 Good morning everybody. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Selim O'Haklokab. I am the Director of the International Center for Climate Change Development in Tata, the University of Tama. I'm also a Senior Fellow of IIE, the International Institute for Environmental Development, for all of our organizations of this event, and I started this event many, many years ago. I think it's the 16th DNC that is here right now. I started it as a one-day adaptation day event many years ago. It's grown since then, so it's a pleasure and a privilege to be here. So what we're going to do in the next long we have is to give you a little bit of a flavor of what's happening at the conference parties and the negotiations. I'm also a negotiator, but we're observers of the process, and I live by Donna and Sheila to share their views of what's happening. But before I do that, I want to just give you an update on where we are. And this is going to be my colleague at Tata, who many of you will know, who provides support to these developmentaries through negotiators as of last night. So as of last night, we have some progress. We now have the COP presidency taking over. You know that so far, we've been having subsidiary bodies meeting the Sub-State and the SPI. Those are now over, and the COP presidency starts, and so we are now in the official COP as of now. One of the accomplishments, if one might call it that, is that the APA has been completed. How many people know what APA stands for? Can I see? That's not bad. You see, I talk of it on the Paris Agreement, which is now over. It's completed and started. We now have the Paris Agreement, and we will move into the implementation of the Paris Agreement. Ministers have started their writing, and we'll start gaming over the negotiation process. From tomorrow onwards, there are four high-level sessions being organized over the course of a week. There are a few issues that were not resolved that are never resolved over the course of a week. We always look at the political needs. Finance is always one of them. This year, we're also damaging one of these issues which we develop over the countries I've been raising, and then differentiation between finance one and finance one is always an issue. A couple of additional items that are related to COP24 that were on the agenda for this session here. One was how to take on board the messages that came out of the Ta-La-Noa dialogue that featured the President of COP23 initiated last year in March. And half the team since then, I've been a participant in a number of Ta-La-Noa dialogues. It's a brilliant means of engaging the party into giving inputs into the COP. But we're not sure how those inputs are going to be taken on board in the COP. There's a difference of opinion on whether they should be noted or simply ignored, and we should see what happens with the ministers. And the final point I want to share for those of you who are following this is the adoption of the recognition of the IPCC Special Report on COP25. As you all know, we have this little Deborah here, a presentation on that. So the issue, and this is a very good illustration of how the language, text language of the negotiations is so peculiar. So does anybody know what the issue is? The issue is one word. One group of countries want to notice the IPCC report. Another group of countries want to welcome the IPCC report. Most of us, it doesn't make any difference. But I can tell you, it makes a huge difference. This is an extremely politically sensitive issue. The group of countries that don't want to welcome Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia, the group of countries that want to welcome, because we are the ones, the top of the ones who ask the IPCC to produce the report, and to welcome its result are all the other countries, particularly the most vulnerable countries, who are sitting with the word welcome. And they're not going to accept changing the word welcome to just simply noting it. To see what happens is actually one of the ministers, they've got an argument about it, and they want to resolve it, and the chair of the Sunset is taking the post note of the minister. So it's an illustration of how for outsiders, but not inside the negotiations, the arguments can seem very arcane. And people understand why people are arguing about what seems like a very simple issue. It is, every word, sometimes even a comma, can make a big difference. I know a couple of people in the audience are negotiators, and I've come to you in a few minutes to ask for your opinions and views to share with the rest of the audience. But basically what we are trying to do here in this session is to enable people who are not negotiators to find the best way to follow negotiations most effectively. And I'll give you a little bit of my advice, and then I'll pass it on to Donna, who's been doing this for some time to share his views, and then we hear from Shayla, who's actually doing things out of the ground in terms of practice. And the idea of the government plan today is to link practice with global discussions, each of us being in different ways. So for those of us who are not negotiators, and we've come into a talk for the first time, our way of following it is to pick the part of the talk about the tax agreement, in this case, that you are interested in. If you're interested in adaptation, or if you're interested in communication, you choose the argument you have to pick, which one is of relevance to your work. And then attend those sessions, find out who the negotiators are for that, find out who the non-negotiating observable groups are. There are a number of observable groups. There's the rainbow group, there's the can group, there's the can-go group. There are many groups, women's group. Join one of those groups and associate yourself with the people who follow those issues, learn from them, and they can in turn help you understand. And then if you're really interested in continuing the relationship, you can do that during the year with your own country negotiators, who are negotiators in the talk. And