having sat within the prime minister's office at a time when there was a great expansion of finance for let's say state building for one of a better word and given the amount of effort and money that has gone into building state institutions in one way or another yeah i think i have two points to add one is i saw a comment just about the what i made i said earlier about having a ministry of environment is important and someone mentioned shouldn't be better to have a department within the ministry of finance and what you will see is that when i was in the system i was one of those who opposed actually having different projects within the ministry of finance because you needed a whole department or new ministry to deal with with such issues and with in a context that's fragile like Somalia where institutions are fragile a ministry of finance can easily divert from its core functions and then become a ministry of environment if you add in an environmental component to it so i would i would warn against that but the ministry of finance can play a an important coordinating role when it's you know coordinating for example funding from international financing institutions and coordinating with international partners how best and effective to to use those funds in Somalia the other point is i saw another point on on Ocha saying what can be better done and one thing that came in my mind in the past few days is you know we have so many sophisticated clusters in the humanitarian system but there's no cluster that is specifically focused on climate change environmental issues and perhaps you know it's it's worth looking at that at a cluster or mechanism in which whilst we're doing humanitarian operations we make sure that you know we're not doing more harm to the environment than than is supposed to do and i think you know that's that's critically important but the key aspect in all of this is that to deal with the environment we have to have and consult with the environmental experts right and the environmental experts cannot only come at three quarters and ninety percent from the north of this part of the world and that's where the localization comes in you know back in the days and then when you used to hear in previous government before the war there used to be a lot of expertise people sent for phd's and studies abroad to actually understand you know the environmental impact and how to to to address that and challenge that on the ground and we need to build that expertise in in in country so that you know we can build better policies to address those but i think that it's important also that as we build the capacity of the government we also recognize the role that the government has to play in addressing climate change issues and in my experience in Somalia that has not been always the case and you've had cases where international partners try to put down or demean the government when it's trying to to to tackle serious issues and we prefer to deal with the status quo if i say what i mean for example if you look at you know a city like Mogadishu which is two million inhabited by two million people it's constantly growing and yet you know we keep on building roads without considering systems we keep on expanding the city without you know considering how the waste is going to manage and people in the city itself are building you know boreholes and water wells to be supplied on water and even those wells are actually contaminated because they're very close to the sea you know it's it's it's if you go to Mogadishu most of the time you'll have a shower with salted water and so those issues at the core and even in a very populated city like like Mogadishu are not being addressed i give you an example i was in in in the office of the prime minister one issue we have we had this that actually the UN was incinerating rubbish inside the airport and we told them stop doing that and instead help us manage waste 20 kilometers outside of Mogadishu and the answer was no no no it's too risky it's too too much security issues we can't take the waste out of Mogadishu in the heart of the Mogadishu instrating you know waste just next to the to the to the to the airstrip and and we couldn't do it we couldn't stop them doing that and and i think you know that's that's that's one of the core challenges of being in a fragile uh context thank you so much Abdulla cleaner do you have any um thoughts on particularly on these kind of questions around building institutions that might support the kinds of cooperation that you were talking about earlier on um i wish i had more thoughts on those things in part just because um i'm real i'm real conflict ground person but um but i will say that uh i mean i don't mean to make everything seem worse but we're we are working towards a time where there's going to be and has been um kind of a reversion towards an autocratic mean rather than democratic practices which means that many of these institutions are likely going to continue to be politicized and transactional in how they work on the ground and so um i think that i think we have to obviously work within the context that we're given i suppose one of my main issues was that this was this was a discussion that was that's picking up a lot of speed the relate the potential relationship between climate and conflict it's picking up a lot of speed and it it is securitizing the wrong things about this relationship and of course we can we can really easily i'd say um put together some sort of uh this is what modern conflict looks like and this is what climate change in different in different places look like and what is the likelihood that they're going to work together and from that come up with policies that that will be enacted sub-nationally to to make for the the best outcome but i suppose one of the challenges i see in this which i can't quite get around is that it will need to be adapted to almost every community and every circumstance so there's no homogenous policy that you simply enact and i think you know quite a lot of what a national government does that we miss in the global north sometimes is a lot of it is just management of sub-national entities that either can't or won't or for whatever reason aren't doing what the national level wants them to do and adding in a crisis to that whether it's a conflict crisis or a climate crisis or a humanitarian crisis of any kind exacerbates the the lack of alignment and the lack of coordination and um that often has some violent ends but um but it does prolong these crises that might seem outside of this well it's just a matter of managing you know 200 plus communities but i would say it's it's a it's a very tricky and difficult well there's no endpoint i guess it's just a tricky process to start thank you clean it should i come in with some questions from the floor yes please do norah thank you great um so i just have one question right now across discussions like this there seems to be a lot of consensus on the need for rethinking funding mechanisms and connecting humanitarian emergency interventions with development slash long-term programming this includes organizations all along the funding supply chain so if everyone seems to agree where is the hold what are the institutional or very practical barriers to making this happen a great question i want to pull or or katrine or caroline from where you sit how do you see that that question what what what's getting in the way of the humanitarian system i'm happy to jump in but also happy to let others start go ahead katrine and i think paul wants to have something great um so a few points here i i i think so there's funding to humanitarian action now what we're discussing here is how do we support climate action i think be it implemented by humanitarian actors or other actors and there i think the part of the funding we need to be looking into is not only humanitarian funding but also climate funding and development funding what's coming in the way i think when it comes to climate and development funding access requirements for fragile countries are extremely difficult to me so we end up with real gaps that mean that despite clear commitments to help countries adapt to a changing climate money is not flowing in the right direction and when it's getting to these countries it tends not to get to the localities that are the most unstable and in particular when these are not under the control of the government so there i think we really need to retain that dimension because i think we made clear in this discussion that i mean ultimately yes humanitarian