 Well, welcome back to the last session of the afternoon, which in some ways is, I suspect maybe slightly different from some of the things that we've heard before. Anu Joge, she's a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics in the Department of Geography and Environment and her research is really at the junction and intersection of domestic finance, community vulnerability and climate adaptation in India. She's been a climate adaptation practitioner and researcher for 15 years, looking at multi-level governance and climate change in South East Asia. And she's going to talk to us today, and this is a title I put together rather than she did, and what I think is going to be the effects of climate change on the vulnerable in India. Thank you so much, Adrian. Hi, everyone. I know it's the last session, but I promise I'm going to keep this very, very interactive and hopefully question some assumptions we have around vulnerability generally. So, as Adrian said, I work on trying to keep adaptation, both as a practitioner, as a researcher for most of South Asia, but particularly in India. Now, some of you may have participated in the climate strikes. Some of you may be part of Fridays for the Future. Some of you may be considering getting into the science, the climate science, being physicists, maybe even adaptation and social science or maybe working in Asia or South Asia in a broader economic or development context. But what I'm going to try and do is I'm going to start at the planetary scale and then end at the village and household level in India. And I think this sort of multi-scale perspective is valuable no matter what you go out and do. The topic is climate change and examining vulnerability, but I'm going to contextualise vulnerability across other nations as well. Just to give you some idea about why we should question what vulnerability is and how it's actually being addressed. So, like I said, I'm going to keep this interactive. I'm going to present four statements to you. The statements you'll often hear connected to climate change. And I'm going to ask you, raise your hand. Tell me if you agree with these statements, if you disagree. Why? If you have to build on it or refute it, let me know. And then I'll talk about them. So the very first statement is this. We are locked into 30 years of worsening climate impacts, no matter what the world does. I've written copy pasted this from the headline of a New York Times article from 2001. Yeah, I'd like to know. Do you agree? Do you disagree? What do you think? Just raise your hand and tell me. Go ahead, please. Yes, anybody else? You're absolutely right. We are locked in to worsening climate impacts and the caveat, you know, being no matter what the world does in the immediate term, in terms of what we can do in terms of climate impacts. So as headline grabbing statements tend to be from the news articles, that was what it was. But the fact is this was borrowed from the intergovernmental panel on climate changes. Six assessment report, which essentially said that warming will continue until the middle of the century, even if nations take immediate steps to cut emissions. That's because, as many of you already know, carbon dioxide is what we call a long-lived gas. It's in the atmosphere anywhere between 300 to 1,000 years, which means we're warming the planet right now. Humankind has put enough carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. It's so much so that we have already raised average surface temperatures by 1.1 degree Celsius since the 19th century. And this warming trend, we're locked into it until the mid-century. And so a lot of sort of push for action is to try and curb runaway climate change and impacts post that. So we have lost a lot of that, but I think what's important and slightly problematic for you to then focus on is saying that beyond what we're locked into, where are we at in terms of pledges and very sort of conditional promises versus what's actually happening? And this is one of the latest pieces of work from colleagues at Grantham at the Imperial. It's a busy graph. Don't focus on all of it. Just look at the aquamarine and the blue train line. The first is essentially what globally nations have committed to in terms of immediate policies. What are they actually doing, rather? And the aquamarine line is what we pledged in some distant future. India says night zero by 2070, some countries have said night zero by 2050. There's a huge gap in terms of what we've promised and what actions we're actually taking in terms of the emissions trajectory that we're at. And so I do want to preface before I continue that there is a very important role that many organisations, youth groups, students are doing and holding businesses, international agencies, governments to account. Often scientists, academics at their own peril are taking the cost in activism with a huge levels of pushback. This was at the American Geographical Union last year, and these two scientists faced a lot of pushback within their own university. And they were, of course, they were escorted out of the conference as well. But this is important. And I want to preface that before I sort of move down from the planetary to now the nation state scale. And this is my next statement. Climate change is a threat to rich and poor countries alike. What do you think? Yes. Anybody else? Yeah, you're both correct. You're both absolutely correct. Physical climate impacts are very much impacting countries in the global north and the global south. You talked about it, forest fires in Canada, west