if you take some time for you to get some level of knowledge and expertise in following the negotiation process, it's what you need to do immediately. But if you're interested enough to then you can continue the very fact that you're here at that week's talk 24 is an opportunity for you to do that. So I hope all of you will do it over the course of the next week. So I'm going to start talking now and go over to Donna, ask her to share her view and a bit of her experience on how she got into the process and how to follow it as well. And then she's going to share that process with Donna. Hello. Can you hear me? Good morning everyone. I am Donna from the Red Cross Red Cross Environment Centre. And I'm here to share with you what you've been doing and how you do things and how we actually see the strategic opportunities within the negotiation and how we get on the ground. So as part of the Red Cross Red Cross Environment Centre represents and works in close coordination with the Federation in engaging in the process. But for us, we don't engage only in the cause. It's a big engagement. And so it's a process that builds on as time goes on. I would like to focus on the four things that are in my story. One is the ambition for the Red Cross Environment Centre. The reason why we're here is because we already seem to be monitoring the impacts of the climate change and how it makes waterways more vulnerable. And I think the system of this strategy, there was a white career in the game about negotiation and the negotiation. I think this is really helpful. Not only because in case you're looking for the negotiators with other parties and they know exactly what their message is. So for the Red Cross to be able to really add value and continue the discussion, we are having a following closely to items, adaptation and cost advantage. Why? Because adaptation is really the closest intersection with the rest of the world. And also it has a range of points, where you want to assist the community's comprehensive discussion on that. So when we say engage, we're going to engage in the subsidiary bodies. So just like what you said, choose the topic in order to meet what. So we've been closely making up the bill for at least four or five years for the system. So in terms of that idea, really be consistent. Keep the ambition alive, but keep grounded and keep your messaging really concise and consistent. Second is always find various options. It's not just about there. There are a lot of options in terms of engaging, but also other options in what we continue to do. We continue to do things that make a difference to the nice community. Again, keep with your ambition and give options. And I think the end point here is that all of the dialogue you are able to watch in there. As well as the newly created platform for the local communities and indigenous people. That's IEP. This is a big and important opportunity for us, our working on the ground, to be heard and to be part of the process. Very strategic. I think I'm going to try again. What's not only at the local government. They are very in position where we work closely with the government. So what we hear at the local government, we connect in the international level. So I think finding these options and themes, our entry points are crucial. And also one more thing that is not really being maximized in the process are other platforms. Like the program. The photo point for the first step is here. And they are just talking about the program. And these are actually really on the ground. The process is just an item to get examples. And I don't know what this is happening. But there is a strategy as we know all of them. We speak different languages. And they speak a really different set. And we say, okay, that's not that strategy. And there's an important use in the Philippines in disaster use production. You make sure it's part of your muscle memory. So be consistent in your strategy. That's one of the things I think is strategy. We are in this together. We are in this together. We are in this together. We are in this together. We are in this together. We are in this together. And as you noted, in this WaveCw様 an investment, a model of communication stopped in the Philippines, but in using micro, people can start changing any kind of culture. and does a lot of representation on the high level at global events like this on their behalf. So I'd like to get my experience on how to do this most effectively. I'd like to just thank the entire community of champions who are here today for being so supportive for my little, I was dragged screaming and yelling into the last part. I was traumatized because I was invited to speak at an event where many, very high powered financial people just came in, said their speech and left and everybody had to be before me and another community leader I had to speak. And he says to me so much that somebody like me who never cries, I cry in furious anger to think of what would have happened to me, what would have happened to one of my community leaders if they were there. It was the most humiliating and disgusting experience but it made me realize that the entire community of people that I remember and face that every single day because exclusionary behavior has become a way of life in cities in general and many of us do it unconsciously without understanding the choices we made to that. So I picked it up and said that they would have said and we do it in our day to day life because one of the most important aspects of our movement in Sahaja Kirti, Sahaja Kirti who's an anthropologist who stands social movement says they wouldn't come up with the law as a law for you because if the law works for you, you'll be doing a project but when the law doesn't work for you when what you think is dissension and necessary for survival is not acknowledged then you mean an aggregation of really large numbers of people who shout and scream to say that your system doesn't belong to us. So our involvement as social movement is recent, we're just 20 years old but it's very special because it's a movement where 