 Well, I think we'll go ahead and start it. I'm sure there will be some people who join us a bit later, depending on their schedule, but welcome to our panel, leading societies towards carbon neutral and adapting to disruption. We have two wonderful people with us today. First, I'll introduce Miguel. Miguel is program officer with the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, Germany. He worked as a process engineer and environmental supervisor for a transnational corporation and later joined the United Nations Environment Program on the Climate Change Team. He joined that secretariat in 2011, where he has focused in capacity building for mitigation and carbon market mechanisms, promotion of climate action among the private sector and other stakeholders and development of tools to implement climate action. So we're especially pleased to have you with us today. We talk so much about making sure we have the data, making sure we have the right information for some of the decisions we make. And so it's great to have someone who actually has that type of information to be sharing with us today. So thank you, Miguel. And we're also joined by Dr. Jen Bindel, professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria in the UK and founder of the Deep Adaptation Forum, which is an international network for people seeking to reduce harm from social disruption and collapse due to the dangerous climate change. As a researcher, educator, and advisor, he specializes in leadership, communication, facilitation, and currency innovation for deep adaptation to climate chaos. He authored the viral Deep Adaptation Paper, which was downloaded about a million times. He has worked for 25 years on social and organizational change in over 20 countries with business, voluntary organizations, and political parties. He has a hundred plus publications, including five reports for the United Nations involvement in developing multi-stakeholder initiatives. And for that, he was recognized as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum. So let me just welcome, welcome to both of you. So glad that you have joined us for today and we appreciate your work and what you both have done to further this very, very important topic for the world. We're thrilled to have you with us. I'm gonna give just a brief overview of what we're going to do today. So after this introduction, both Jim and Miguel will take about 15 minutes and we will start with Miguel to set the stage, right? And he will tell us more about the science and what it means to begin urgent mitigation action. And then after his presentation, I will turn it over to Jim and he will talk to us about what happens if we can't prevent massive disruption, right? Concepts and practices of leadership for that situation. And then from there, we'll go into a bit of a dialogue between them and then have open discussion. So please put your questions in the chat and I will help organize those and we will come back to those after those initial presentations and a bit of intersection between them. All right, so I will turn it over to Miguel. Thank you so much, Miguel. Thank you very much and the pleasure to be with you today, thanks for the invitation. Can you hear okay? Perfect, so if something happens in the meantime, wave or something. So again, pleasure to be with you. As Janice said, the idea is that I help you or help provide a little bit of the context to the conversation. So I will keep it a little bit general and then in the question section, we can try to go into more detail as you may wish. I apologize for the lighting. I've been trying to position myself better but I still look like a ghost or something. Anyway, very good. So as Janice explained, I work currently for the Climate Change Secretariat also known as the UNFCCC Secretariat which is the organization that supports national governments in the negotiations around climate and helps them follow up with agreements that they reach. And most recently, of course, the Paris Agreement. Now, in addition to that, since the Paris Agreement was adopted, they also asked us to work more with other stakeholders. So with the private sector, with academia, with NGOs, with multinational authorities, et cetera. So the rest of society, and for that reason, a small team has been put together that tries to do that through different initiatives and I am part of this team. So that's why I have the opportunity to be with you. It's part of this work to try to... Ah, that's better. I found a better location. And I try to support that work. That was part of the introduction today. I focus on the outreach to other stakeholders around climate. Now, the first topic was or setting the scene in terms of where we are with the climate emergency, as it's being called rightly these days. You probably know as much as me around this topic. We are currently at around 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming. We need to avoid reaching 1.5 or reach 1.5 as a maximum in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate. And Gem, I'm sure, will expand on that. But we are already at 1.1 and we might have less than 10 years left to reach 1.5. So that's why this is a climate emergency. We are talking about a very short-term consequence if we don't take serious action right now. And what that means is we need to have global emissions of greenhouse gases. And this is not only CO2, but all greenhouse gases. We need to have them by 2030. So we have less than 10 years left. And then we need to have that amount again by 2045 at the latest and then reach what people are calling net zero. We could also call it carbon neutrality, climate neutrality. I will explain a little bit about the different terms in a moment by 2050. So the scale of the action that we need to take right now is very, very significant. You probably know that the major investments in infrastructure and energy generation in transport, et cetera, are usually thought of decades in advance. And once the investment is done, it will be there for at least 30 years, maybe more depending on what the infrastructure or the investment is. So when we're talking about 10 years, left to have emissions, that means that we needed to be making the right decisions 30 years ago, right? So we are quite late in responding to this emergency, unfortunately. And that's why it has become an emergency. We need to respond to the climate change challenge as an emergency, meaning we need to take extreme action. Now we need to take extreme and all action necessary to avoid hitting that 1.5 degree Celsius. We could also say maximum two, maximum Celsius, but it is clear that with two... Miguel, I think you've frozen. Should we wave? His better light was probably away from his wifi. He probably can't see us either. Kumi, can you send him a chat? Sure. That would be great. And just let him know that he's frozen. He's left the room, as it were. Maybe he'll come back. So he might come back in a second. We'll wave at Kumi. How's everyone feeling about the emergency? Maybe he did that for emphasis. Yeah, it's unintentional chat amongst yourselves moment. Here we go. Well, Jim, I'm interested in hearing you just respond for a second to what you heard there. Oh, I've prepared some remarks to immediately