coast of the US, huge heat wave, heat wave related deaths in the EU. And of course, floods inundation and disruption wherever you go, right? So essentially, it's bad. But the fact is, and this is another IPCC graph that talks about country-wise vulnerability with the darkest being the more vulnerable, with the huge caveat that vulnerability differs both between and within countries. And I think that's the critical thing to think about. And I think why it's so critical to think about, because, of course, developing, least developing countries or LDCs, this is the climate language used for these blocks, some of them are far worse off. Example, some of the small island developing nations. So Dominica, which is a small island in the Caribbean, and a report noted that after Hurricane Maria in 2017 lost equivalent of 250 times its GDP, essentially. That's a huge amount, right? But equally, there is vulnerability within countries. So after Hurricane Sandy, New York City had one of the most sophisticated climate change policies, climate adaptation policies, they massively climate-proofed infrastructure. But essentially, what we note is that after the 2021 floods, and New York City's been being inundated quite often, 12 out of all 11 out of the 12 people who actually died in these floods lived in basement apartments, typically rented to low income tenants, right? So you are seeing that there is vulnerability within country as well. Same for wildfires, a lot of people live in large estates near forested regions, same for across the coast in areas like Florida, but essentially what is their propensity to be able to take out large insurance products, rebuild after, and recover from economic losses. This is a recent Lancet study that notes that Paris has one of the highest risks of heat-related deaths in the EU, but what it actually misses is that there are a temperature disparity even between neighbourhoods, people who live in more industrialized areas, more comfortisation, less green cover, those areas suffer from a higher heat island effect, which means they are a few degrees higher at any given point. And of course, the vulnerable and the poor have lower access to health care services and access to cooling spaces as well. So, but there is differential vulnerability. So when we talk about the need for money for adaptation and the sort of urgency of where it needs to go, the urgency of the fact that it does need to go to developing economies, it's also worth thinking about the money that's already being spent in better endowed countries. Where's the money actually going? Where should it be going? But here's another thing I actually want you to consider. This is really the crux of my talk. Look at these examples and tell me how much of this heat-related deaths or flood-related deaths have to do with climate change, or is it to do with their existing development socio-economic structures in which they exist? And that's something really to keep in mind as I proceed. Think about it. And then I come to my third statement. India is particularly vulnerable to climate change. I mean, it's a no-grid. I'm not really going to wait for an answer here because actually all of South Asia is. We are seeing massive increases in temperature. By the way, if you ever get into the space where you're working with global circulation models, you'll note that it's actually very easy to model, and with a lot of certainty you do realise that heat is something that's easy to predict. The rains, precipitation, the monsoons, much, much, much harder. This is part of the whole global gearing phenomenon. So South Asia, very vulnerable, vulnerable because of course large coastline, so increased incidences of cyclones, huge heat waves, already we're seeing heat waves, increased massive floods in Inundation, but of course we are also crowned by the Hindu Kush Himalayas, which essentially are headwaters for some of the largest rivers. We're seeing glacier melt at very degrees. This is going to impact again inundation but also food security. One of the things when you do a vulnerability and risk calcination, one of the factors indicators of vulnerability is population. It's one of the reasons this is very dense and therefore shows up as very vulnerable in a lot of our climate and disaster indices and indicators. The story is the same for India. I won't get into the numbers, but essentially more heat, more intense erratic rainfall, but less quantum amount of water availability. There's a lot of runoff, essentially, but also huge levels of inundation, increased incidences of cyclones, and of course sea water incursions as well. And then when you look at these, and this is actually collated from a study that did a meta-analysis of all of the climate risk studies published over the last 10 years for India. The thing we note is that of course heat, total and low income and marginalised residents work outdoors, living crowded, poorly ventilated homes, and don't have easy access to cooling systems and drinking water is often a constraint. Same for rainfall and flooding. One study noted that a billion people in India face water scarcity for at least a month a year, and of course we already know the kind of damage that flooding is already doing. By clothes as well. Hosted communities in low-lying areas often the poor, and this is not just in India. In many countries you live in more low-lying urban spaces and face far more inundation. So then the natural logic here is then climate change is a driver of social and ecological transformation. And I love your thoughts on this. And when I think