80% are women which is a very non-ethical as we say we don't have patients so we can't be central to this process and we grapple with our commitment to stay deeply local and to explore ways by which we engage the state level, the traditional levels the national levels of the world and for us, coming into the climate change process we feel very comfortable with what we will need to do to address these different levels but we see that the very complexity of being excluded in the habitat and in our space are going deep barriers in the climate change discourse. So when I got invited to be on this commission I thought it was so symbolic a social movement, a grassroots activist it's so politically correct to put on this committee. Maybe it's no one ever doing it. No, it's not. And so my presence in this event to seek the answers, you're a very important and old friend who's am, I'm going to reach out to but I want to do that with everybody because what I realize is that the useless value of lots of noise is very important before you get invited to the dialogue, like the talent order. And it's really sad that I am leaving the day after and I got invited to be on that dialogue and I'm not here and I can't even communicate. But for me that's a very important thing. Annotation of large numbers, like you said, stay persistent, be doggy, once you choose something, you don't let it close, stay with it and make friends with your worst enemies. I want to add that. When I started my work as an activist and all our work starts with fighting elections and I think he said it before, the players and the principle course. And as a middle class, educated person, I had lots of really smart, you know, hearty things to say, that you say to people of your own class, they're not really good. Not really good at that. They humbled me with a very interesting section. When you live in a big, you don't attack them. And so what we have started doing is these women have actually developed amazing ways to make friends with the people who conduct elections, with people who aren't in the police, with municipal administrators. And today, engage municipalities and provincial governments and national governments to the extent that those people have the capacity and the political acumen to see how much this engagement works for them. We still have, I still have many housing ministers and urban development ministers who sort of quickly come around and walk away when they see me, because they know I go after them and they ask me. So those are the techniques. And when I look at climate change, I see several real big challenges. And the first challenge is that the urban work I'm not seeing by national governments as worthy of attention. Rural work are the good work. The urban work are the good work. They deserve the country's support. They deserve the international attention. Universities, I don't know how many of you have done your PhDs on rural processes. The urban work is not about the poor. So it starts with that. And one of the biggest crisis that does is you don't have identity. And so when you work in urban areas, you don't do that. And when there is a disaster, even international aid cannot reach them because they do not have the documentation to get here restitution. So when you're doing this kind of work, my key to do when, whether you're a negotiator or you're an institutional arrangement or something, that you think of what you do. The way we deal with it is that when we have national crisis, we have a program called New York City in which we produce our own identification for communities that have no identity. And no form of documentation. And so our group goes there, in the Philippines, for instance, when there are a lot of slides and people's houses go there. These guys go there and they go and they draw the map, they draw where the houses were, and they document the people. And they take it to the city authorities. I say, these are the people. We can read every part of them, we are testimonials. So we want to look at ways by rituals like this become part of the systems that we have. The other very important thing is that urban poor people in their way of coping with resilience, street, heat, and gold, and rain, run as part of their ongoing existence. And they are celebrated as resilience. I get very annoyed. You know, oh, these are strong survival instincts. I remember David Sathapwet came seven, eight years ago. And a bunch of people in Norissa just told him, oh, it's 46 degrees and we lost four people after the storm. This is climate. No, it happens anywhere. So these kind of things, we have to educate ourselves to understand that though they're not natural, they don't have sense, and there has to be something. And we're looking at ways by which habitat, transformation can reduce the heat, and things like that. The other thing which we don't understand is all these differences between meticulous and mitigation. Jews, we think all of them affect us. So for instance, right now we are fighting, we didn't know we were fighting mitigation. But you know, there's a lot of investment going in infrastructure in all our countries. Ports are being redesigned, railways are being led, public transport, solar farms, just name them. These are going to create eviction challenges for undocumented people, both in order to do their work. And I'm just discovering a very interesting thing that I was invited to be on various committees of Northern organizations. And I realized that many Northern development assistance, bilateral assistance, actually give technical assistance in the form of engineering firms doing these jobs for Southern countries. And we are working in three places where the ports are being designed. And 50,000 to 100,000 people will be evicted if there's violence. And when we talk to the engineering companies, they say, but you know, you should go and talk to that government. We can't do this, we are just professional designers. So they take no actual responsibility for this. We go and talk to the government, they say, but you know, in the terms of reference provided for