start from when Miguel has concluded his initial sharing. So it's all fine. It's coming. Hi, I'm back. Back to you. Miguel, go ahead. Sorry. Yes, I don't know what happened. The internet was working and everything. Anyway, thank you. So we were talking about the definitions. So when you'd say carbon neutral, carbon neutral, net zero, people understand in general the same thing. They are synonyms. It means achieving a balance between our global emissions of greenhouse gases and sinks in the planet without causing any more global warming and therefore climate change. So we need to achieve that balance where we are in a net, not putting any more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, as the conversation about this topic has advanced, it has been concluded that when you speak at global level, net zero and climate neutral in general are the same, are synonyms, right? We do not want to put any more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in case it costs more climate change. However, carbon, carbon neutral may mean something different. It may be referring only to the carbon based greenhouse gases. So CO2, CH4, methane. But you're leaving out other greenhouse gases. And this conversation became more apparent or more, better well-known. When China announced that they wanted to be carbon neutral by 2015 or earlier, but they don't include CO2 in that target, which is still very ambitious, right? But they did not include yet the other greenhouse gases. So when you say carbon, it may be that you're referring only to the carbon based greenhouse gases or you may be referring to all of them. There is no official definition yet. IPCC, which is of course the scientific voice for this topic, they are referring to carbon neutral when it's only carbon based cases and GAG neutral when it's all of them. So maybe in the near future, we will have a little bit better definition on the terms or use of the terms that refer to which greenhouse gases we're referring to. And then when you go down to the organization level, now not global level, but maybe country level or organization level, then the three of them may mean different things. When you say carbon or climate neutral, you may be referring to achieving this balance between your emissions and your sinks and whatever you are not able to avoid. So whatever is not going into a sink, you compensate. You offset with carbon credits or some other instrument that allows you to compensate for the emissions you did not avoid. But when you say net zero, it means you are compensating whatever you needed to compensate only with long-term capture of CO2. So you are really net zero because you are either extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere or trapping it before it goes to the atmosphere. So when you talk about climate, sorry, yes, climate or carbon neutral versus net zero at any other level that is not global, there is a difference or at least this is the understanding that is emerging now. So it will not be the same to say Microsoft is climate neutral than to say Microsoft is net zero. So right now, very difficult for any of us to reach net zero for sure. A lot of transformation needs to happen, assistance transformation in the whole of society plus the development of the technologies necessary to achieve that long-term carbon capture in an economical way, in a feasible manner. Today it is very, it's a very complex technology and still very, very expensive. So right now understood that very few, if anyone can be net zero, but we can work towards getting there through trying to be climate or carbon neutral. Now, the other points that you had asked me to address is one of the main challenges, right? For businesses and for organizations to achieve that carbon neutrality or climate neutrality or even net zero. And what are we doing from the UNFCCC secretariat or the UN side to support that? So the main challenge in terms of mitigation, in terms of avoiding emissions and then capturing or sequestering emissions to become neutral or net zero is of course this transformation of the systems that we need to have at global level. And when Microsoft or BP even or anyone else makes a commitment to achieve net zero status by 2050 or earlier, they are doing so by assuming that others will make the changes that they need to make in order for their organization, their company to be able to achieve that target. It is clear that by working alone, no one is going to achieve net zero or real climate neutrality. And so again, the collaborative, how do you say element or the collaborative nature of addressing climate change appears again. It is very clear that we need to collaborate at organization level, at national level if we are going to face climate change successfully. So the main challenge right now is how to encourage, how to facilitate this transition of all the different elements in society and the economy that is required for all of us to one day achieve net zero, transform our energy matrix, transform our transportation modes, transform the way that we are treating natural sinks today, right, biodiversity and ecosystems. So we need to protect those and we need to grow. Yes. Let me just go ahead, because this is a question in the chat and I think it would be helpful at this point. Explain sinks, please. Sinks, uh-huh. Sinks is any, how do you call it, any ecosystem or technology that traps or extracts greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. So sinks includes of course, forests, everybody thinks trees immediately. That is true in principle, but it also includes oceans, for example, oceans are the biggest thing in the sinks right now in the world. Oceans have absorbed an enormous portion of the CO2 or they mainly CO2 that we have put in the atmosphere in previous centuries. If it wasn't because of the oceans, we would already be toast. But the oceans are huge sinks and then any ecosystem that is trapping CO2. And then moving forward, technologies that may help us either trap CO2 before it gets to the atmosphere or extract it once it's there. So the famous carbon capture and storage and another technologies for direct capture of the gases from the atmosphere. So these are the sinks. So we need to balance what we emit with the capacity of those sinks. Yes, so this is the main challenge and that's why the Paris Agreement is valuable. The Paris Agreement is no silver bullet. The Paris Agreement is not telling you, do one, two, three, four, five and you're solved the issue. No, no, no, of course the Paris Agreement doesn't have that clarity, but the Paris Agreement one indicates very clearly that all governments in the world, particularly now that we have this political turn in the US, all governments in the world agree that we need to reach that target. That's where we need to go. So that gives a very clear signal to everyone in particular to the business sector what direction they should be going. If there was no Paris Agreement, there would be an excuse for many who were reluctant to act on climate change to continue doing that. But the Paris Agreement at least says there is an intention to get there. That's the direction that everyone has to align with. And then it also tells you we need to work together, right? We need to connect