actors have a role to play but we need to think beyond humanitarian action and so i think we need to frame that question more broadly about how do we make sure that the right type of support is provided to local actors and this connects very much with the idea of we need to be diversifying actors because it's not always your central government that will be in a position to support climate action in a given location and for now we're very much looking at the system where money goes to central authorities and may not then be dispersed at a much more local level where action is needed and whereas with development money we will not have a humanitarian window i think with climate money there's an element there of making the case for money that needs to be allocated to more humanitarian and nature type of activities so i think the question of burdensome access requirement is coming in the way then i think when we're looking at highly unstable location and money that is not identified as humanitarian money you have the whole question of sanctions and how is money not allocated to certain territories because of the terrorist list for instance so there i think we really need to think of those modalities of access as well because what's needed is not on the emergency assistance and very quickly in a number of locations you run into the tension between what's needed and what type of funding could you be tapping into really really helpful and not you know challenges that we actually see across say the the least developed countries group not just limited to to those that are really at the bottom of the the fragile conflict context list um paul i was actually the the sign i was making was that i was very happy for kathleen luna to take that question um but now that she has and given given most of the answer i would just add maybe a couple of thoughts um with respect to the as kathleen was saying i think i think there are sort of three large areas of funding humanitarian funding development funding and climate funding and these are complicated because they're also going in different modalities some are grants some are loans and they there's all sorts of different levels of it i certainly find it very hard to get my head around but i'm no specialist the climate sorry the the humanitarian development piece i think a lot of evaluations of this problem the fact that people say they want the money to come together and yet it doesn't focus on a couple of areas the first is is around um the work processes diagnostic and planning processes on the ground because there's a lot of um anyone who's on the ground knows there's an awful lot of diagnosis and planning going on and and often the development and the humanitarian ones are being done separately and differently and then there's an attempt to kind of retrofit them so some of it is as simple as that it's just how the work is planned further back the stream as the questioner is suggesting it's all the way out of the stream another real constraint is the actually within the organizations both operational organizations and donor organizations have tended to make a very clear line between humanitarian development which is reflected in their this is not true for all but reflected in the funding sources you'll have different funding streams which require different reporting um and which are often being run out of different offices in the same organization and because so much climate work as we were saying earlier on is about what are the relationships between response to our anticipation and so on a lot of the work falls into the gaps between those different streams and those different offices so those are the practical problems and I think they're quite well known actually by people who've been trying to get some work done and I know that some of the donors Switzerland for example are restructuring to try and make this easier to do then there is as well as Catherine Luna was saying that the climate funding which which is possibly in danger of taking on the very worst of of humanitarian funding in as much as not going to civil society organizations as you were saying being almost impossible to access but also some of the some other bad bad sort of elements which are that it it doesn't seem to go to fragile fragile states complex affected states because those states are less able to produce shovel ready big programs which the donors want to fund and so the sort of things that these states are able to put forward the cost actually of putting the putting the proposals forward is too high for them to access one final thought is the other piece about climate is how which which affects particularly many of these states is that the loss and damage element that is the funding for all of the people who have fallen through the net of mitigation and adaptation is very much the poor relation in in the climate talks and very much around this cop is a poor relation that might not be the case next year but Simon I know you've actually been working on this for quite some time so maybe iid's got got thoughts about loss and damage indeed indeed this is something we're thinking about really actively and I think Catherine this is something that you're kind of moving towards in the comments that you're making is that there is this gap between what is allocated through climate finance mechanisms that's available for mitigation and adaptation what's available through the humanitarian funding channels and a need to bridge that gap that's certainly very much kind of how I'm thinking about what loss and damage financing might mean in practice is how we can maybe either create new modalities or use existing modalities to to get more finance into the kinds of action that we need to address loss and damage in these kinds of contexts taking into account all of the challenges that come with the existing financial architecture in terms of access to finance places like Somalia south Sudan many of the Sahelian countries simply don't have the climate records available to put together an application to the green climate fund that's the only fund under the UNFCCC that actually has maybe the opportunity of getting some loss and damage finance or some adaptation finance so that's effectively blocked for them let alone the local organizations like DeGones that might be wanting to access climate finance or looking at the potential for things like front-line funds to get money to the grassroots for climate action incredibly difficult in these kinds of contexts I want to end with reference to one of the questions or comments that came through from Duncan Pruitt at Oxfam that brings us back to some of the things that you were saying Kleena which is what is the potential for the new surge of climate finance to actually exacerbate existing conflict among elites who are competing for scarce resources within these contexts there's a huge amount of interest in climate finance as being an elixir for many of these challenges but maybe it will just add fuel to the fire so I want to wrap up we're very close to the end I really want to thank everybody who's participated on the panel thank you so much for your insights for your different perspectives to Degan Ali and to Abdelrahman Sharif for your really rich insights from from Somalia and and really driving home the importance not just of localization and locally led climate action but of building the institutions at the local and national levels to to deliver these longer-term impacts to Paul for your thoughts on the the nature and the system of the humanitarian systems five really great recommendations there for humanitarians Kleena for really grounding us in understanding better that relationship between climate change governance and conflict and to to focus our attention on some of those political the political economic drivers of conflicts more and the importance of institutions and then to Katrin and Caroline who thanks so much really amazing to hear what you're doing in the ICRC and the MSF and to hear about what we might do more broadly within the humanitarian community to address this climate emergency so thanks everybody not enough time to get into all of this in in a great deal of detail but a really wonderful start to thinking about this more practically and thanks also to our audience everybody who's submitted comments and questions sorry that we couldn't get to everybody but we will take those this will be put online so you'll be able to refer back and and listen to the debate again if you so thank you everybody signing off now and thanks for a great debate