technical assistance, we were told that these issues will not be dealt by us, it will be dealt with. So we are nowhere on no man's land, on no person's land. And so I feel that somewhere this artificial difference in disaster, adaptation, all these words which create wars and remove. On the ground it means, and even worse is that now that government funds have overtaken development funds in terms of what cities are looking for. When you go and tell the city, okay, we want secure water points, we want to make sure that there is sewer treatment to produce toilets. They say, but when you go to the climate funds, they say, this has nothing to do with us, it is to do with SDGs. So how many self-people are you going to produce? I'm saying, this part of mine is resilience. And I think that, and the good thing that I've heard in conversations I have with the community is that there is an attempt, a strong attempt to actually make the convergence of SDGs and climate change. And that's something that has to be worked out. The second last thing is about the architecture of funding that is there to be. My colleagues, many of you are here, when we asked you to write a proposal that would help people like us address this, they say it takes us so long we can get registered in those areas. And so my sense is, I'm going to wait for 10 years for that architecture. 10 or are you going to fight and shout as we go here? That's the thing. And the last thing is that has to be a very robust understanding of how urbanization is going to transform cities. Most of the people that I have met here are working in rural areas. In the few instances where I was invited to be part of those organizations moving to cities, there is an amazing old-fashioned 19th century understanding of what that transition is going to be. And I think we have to work together to produce a more robust understanding of how quickly the metamorphosis of a rural identity does the urban discontent. And so I'm not just as an event of addressing organization and climate change, that this artificial divide, this inability to understand transitions is also a change. And so finally, we as STI, working for the three countries, we have an interesting informal alliance and then informal with other networks of urban, world-wide swachy movements. We're all struggling to be recognized within this different climate space. And we would love to have some form of engagement in these programs where we come in as partners. Thank you. Thank you very much. Transition of rural to urban to my country, Bangladesh, we have 160 million people living in less than 150,000 square kilometers. So the population density of the entire country is well over 1,000 people per square kilometer which is almost definition of a city. So it's a city-state effectively. Okay, so now I'm going to open up the floor to both questions and contributions of people who wish to share reflections on what has happened here. The theme is what's happening in poverty for a particular and I know a number of good friends negotiate as we have been following. I'd like to invite Klaus from Austria to share a little bit. Klaus has been a member of the adaptation commission. He's very interested in issues related to adaptation. Klaus would be like to share some thoughts with us and then I'll pass the microphone along to whoever else wants to. Thank you. The program, I would like to reflect a little bit on the nature of how to compute the subsequent conclusions related to the special report. You must understand when the special report has been repressed three years ago, the science was not in a position to differentiate between the impacts between 1.5 degrees warming and 2 degrees warming. It was only the huge effort of the research community which published around 1,000 papers afterwards that the IPCC had the basis for its assessment and the recite of the assessment was that it matters. Every bit of warming matters. And this was of course not nice in the years of those who still made a lot of money with selling of securities. And therefore it was, you know, already before the meeting here, there was a big debate on the agenda whether there should be a specific agenda item and the substance to consider the special report or not, for instance. And the final decision was there is no specific agenda point was only under research and systematic observation. And those who study the conclusions when special reports or assessment reports have been considered under the COP, you might know the language that was usual and it was already known in advance, so to say for the insiders, that some parties cannot agree to a language that is stronger than to know. And what is now the lesson learned is that contrary to earlier COPs, failure is an option for some parties. And I think that's very important and it has been mentioned even in the interventions yesterday that this is also relevant for more material decisions because that's not a very material decision to choose mode or recognize or whatever. But there are material decisions to be made later this week and also there you have to expect that if red lines from those countries will not be crossed, they will not agree to something that is beyond the red lines. And the decisions are not made by those here in Katowice but those in the capitals. They don't mind what the situation is here, they don't really distance study the reports, they have their view and there are, hello, the issues that those who make those decisions, they agree that we have to fix our fossil fuels. Emaxcom would say that. But the issue is the speed and the speed matters and this becomes visible when you compare the emission pathways of two degrees pathway to 1.5 and the implications when how much carbon dioxide removed virtually and what does it cause. And finally it's all about financial issues and here the lines are very tough. When it comes to finance, this is usually the toughest part of the negotiations, thank you. Thank you very much for that. Don't know if you want to comment on this. Yes, I just wanted to add, I think when we heard about the Don't Live