social and ecological transformation, it could be floods, biodiversity loss, migration, agriculture, productivity. What do you think? Please. This is very much the framing that is being used that contemporary climate change is very much constructed as a series of external shocks and stressors that impact existing social and ecological systems. This is a very famous diagram that you see that located a lot. If you get into the climate space, again by the IPCC and a lot of water availability and risk assessments do this. They look at the hazard, they look at the extent of exposure so you can have a huge flash flood if no one lives there then there's just no exposure. So you look at hazard, you look at exposure, you look at existing water availability and that's how you calculate risk. And therefore what's ended up happening because we use this frame is that climate change is framed as a causal driver for flooding, biodiversity loss, migration, worsening agricultural productivity, rising poverty, urbanisation and in some cases domestic violence, geopolitical tensions, even polygamy. So climate change is essentially being connected very causally to socio-economic phenomena. This is actually an interesting report that came out I think in 2019 and this is from Maharashtra where they recorded that men are marrying more women because they just need more available hands to collect water. And they had to go further and further to actually get the water. Climate change has also been linked to farmer suicides in India. But what I would like to argue is that you cannot understand climate change without the historical and existing power relation that mediate these changes. Essentially if you isolate climate change from its social and political and historical context, you end up with unintended consequences on how it's addressed and we've already seen this in terms of what's happening on the ground. And the best way to sort of show this to you is through an example and this is when I come down to the village in the household level. There's a fantastic study done by political ecologist Marcus Taylor with a colleague Suhas Bhasme in India. They looked at this large adaptation project in India called National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture. It started in 2011. The idea was to put money into these model villages, 150 villages that would become resilient through all of these interventions, technological interventions, practice based interventions, governance based interventions that they would put in place essentially. The idea that your climate change is affecting you externally and will bring in experts will try and fix the problem. So what they try and do essentially the entire program focused on improving crop productivity, improving livestock and fisheries. They thought about technical innovations as well in terms of how governance is managed. They focused on a very specific place, a region called Naginhali in Karnataka. Karnataka is in the south of India. Compared to most states in India amongst the states, Karnataka does better in many development indicators. And it's worth sort of thinking about that in terms of context. So they figured out that what were the climate risks. Decrease in rainy days, high incidence of dry spells, more intense rainfall, damage to crops flooding. So essentially water comes damages but water doesn't stay. It just goes off and it comes out of season so it's not really helping the crops. So what were the interventions they thought about? The interventions were watershed management, improve water capacity, build a lot of storage infrastructure, improve cropping practices, try and move farmers from subsistence agriculture, get them to have higher value horticultural crops like tomatoes. So grow things that have higher margin in the market so they earn more money. And so the government said let's give them subsidies so that they can buy these and also grow them. And of course improve biodiversity so let's have androecology. Let's try and help them plant timber crops alongside stable crops, more money but also better for the environment you're growing, you're greening the space as well. So this plan was adaptation at a village level but what's a village level? Is it really a homogenous unit? It's not. The entire project questions or rather ignored questions of power within and between households to understand how the project would shape livelihoods. A village is not a uniform structure. Poverty and vulnerability especially in agriculture are dependent on a number of things. Differential access to key resources nothing to do with climate change, unequal relationships between farmers and traders, nothing to do with climate change, indebtedness, which is pervasive to informal lenders, access to non agricultural employment which has become a huge recourse for a lot of farmers in India having access to non agricultural employment being circular migrants essentially going out into the cities driving taxis driving rickshaws coming back working on land or the men going away and the women staying back and working on the land essentially. Of course, community, class, caste, gender and age greatly shape crews essentially more vulnerable. So we will have a situation where in years of project that said let's just build more water structures, let's build check dams, let's have these ponds, let's decent existing ponds and we will fix the problem. The interventions were externally driven the ideas that are not climate expert I know exactly what's happening in this village and I'm going to come and fix it. And so