all the different players to be able to get there. So that's the value of the Paris Agreement. It's a statement of a clear statement of intention. And then companies and organizations of all types have to align with it. This is the main challenge right now. Demonstrating that you're aligning with the Paris Agreement and advocating for it to be implemented, right? For its goals to be achieved. What are we doing from our side? And this is the last point before handing over to Jim. From our side, of course, other than supporting the intergovernmental negotiations and having this little group of people that I mentioned, there are several things that we are trying to do. One, try to develop some examples of practical action that can be taken at sector level. So a whole sector addressing their mitigation target together. And for that, we're working with sports and with fashion industries. I can go into details why those two, but we're working with those two as an initial, as a starting point to try to develop these collaborative initiatives at sector level to support the Paris Agreement or to meet the Paris Agreement. Then there is another group that has developed the carbonization pathways also for whole sectors. And these pathways are indicators of what needs to happen in each sector for them to achieve net zero. Specific actions, of course, still need to be developed to be able to go through that pathway. But it sets some clarity around the bigger goals that each sector needs to try to achieve. And when I say sectors, in this case, we're talking about industry, about energy, about transport, about the oceans and others. And the other thing that we're doing is a lot of advocacy, right? Part of this conversation with you today. I mean, here I'm talking to, I'm preaching to the choir, as they say, but we also do a lot of engagement with other people, other professionals that are not so active yet in the climate sector and the climate topic. So those are the main focuses for our work. Secretariat is relatively a small organization, right? Around 370 people today. And for the amount of things that need to be done, of course, that's nothing. What needs to happen is to come from you. Of course, it's the rest of society that is going to actually do the stuff. So, I'm happy to be a medial. Thank you. Thank you. Great information. So appreciative of it. Thank you. And we'll come back to some of those points later, I'm sure. Perfect. Yes. Okay, Jim, would you please help us? Yes, thank you. And thanks for that, Miguel. What you've described there on corporate sustainability is definitely important. It's needed. It's urgent. It's got to be scaled. And of course, you're struggling against those market incentives, which are against such mainstream and scaling. For me, I see a big problem in the way the money supply comes from private banks and how investors in stock markets demand share value maximization strategies and how that puts such pressure on businesses to be short-term. Externalized all kinds of costs, including ones related to the environment. So, I had 20 years working in corporate sustainability. And so, it was fascinating for me, but also quite frustrating. But I recognize it's important to keep trying. But the work I do now is because there's another way of looking at our current situation. And I'm going to outline that briefly and insufficiently, just to show how, why some people have been trying a different approach, which I think is complementary, although some people disagree. They don't like what we're doing. So, to start out, I just want to go back to the IPCC analysis that you mentioned, Miguel, which is obviously the guidance to the UNFCCC. And their 2018 report on emissions pathways for a chance of staying under 1.5 degrees global heating and averting all the catastrophic changes from those potential warming feedbacks that you mentioned. Yeah, it's, that report was quite shocking. It explained that we had to cut the emissions immediately around 5% a year for the next 30 years to get to net zero. And of course, because we haven't been doing that since that report came out, that's gone up now as a percentage cut per year. And of course, in order to have that projection, the IPCC needed to imagine that the technologies that Miguel mentioned, the negative emissions technologies which don't yet exist at scale will exist at scale rapidly to strip out about 250 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. And altogether that gives us only a 50-50 chance of staying under 1.5 degrees. So if we took that technological wish out of the equation, I just wanna show you what these pathways look like. So I do share screen. There we go. So now you should be seeing this graph because of simplified emissions pathways. So the blue line there is what IPCC would be proposing we do if we don't have those technologies to strip out carbon from the atmosphere in order to have that 50-50 chance of staying under, well, staying under dangerous warming threshold. So because it's a 50-50 chance, that means it's also a 50-50 chance of it not happening and us failing. And you can step away from climate science and these hypotheticals, but that graph is pretty intense in terms of what it's suggesting we'd be needing. We can step away and we can think, well, yeah, okay, it might not happen. And so what should we do if it doesn't happen? Should we have that conversation? Does that feel meaningful to us right now? Does it feel somehow avoidant not to have that conversation now? What do we need to consider preparing for? And then the other thing is, if you, I'll just show you this graph from our climateologist that shows that despite all the amazing efforts of people who know about this stuff at the intergovernmental level, if you map carbon emissions from fossil fuels and land use change from people, mainly modern humans, then in terms of the biggest contribution modern Western humans still, you see it's like an exponential growth curve. It's as if we were an unintelligent species just in a petri dish polluting ourselves into non-existence. That's kind of like the way you see these curves in biology classes. So it's basically, we haven't done it over decades, so it's quite possible we won't. So again, another reason to think about what to do about it. And of course, even if we suddenly did muster the political will and managed to redesign economic systems and incentives, and you've got to think about what going down that blue line would mean in a world where billions of us depend on fossil-fueled agriculture for our daily calorific needs. And so I haven't seen very compelling analyses of how we actually go down that blue line without effectively something which would be a massive disruption to people's way of life, the total upheaval and therefore obviously leading to backlash, unrest and so forth. So we've got to think about how it's probably quite unlikely that we can sustain that trajectory. And so I'm not saying we don't try, definitely we try, but it doesn't look likely. And so the work I've been doing, I'll just stop sharing screen. Stop sharing, there we go. The work I've been doing is to say, well, let's have a conversation about preparing for if we fail at this. So what does it mean we prepare for? Well, first, suffering