and Well messages yesterday, I had a personal reflection and this is exactly also what we're seeing in countries, how governments are and the scientists and the medical businesses are not so linked to each other. But I think I want to emphasize on the message yesterday to thanks and I would be really encouraged in the message coming, we can use this as an opportunity to engage in parties and talk about, okay, even if we didn't know it were well done, that's a text there. I know it's important, but I think how we should say that underground is more important than us. Those who are working in countries and how we can immediately right now keep the dynamic more and in each of the negotiations, given this, this is where it is. I think that will keep us also moving and we will start with words on that. I actually love that. So I'm going to now wrap up and share it. I'm afraid I'm off, I'm sorry. So what I'm going to do is to share some reflections and then maybe respond to with some of the questions we'll do that. So for those of you who don't know this, I think many of you do know, this is my first part, right? I've made every single comment. And my friends ask me, you know, why do you keep coming to the city? And it doesn't make me depressed. I think that makes me depressed. But for a global problem on the scale of climate change, it's the only global governance treaty we have. It's not good, it's not perfect. It's far from perfect, but it's the only one we have. So let's be engaging. We're not going to get any kind of global impacts. And over the years, the one thing that we have made a big difference, and I said this yesterday and I'm going to repeat it now, is we do have the Paris Agreement. And the Paris Agreement, in my view, is an extremely forward-looking, liberating agreement because we have now agreed how we are going to tackle the problem. And implementing that agreement does not require more negotiations. It requires people doing things, multiple stakeholders and over-level, urban-level, rural-level, everybody. All of us, every single person in this room, is an implementer of the Paris Agreement. Even in all of ourselves, and we don't need another negotiation that's just what we do. We know what we do, we can do it. And I'll give you a very good example of that. Even though Mr. Trump has officially withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, that doesn't mean the Americans are still going to withdraw. In the beginning, in the talk with the American people there, we are still in. They're still in. All my friends are still in. They haven't left the Paris Agreement. They're in the Paris Agreement. And in fact, if you look at the U.S.'s track record of division reduction, they actually won't be doing that. Obama, it's a commitment. Trump can't stop that. He can be paid by the whole of the U.K. and the whole, you know, the promotion of the whole. But nobody's buying the whole anymore. Nobody's investing in the whole. It's done, it's paid debt. It's not that the future is not important, despite what Mr. Trump does on behalf of the whole of U.K. We're looking for a vested interest and corruption. I can't think of anybody who's more productive than the president of the United States who's in the pocket of the whole of U.K. Even if you look at development, we're nowhere near that level of corrupting the entire government with the particular lobby. And now it's a fight. So it's a fight to the death with this lobby. These people cannot stop us. And then I'm still the question of whether the word matters. The word doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The words on the piece of paper don't matter. The clash that underlines those divisions between whether we know them and whether we work on is what matters. And that is a very, very fundamental clash between those that wish to solve the problem and act the problem, and those that don't want to solve the problem. And those who don't want to solve it are no longer doing it out of ignorance. They don't deny it because they aren't convinced. They are doing it as a criminal act. They are protecting their own interests at the expense of the rest of us. And we have to take it on as a war. It is not something that is any more immutable to discussion only, although discussion is important and we need to bring them on board with me, we're going to find consensus we should definitely try and find consensus. But we can't wait for consensus. The issue that has happened over the last 24 years of the UNFCC is it was created to prevent the problem. It has failed to prevent that problem. The problem is now on us. Reality of climate change is not on us. So that takes over. Climate change is more important than talking about it now. And we all are the ones that are going to tackle it. And we need to think about how we do that more effectively in the future. And the only part of what we need to do is to make sure that the officials who do the negotiations actually do something substantive, raise the level of ambition, agree on a rulebook, whatever it is that they are negotiating endlessly and into the night about, comes out with something that's useful. But we don't look to them to believe. We look to them to follow us. We have to become the leaders now. And I think the local climate is, in a sense, when we started this since three years ago as an event, it was like the anti-pop. We had an event on the side of the weekend where people can relax. When you wear your jeans, you're coming, you meet friends, you network with them. You find ways of moving things forward. I think we need to go beyond this function of simply networking and sharing and being collective action and challenging those who are on the other side of town doing the negotiations and as Chita said, making our voices heard there. And we can do that. And it is also true if we do this repeatedly. So I look forward to further conversations today and from the rest of the day. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to share and now I have to ask you to thank our panelists and hand over to the team that you gave us.