what ended up happening. There was a huge elite capture of water structures. They built these structures on private land. That was only the space that was the only space available so you're building public infrastructure, the richer farmers essentially started trading in water. And the less resourced farmers did not have access to it. The government recognized this and said okay, we will offer you subsidies to build something. But if you own land that is so small, it's really a trade off for you to think about giving some of that land away to have a small check dam versus earning an income by sort of harvesting on the entire land. So a lot of the poor farmers simply didn't do it. Poor farmers also did not have enough land to plant trees at the required spacing to give them intercropping benefits. So they simply didn't do it. And the most important thing about adaptation projects, your project intermediaries, locals, who you can co-opt, because they have political cloud, they can get things done. It ends up happening. They happen to be for more advantaged socioeconomic classes, but they end up being prime beneficiaries of project outcomes. Often, villages were chosen because they found these people who were powerful and were actually the only ones who actually benefit it. And smaller farmers, as I noted, were already indebted. So even when governments said we will offer differential subsidies, so if your government oppressed costs, you would get almost 90% subsidy to do something. But you simply didn't have the means to take out cheaper loans and remortgage your land or whatever else you possessed because the money would only come later. So essentially what ended up happening in an adaptation project like this, it helped a few privileged consolidate their wealth and push the poor into further dependency and vulnerability. So what I'm trying to essentially argue here is that if you're going to look at climate change in isolation, especially on the ground, especially when you think about adaptation, what you're ending up doing is looking at how it reconfigured existing structures in a way that privileges people who already have some amount of privilege, leaving the poor even more squeezed. And if I was to really recap, what I'm trying to say here is that, of course, we have a biophysical phenomenon like climate change. It is a huge threat. Governments are not doing enough. There's a very, very important role for scientists, for activists, for social scientists to get out there to do the research that's needed to hold governments and operates and fossil fuel companies to account. But equally, if you want to fight for a more just future, we need to rethink what we call climate imaginaries. This idea that climate is this external thing that comes destroys everything and really think about what are existing social structures, some even colonial existing social financial and economic structures that persist and actually deepen inequality. And this is an example of India, but this is likely happening in places across the globe. On a more or less somber note, I'm going to leave you with this. This is one of my favorite examples I use when I talk about differential adaptations. It's the movie clips from the movie from Parasite by Bujangoon. He won many Oscars as you know in 2019 for this movie. I won't give any spoilers if you haven't seen it. But the entire movie centers around this large flooding event in Seoul in South Korea. And it's a fantastic example of this sort of phrase that was coined by Neil Smith. There's no such thing as a natural disaster. Essentially, you have a huge flood event. It completely lets inundates and displaces the poorer family that lives in a low lying area in Seoul. And it's basically just another day for the very rich family to just look out in the garden. They even, they just have to stop camping and come back from where they were travelling. This is very important to know. So this is the question. The point really being natural events happen, but what makes them a disaster is very much. How cities are built, how they're governed, how even rural structures are built in government and existing social economic processes. I will review that. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Anu. Now I know people have some people got to go because we sadly overran at lunch. But for those not dashing off any questions. No. Oh, it was one of the back. Did a question there? Yes. In terms of adaptation actions, they've been happening for a while. So one of the most important pieces of work that's happened recently is a number of adaptation scholars from across the globe. US, UK, India, Australia essentially got together, looked at externally funded adaptation projects. So money coming from the green planet, money coming through bilateral aid to developing economies, and essentially showed how many of these projects were maladaptive. Maladaptation essentially being they either retained vulnerability, they passed it on along the value chain or another village or actually worse. Maladaptation has become such a pervasive problem that's now being incorporated for the first time in IPCC, in conversations about loss and damage, because this has essentially always been happening. But there's finally conversations around it. Any other questions? Sorry. Please. I think it was the second statement that you were putting on the board, which was that when you were putting a statement, stage number two was that entries, so HIC and LIC panels are affected equally by climate change. But surely countries with, for example, newly