is already happening because of the events made more frequent and extreme because of climate change affecting communities that have been made less resilient because of the pressures of climate change. So it's increasing hardship, water shortages, hunger, disease, worse than natural disasters, migration, conflict. A year ago, the Red Cross reported that already two million more people each week need humanitarian aid because of the climate crisis. The second thing we need to prepare for is widespread suffering is going to include you and me and those dear to us. So the UN Secretary General said last year that climate disruption is happening now and it's happening to all of us. It's just worse in some places and it's disrupting lives in some places more than us. And that's where it shocks people, the people like us who meet in physical or online spaces and have conversations about being better at our jobs as professionals within the existing economic, political and cultural systems and existing institutional frameworks. But yeah, it's, there's evidence that we are certainly not going to escape this in our own lives now. So one study just from last year shows a multi-bread basket failure in maize and corn is likely within three years of us hitting 1.5 degrees C global ambient warming. And so that is a maize accounts for about 20% of all human calories and we rely on a few major exporters for the international market of that. So a multi-bread basket failure is where a few of the main exporters are hit with massive disruptions. That would mean some studies still outliers science but some studies are saying it's quite likely now as a paper last year said it can happen by 2025. This is 1.5 degrees. And although it's, although the consensus is 1.1 already, if we just look at the last 12 months we, the last one has been about 1.3 degrees above the pre-industrial norm. And of course that can just be a fluctuation. It's not confirmed as the temperature that we're at until you get a period of time, but it shows you we're getting quite close to a situation which some of the security models are saying then put our own situation, our own lives in some worrying context. So deep adaptation is about preparation. It's an addenda, a framework and now a community for people who anticipate societal collapse in their lifetimes, but want to stay engaged and be useful rather than return to avoidance. And there are many ways of returning to avoidance. Our whole culture is avoidant, being busy, being intellectual is part of avoidance. I know that's what I've been doing. So I wrote a paper about this predicament in July, 2018. It went viral, downloaded over a million times and on the back of that I launched the deep adaptation forum in April, 2019. It's got a small team of staff, over a hundred volunteers supporting about 15,000 participants free of charge worldwide on many kinds of initiatives created by the volunteers to help people process their very understandably difficult emotions about this with a desire to find ways of living kindly, wisely, creatively, accountably even in a time of increasing turbulence. So it's not framed by the idea that we're gonna get out of this. It's not framed by the idea that we will pull through. It's saying we don't know how bad it's gonna get but we wanna be present to it and bring our full selves to this situation rather than be avoidant. So it's been an emotionally tough and uplifting journey that I've been on for over two years now. And as I thought about what to share with you I thought actually I've been doing a bit of an auto ethnographic thing over the last two years keeping notes on my aha moments or and so that's just the auto ethnography as a fancy way of saying I'm gonna share you what I think I've learned through my practice. And of course sharing it in this way is part of that process of ongoing reflection. But before that I wanna mention the experience of one man who's called Michael Shaw. Never heard of him before. It's like so many people just reach out out of the blue. He sold his house after reading my paper to decide to make a film. And he's made the film now and it's about helping him. It was to help himself and help other people feel into this predicament to try and find ways of being compassionate and kind and curious and creative in this context. And there are many stories like that of how people are now responding in a very different way. A way that is sort of hidden away from normal conversations about management, leadership, professionalism, hidden away from normal conversations about what is like an appropriate way of engaging with this problem. These are people who are completely changing their lives. And there are other people like that you may have heard of the campaign group Extinction Rebellion. So Andrew Methurst read my paper and then quit his job in the city and then became finance director for them. Askeena Rathore read the paper, quit her job to become one of the main coordinators of XR and the research that we've done shows that 48% of the surveyed participants in the deep adaptation forum report that because of becoming aware of collapse and engaging in it through the deep adaptation framework, 48% are now acting in as they consider acting with acts of leadership in ways they hadn't before. So I wanna tell you what I think I've learned is 10 things what I would call 10 insights on leading in a time of dying. I choose that title for my comments today because Michael Shaw's film is living in a time of dying. So the first big thing is I'd call it creative energy after ending cognitive dissonance. So after stopping one's invasion of difficult information, new motivation and energy can be found. Definitely I've discovered that many people have. I think it's because of the, how tiring it is to have cognitive dissonance, getting on with your life and work while maintaining all those inner evasions and evasions, it becomes debilitating over time. So ending the compromise with all the organizations and cultures, ideas, epistemologies, all that, that you no longer admire or respect you actually see as part of the problem. Ending your compromise, your submission to that can unleash creativity, courage, compassion. So that's the first one. Releasing our imaginations from deep stories. So there are deep stories in our culture we don't recognize such as story of self and world like progress. And if we can release our moral imagination from the assumption that progress is essential, it's gonna happen, it's good, then we can actually become more present to what the situation is. We can be engaged without worrying about future suffering or setback. We do it because it feels right and true to us. People who are attached to the idea that they do what they do because it's definitely going to add to society progressing. Well, then they're telling themselves porkies in this situation. And I think it's limiting of our imaginations. Third one, vulnerability is definitely a fuel because of the amount of trust it creates. So being vulnerable about our difficult emotions and about the situation of this increasing climate chaos is big for us in deep adaptation field. And it appears to be a catalyst for incredible connection and trust even amongst complete strangers in different cultures who've only ever met online. They have therefore getting this fuel for voluntary creativity and productivity, creating all kinds of new ideas and initiatives. The fourth one is courage coming about from a death of our identity. So the death of the old sense of ourself. And that's a basis for many people to take bold and novel action in service of their sense of truth and love. And that can mean setting your house or quitting your job, joining XR, making movies, whatever. Also, quite a few people have decided to go on hunger strike because they're really wanting to bring attention that this is an existential matter. They prioritized it in their lives. They want to help people realize that this effect threatens everything and challenges us to think about who are we in this crisis? The fifth one, engagement by prioritizing questions over answers. So I deliberately made deep adaptation an open agenda making clear they're no easy answers and therefore we're gonna invite a whole of each of us to show up and everyone to participate in generative dialogue co-creation. And that's really helped voluntary initiative to take shape. Yeah, and for me that indicates that hosting debate is in that way with that idea that there's no one gonna come with the answers is a really, really interesting attribute for leadership in the face of climate disruption. Sixth, a clear container for connection. So you gotta provide some containers, some tips, guidance, rules for why and how we're showing up together. That's been key. And our intention is to embody and enable loving responses to our predicament and keep learning about what that means and how to do that. And the mode involves a form of dialogue that's different to what happens in most often in society. We use something called deep relating to them for emphasis on a vulnerable sharing of feelings or curiosity about them and about topics and about each other. I've got three more and so I'll just go slightly over my time and then back to you, Janice. Paradoxes of a management mindset. So as initiator of this concept and community, I believed in participative approaches and help design systems for that but I was still constantly scanning everything, troubleshooting, trying to influence agendas and that was both in service of participation and those approaches but also was affected by my desire to influence. And so I decided that after 18 months it would be best I just quit. So I left the management. I have, I'm now a resource and I'm a non-executive on a board, advisory board but I'm no longer involved in day to day. And I'm really fascinated over the last six weeks to see how that's leading to really interesting new conversations and a sense that people can create. So that's fascinating. It's one thing for someone to say it and then actually for it to happen. Maybe actually the leader is a problem in that way. Eight, limitations arise from privilege. So no matter how much I thought about approaching this in a way which didn't replicate patriarchy, I've realized I did. I'm socialized by my culture and so the way I act or don't act comes from that, it's inescapable. So I made gender issues a priority and that's reflected in the board and the team but I didn't make anti-racism diversity, decolonization a priority. And so we are quite a white middle-class community and fortunately people are stepping up to change that and work on it and take it really seriously. And so one of the first trainings we're rolling out within the forum is on anti-racism. If I hold my hands up to that, I just knew there was an issue there and I didn't prioritize it. The reason I didn't prioritize it is because of who I am in terms of the culture I come from. So that's a really interesting lesson for me. Finally, our two ones, organizations seem to be bogs. Just within a year, my whole world became what deep adaptation forum was rather than what the world in the face of collapse with collapse on the horizon might want or need. So that was fascinating. Stepping away, I'm having more perspective having as incredible. And I realized how I used to when I joined an organization thought everyone's just looking at the world from the organization's window. I did that even just after a year and a half. It's amazing. So that the implication I think is we need more fluctuation of people's involvements in organizations. And the final one, I discovered the urgency drives hypocrisy. So living theorists, there's a type of first-person inquiry or to ethnography. They encourage us to be clear on our values and how our actions may or may not be upholding or embodying those values. So for nearly 20 years, I told myself that my values, core values were love, courage and inquiry. And so I looked at that and I, in retrospect, I realized that the demands I've been putting on myself to analyze issues, act rapidly, get funding, hire people, all that stuff, meant that I was working at a pace where I was deprioritizing loving, brave and curious conversations with colleagues, volunteers and even critics. So that's the 10th lesson for me for leading in a time of dying. It's to take time away from the rush careful with those stories of, you know, being needed, reconnect with espoused values and then think about what people have said about. Things that said that maybe felt made me feel awkward. Situations where I felt awkward or frustrated and then check into that and try and learn how I can be more coherent in the future. And that's something I'm reflecting on right now and what I've been reflecting on today as part of preparing for this session. I've rushed through that. I might sound quite lively, but I recognize it's pretty, pretty tough stuff to hear. So if you go to jenbendell.com, I've published already about an hour ago the notes on this and I linked to some, I linked to the film I mentioned and I linked to some emotional support that you can get on this. Thank you. Thank you very much and we'll heal from you again, of course. So we're not going anywhere yet. So this is a chance for you too, Miguel and Jim, to kind of exchange ideas with us listening on. So we're going to ask Miguel to go first and kind of maybe talk about where there might be some overlap, where there might be some complementarity to it. As you mentioned earlier, Jim, and move out from there. So Miguel, why don't you take, I'm going to cut the time a bit because we've gone over in our presentation. So just take two or three minutes at the most and say something about that and then it'll be Jim's turn to do the same. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Very, very interesting. I think that both the focusing on the mitigation side reduce animations from the intergovernmental level down to organization and individual. And the work that you have been doing on this deep adaptation are complementary. We will definitely need to face impacts of climate change. We're already facing them. All over the world, people are already suffering because of the impacts of climate change and this is only going to become, I don't want to use the word worst or worse but that's the right word. Yes, it's going to become more difficult. And so the approach that Jim presented on helping individuals deal with the difficult situations they are going to be living is definitely very important. It's of course, beyond the level that we usually deal with in the climate change secretariat or in the UN directly. In the end, all of the work that we do in the UN at least I'd like to believe is about avoiding suffering and supporting people in living a better life. But we usually don't work at that level, right? Directly with the individuals. We work more from the top down approach. So both are definitely very important. The deep adaptation that Jim presented is deeply personal, right? It's something that, yes, that is deeply personal. So speaking from a personal point of view, I completely agree and I appreciate a lot that kind of work. Probably the people who are making these films or changing their jobs, et cetera, are the ones that are thinking further ahead and for different circumstances available, sorry, not able to do this right now. Maybe not everybody can, but it's people that have the opportunity and are taking the chance to do it. This is similar to or reminds me a little bit of Elizabeth Kugler Ross, the circle, the five steps towards addressing pain or suffering. And definitely it will be part of the experience or the knowledge that we will need to go through the experience that is coming. And actually it's not necessarily that it's coming, right? For some of them it's already there. And it may be because of climate change or it may be for different reasons, war or other struggles that people are facing, poverty. They also need, or they will also benefit from something that Jim presented, helping them process that. While at the same time, we work to address the causes in the first place, right? So I see them as highly complementary. So if we don't work on mitigation, it doesn't matter how much adaptation we do, we're done. So while we have the opportunity, we have to try to reduce emissions as much as we can, as soon as we can, while at the same time working on already facing the consequences that we're going to be living on or that we are living already. So yeah, I see them as highly complementary. And at what Jim presented, we'll become more and more relevant as more and more people start facing this situation because of climate change. Yeah, over to you. Yeah, thank you for that very present, open-minded, open-hearted response to what I shared, Miguel. Yeah, climate affects everything. We have to find ways of trying to cut emissions, draw down carbon without any fairy-tale stories anymore that this is gonna mean that we avoid disruption because people are suffering already and it's increasing. And it's going to increase. And so somehow mainstream political narratives need to change. Like no politician seems to want to say that how much of a mess we're in and what's coming and how we need to really find it in ourselves to care for each other in ways that, in ways maybe we've never done before as a species. So yeah, it's massive. It's an existential thing. And I do feel a bit disappointed in how a lot of climatologists have not really gone there. They've basically stayed technical on the one hand and on the other hand, they've sort of stayed hopeful. They felt they needed to say we must act or else rather than say we must act and we've got a lot of problems that are gonna challenge us and our humanity. Not, and that maybe it's to do with the culture of natural science and natural scientists, I don't know, but I'd rather, I'd like them to see. I'd like to see a few more climatologists crying and saying let's all try and love each other through this mess and cut carbon and draw down carbon. Yeah, thanks. Great, thank you both so much. And we do have a question in the chat. So I'm gonna go there. We also have some other questions that I've asked the presenters to prepare but we'll come back to those. So let's respond to what's in the chat. Joanna asks if you would each speak to what local leaders can do to make a meaningful difference in this issue from your individual frameworks. And she lives in a small town at an estuary in North America, Indian River Lagoon. There are local issues with runoff, water, local companies like aircraft manufacturers, education and civil society organizations where can the individual leverage their time for local change? Which of you would like to go ahead? You want to go first, Jim? Okay, briefly, I think local government is where you can try and make a difference immediately. We need to try and find ways of being okay, being okay, getting the basics of what we need. But also in terms of culture and meaning and pleasure, we need to relocalize all of that. We can't continue to expect high carbon footprint lifestyles where we're driving everywhere, flying everywhere, always online, where all our food is coming into the supermarket from all over the planet. Yeah, we need to look at ways of relocalizing and so engaging locally will be useful. Even if it's just like an insurance policy for if there is disruption to the international supply chains and complex networks of late capitalism. Part of that I think is also looking at trying to create your local means of exchange. And so I've published a paper on local currencies and as one way of doing something on that, it would be great if local governments could lead on that generally it's just, it's not, it's like a group of businesses or a group of individuals to get together and create their own local currency. And it goes nowhere for local government with their tax collection powers and connections with businesses and could get involved. So I'll put a link in there in the minute to that paper if you're interested. Local leaders also very useful in, that's a lot of, although deep adaptation forum is non-local mainly because of the pandemic that hit and the kind of work we do, it wasn't suited to immediate local action. We have 17 local groups, but they haven't really been working because of the pandemic. But I witnessed all the mutual aid that's happened where people getting together to make sure that the elderly are supported because in self-isolation and so forth. I think that's really interesting. And that kind of can come on to that later as well. Thanks, Janice. Miguel, did you want to respond at all? No, just to add that from our side, local governments, local authorities are usually where you see, if I may say, some of the highest commitment to climate action because they are the ones closest to their people. So when you see sometimes at the national level, there might still be some doubts in which way to go. At local level, you rarely see that. They see that people are already suffering. They see how they're getting, they have to respond to the people face to face. So they are much more likely to make more ambitious commitments at the national level. So, yeah, providing support to those leaders, local leaders that are willing to do what is needed is very, very important. And I realized that this conversation became very personal, right? Thanks to Jim's intervention. And again, my initial intervention, my initial thoughts that I shared with you is from the UN, UNFCC point of view, right? If you talk to me as an individual, there is probably, there is a different side to the story. I agree a lot, for example, with local currencies, which is an idea that has been