emerging economy, where there are many factories, creating their equalities are going to be affected at a quicker rate and at a larger scale. So what can be done about this because clearly these factories have a lot of economic influence for the Western economy, but also for the economy of the newly emerging economy. So what can be done about these factories that are so helpful to the environment, but beneficial to the economy? That's absolutely true. That's something that India essentially contains. At one hand, we are essentially saying that we are being extremely aggressive with our renewable investments, but we are fighting to ask for the carbon budget to grow, which means that we will continue using coal up to a point. While we're signalling, we're going to do something by 2017. And you're right, a lot of these factories are causing local air pollution. But remember, there are a lot of people invested in looking at coal. This is what we talk about when we talk about transition risk and just transition. Can you just approach entire factories and expect that people will somehow just switch into renewable jobs? It doesn't work like that. We are right. It is a huge scenario. This is what a lot of emerging economies like China, like India are essentially contending with. The fact is they are also vulnerable. So for a lot of countries like India, they have realised up to a point that we can only push this point if we're looking up to a point. We'll have to also be doing it. And we need to be investing enough because the impacts are also being felt here. So it's almost, yes, we need the carbon budget to grow, but we are going to be impacted. So we actually need to put the money in and try and fix a few things. The problem is when they try and fix it and don't really manage to end vulnerability. Please. I think it's a big company of point about the need to meet the obvious geophysical mainstream of climate research in order to actually tackle it in policy terms. I think you mentioned, for example, even the need to go beyond contemporary issues in every phase into historically, and so for example, there seems to be podiumism. And I think there's lots of people that are so as to recall who will know. I think that the forces on things like podiumism are not necessarily substantive debates in the sense that they are very contested. And the meanings and the responsibilities around those particular processes are not verifiable by scientific experience or research. So in that context, given that we are leading with this phenomenon that is 5G driven by social and economic processes is in a climate analysis geophysical problem. How could we actually be such narratives in this sort of inequality outcome given that there is a agreement on the basic terms and basic interest played amongst the same vertical place? That's a very, very good question. I can break that into two parts. The first is the fact that colonial legacy actually are very much, are very much entrenched in global conversations when we talk about something called common but differentiated responsibilities, right? It is a geophysical phenomenon, it's a lender, but the fact that the UNFCCC has very much talked about how it is differential for what they call annex one and annex two countries, right? Sorry, or rather annex and non-annux countries, right? So this is very much the case. The fact that the industrialization happened in certain countries, they industrialized very quickly, developed economy had to have taken time. Some countries are still not quite there and therefore need that budget as I was talking to grow, right? And so since Kyoto protocol, or even before that, since the 1990s, this conversation on differential responsibility and the work on burden sharing, right? But you're right, it is very contestant. You can come up to a point, even things like loss and damage. Loss and damage is very much predicated on what was the legacy of growing, right? And people are even questioning the word Anthropocene, because the word Anthropocene assumes that every human essentially, we have reached an epoch where every human essentially is causing a lot of planetary changes and people will say, no, wait a minute, it's not the entire world. It is the global norm. And let's talk about that. So it is baked in. It's baked in a way where it's just rhetoric. When it comes to actually legally binding, what can we say, what can we actually commit to? That's where it gets contested. But you're right, it is, it's hard to point. But there's some fantastic folks doing work, for instance, on climate finance and financialization and talking about the historical legacies, for example, in Ghana, in terms of how colognally in Ghana, money was lent out, how it was essentially managed, who had benefited, and how that practice is essentially continued even now in terms of formal credit, from informal to formal credit. So there is a handful of pieces that are largely quantitatively driven. Are these solutionist? They're not. And that's where we have the essential gap. But when we talk about carbon, it is very political because of this. In fact, whatever the IPCC presents is very much the lowest common denominator. I have 48,000 scientists do this amazing amount of what entry work, but then it has to go through all of the country representatives and be agreed line by line. And so much of what we are saying is a bit undersold because a lot of scientists are not able to say everything because countries don't want to have it all set. Well, Andrew, thank you very much indeed. I think we probably better call it a day.