in the fringe for a long time, I think, and many people feel not very, they don't really trust it, but I am also a fan of those exercises. And if you see, I live in Germany right now, and after the war, this is after World War I, after World War I, city authorities established local currencies, right? They called it not guilt, right? The emergency money, because the national, well, at that time, Germany was a newly born country, et cetera, but at national level, the economy was destroyed, the authority was lacking. So each community came up with their own, even coins and notes and everything that they would use locally. So it shows that it is possible to do this, it's a matter of choice again. So I like those approaches and others, even when you don't hear about talking, you don't hear about them in the talks, at the intergovernmental level, right? But I feel that somehow, yes, this connection between the very local and very personal aspects and the global ones need to happen. And climate change, if it has something positive, is that, that it is showing that you need to integrate all society. If we have not been mature enough so far to do it because of good reasons, now climate change is forcing us to finally realize we are all in this together. So, yeah. Great, thank you. And this is the next question and it leads right into one that we had already pre-planned in some ways. In your view, how does the pandemic affect the ongoing work on mitigation and deep adaptation? So I'd rather Miguel answer that first, if that's okay. Thank you. Yes, so focusing on the mitigation side, I am happy to say that we don't see a big impact of the pandemic in the efforts to decarbonize, right? In the efforts to mitigate. You see that in spite of the challenges, national governments and local authorities and companies and civil society in general, they are still pushing for climate action. At some other time in history, I mean in history, meaning a few years back, I would have been very surprised to see that, right? Because you have a problem like this, everybody thinks, oh, the economy, the economy, let's say the economy, what like some people did still, but not the majority. Not the majority said the economy is first. They said, yes, we have to protect the economy, we have to protect jobs, et cetera, but we also have to keep pushing for climate action. So it was, I think the pandemic has not made a big dent. Now, of course, on the short term, it has helped by reducing emissions, right? We have much less travel, we have reduced economic activity. So emissions have also gone down, but this is just a temporary effect. If we don't change again, our systems and the way we live, as soon as the pandemic is gone, emissions are going to go back to normal, so to speak. But in the meantime, we don't see a dent in the efforts to reduce, and there is a temporary reduction effect. Yeah, just to come in on what you've just said there, we have seen the way governments took on a lot of debt after the financial crisis, leading to a decade of austerity, and that then also causing some restrictions in terms of what people could do. We'll have to see what happens. Is there gonna be a return to a narrative of austerity in many countries from sometime next year, saying, well, we had to do this to help everyone out, and now we've just got to privatize and slash costs and deregulate and cut funds to various different programs, including environmental and climate ones. We'll have to see, but you're right. I've been seeing some major commitments to Go Green, although we've also seen the bailing out of airlines and fossil fuel sector in so many countries and also efforts to pump up consumption again, and in many countries emissions have already rebounded. So what are the estimates that 2020 as a whole might be, is it 3% to 4% emissions down? Maybe it's difficult, but it's, yeah. And as you say, it's not a reduction because of a transition to a different fuel source and suddenly managing our lands better and restoring soils and planting trees. It's not that, so it's not gonna be sustained. So I don't see much positivity out of that. And also a big thing to note is that environmental, it's good that the UN, UNEP and others now have made it clear that environmental degradation and climate change makes zoonotic diseases coming from animals that infect humans more likely. The bad news is therefore climate change and environmental degradation means that we're more likely to see the next coronavirus. Like this is an aspect of the suffering that climate change contributes to. So what do I think we learn from the pandemic? Well, obviously when countries are stressed, when people are stressed, we see the best and the worst. And so a lot of people talk about human nature and as if like me, because I think we're not gonna go down that blue line, we're not gonna succeed, the 50-50, we're actually, I don't think we are gonna succeed. And it doesn't mean I have a bad view of human nature. I believe that everything good and everything bad is possible in fact, in all of us, depending on circumstances. And so we just have to try and feed the good sides of ourselves and each other. And there are well-known ways of helping do that. Spiritual practices, meditation, all kinds of things. So that's got to be part of the future climate agenda. However, the disappointing thing is I've seen a lot of people in their anxiety want to believe in a story. And it's either a story of just conformity, I'll believe whatever the mainstream media in the government says and just everything else is just conspiracy. Or you've got a lot of people who just want to get out of this sense of fear and get angry at someone. And then they've got a YouTuber telling you that Bill Gates caused it all, hate him. He's the bad man. And then you can go the full WACCO Q and on conspiracy. And so many people I know. Ah, so, and where's this coming from? It's a desire to get out of that fear and go somewhere else. And you can go the real, just follow the government and mainstream media line. Don't be curious. Or follow these WACCO contrarian conspiracy theories and neither pull away empowers you to think about like what's wrong systemically. You know, are we worried about big farm suitable companies having too much influence over government policy and the medical profession? Yes. How do we ensure safe responses and insane policy responses in that context? Like you kind of that sense, that's that sensible space of curiosity and critical thinking is all like crushed by people just wanting to follow the government and mainstream line or go completely WACCO and Bill Gates wants to eat my children type stories. So I'm a bit worried, right? And so that's why in deep adaptation forum, we're very focused on helping people come with their fear and their confusion, talk about it, normalize it, bond over it and then don't go one way or the other. Just try and stay curious. Right, right. And two thoughts from Ariel and I think they're really similar. She's asking particularly about how can we maybe propel youth leaders organizing for social justice and provide some impacts and approaches for them in thinking about these really critical issues. And she's also concerned about the environmental justice movement as a way to further racial justice work. So kind of combining those movements in some ways. Very quickly, Ariel, you've put in a few conversations here. So justice movements, racial justice, yeah, and also militarization and youth and okay. Let me just clarify that a bit, Janice. What I was saying is you were talking about work that you were doing like trying to enhance in terms of, you said issues. First, you were folk you noticed about how the patriarchy was affecting things and then you wanted to change that. And then you felt like the work you wanted to do in terms of racial justice. So there's some different work that's already happening but sometimes those leaders don't necessarily get their voices amplified enough. And so I thought there might be some learning or lessons and support that could be given to youth leaders that might have some creative insights about things. Also environmental justice movements, people who are already working in their communities on this but we might not all be connected with each other. Yeah. I like where you're coming from because a lot of people working on climate want to keep it technical and actually believe that we might get further if we keep it apolitical. Apolitical in terms of traditional notions of left and right. And yet, if we didn't have systematic ways of othering nature and people and deprioritizing their worlds, their reality, their needs, their influence. We couldn't have had colonialism. We couldn't have had rapacious global capitalism. We wouldn't have ended up quite in this mess at least not so fast. So climate chaos, biodiversity loss is the product of an oppressive system and the way that that oppressive system gets maintained is in each and every one of us with our unconscious bias, including me and my blind spots. So for me, it's all connected as Miguel said earlier. What he's liked about this conversation is going from like the macro, the climate, the big, oh, emissions to the hyper personal interrelational. It is all very connected and climate change is demanding. It's like a really severe mirror for us to look at ourselves and how we have participated in a culture that's ultimately destructive of life. So philosophically I'm with you. Practically, what does it mean? People like me either need to make this anti-oppression work in all ways, personal, but also decisions about who to work with, what to talk about. We need to prioritize it, or we just need to step back and go away. So I've been doing a bit of that. I've been learning, I stepped back, but also I'm interested in how to learn more from BIPOC and I'm learning from more from an indigenous group of activists and leaders and scholars. We're all a bit white here on this call. I don't know how you self-identified Takumi and I don't know who else is, who's not, but yeah, we do have this issue still in climate conversations. And it's had this issue for a long time. Thanks. Miguel, did you want to respond to that one? That one is a difficult one to respond to after GEM. What do I mean from our side? Again, our main interlocutors are national governments, right? So this is the way the United Nations system has been set up. They are our bosses and our main partners in work. But as I said, they themselves have asked us to work more with everybody else. And that includes youth. And so there is a whole process to allow the participation of observers from youth, from the youth community. In the process, there is a youth COP before the official UNFCC COP every year. And they have opportunities also to make statements at the conferences. And in the last years, you have had more prominent participation, right? Thanks to GEM. You have had more prominent participation, right? Thanks to the push that they themselves have made. You have had several of the leaders speaking at the conferences, at the planners of the climate change conferences. So governments and the intergovernmental process has realized that they have an important voice that they have to include it. But it's still at the level of observers, right? They are allowed to come to speak, to watch, but they are not making decisions. So I want to try to say this from our side. We have tried to open more the doors for youth and for other groups to come and participate and communicate their opinions to decision makers in the governments. But the need to keep pushing from below, bottom up, remains, right? The UN system is probably not the, how do you say, the right channel to bring all of the concerns from citizens and from youth directly to the decision-making process. There has to be parallel processes to do that, which are complementary, right? From our side, we tried to do what we can to support national governments, but it is very important that citizens also keep pushing from their side their own governments. So I'm not trying to defer the question. I'm just trying to convey that from the UN side, we have our mandates, our way of working, and that has to be supported a lot by citizens through other channels. One thing I quite like, what one bit of the UN is doing on this is the ILO, and they have been promoting the idea that environmental health and safety obligations of corporations and managers should now include, increasingly, climate safety, effectively, because climate is a threat to the well-being of their staff. So that's really interesting to see, and that inspired me to think about how the trade union movement could do more with the youth activists, because obviously we hear about youth strikers and then we hear about adult solidarity with that, but actually adults aren't going out on strike and there are many restrictions on what is a legal form of industrial action. So it has to be looked at carefully, so I did a bit of that, and I've put the link in the chat for how the trade union movement could actually really show up in solidarity with the youth climate activists. Great. Well, thank you all, all of you. All of you really contributed great questions and to Jim and Miguel. I greatly appreciate this. I teach in the field of sustainable enterprise and spend a lot of my mental ability in this field, and it's great to really think more about some of these questions. I'm particularly interested in the local leadership for sustainability. So how do we, not just engage with local leadership, but how do we help them, again, interconnect at all these different levels, right? I think we have to deal at the very personal level. I think we have to deal at the institutional level, but I think by focusing on the local, we can again connect people in such a way that they are heard, right? And I think that's so important in the environmental movement, again, as we just talked about in terms of diversity, there's not much, there's not enough. And so how we engage with the real problems that our communities are encountering at that local level is critical to getting support for the broader issues that we are so aware of and that are really driving us. So I've learned so much from our conversation and from both of you, and I appreciate it so much. So we're giving you a round of applause. Thank you all. And if you guys could stick around a couple of minutes, there may be other questions from people who want to talk to you for a few minutes. Thank you.