 from a variety of different types of speakers, from academia, from research centers, and from civil society. Before we get started though, just a little bit of housekeeping information. So the event is online. It's being recorded in webcasts on the FAO website. And for those of you who use social media, whether you're following online or you're here in the room, the QR code to reach the report is up there on the right hand side of the screen. And also we're using the hashtag unjust climate, which is the title of the report to discuss this report online. And we also have, for those of you that are online, a Q and A section of the webcast, and we will be taking questions, make time for questions at the end of the panel discussion. And for those of you in the room, you'll also have the occasion to raise your hand and we will take your questions. So we're here today to talk about the unequal and unjust impacts of climate change. We know that climate change is having a strong impact on countries, communities and individuals who have contributed the least to climate change over time. And we also knew that all sorts of inequalities about where people live, rural and urban areas, about their gender and about their age had an impact on the extent to which climate change was negatively impacting their ability to have sustainable livelihoods. But today FAO is presenting for the first time a report which reveals exactly how much climate stress has disproportionately impacted vulnerable segments of society. And you'll hear numbers about the impact of climate change on widening income gaps, on the impact on economic growth, and all of this data is brand new and very interesting so that we can just see the scope of the challenge that we have in front of us. As I mentioned, we have a full program where we're going to have a variety of speakers, but before we get started, I'm going to turn it over to the chief economist of FAO, Maximo Torero, who's joining us online today to provide some opening remarks. So, Maximo, the floor is yours. Thank you, thank you very much, Lauren. I hope you can hear me well. We can hear you. Perfect, okay. So, excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends, apologies. I was not able to be there. I'm in Helsinki right now, but it is my pleasure to be here at the launch of this FAO report than just climate. As all of you know, climate is extremely important because we are violating six of the nine planetary boundaries, which means that the frequency of the climate events will increase and could increase even exponentially. And this implies that inequalities will matter a lot and it implies that the impacts could increase substantially. Climate affect us in at least five dimensions, extreme temperatures, excess or lack of water, variability of climate indicators, which makes more difficult for farmers, small holders, especially to make decisions because they don't have proper early warning systems and information. It will also affect the evolution of pests and diseases that will change based on the climate change. And it will also affect migration both of species and human beings. We often hear that the poor and marginalized are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but there is a little cross-country evidence on the magnitude of these vulnerabilities. This report, as Lauren already mentioned, aims to fill this gap by rigorously measuring and monetizing the magnitude of the impacts on people who are too often overlooked in global climate discussions, the poor and the vulnerable groups of women and youth in rural communities. Climate change is not just an environmental challenge, it is a matter of social justice. The report titled itself speaks volumes about the injustices regarding the causes and effects of global climate crisis. We know, for example, that people living in low and middle income countries contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet they suffer the most of the impacts of increasing temperatures. That's where the injustice happens. We also know that inequalities within countries are large because differences in environmental conditions, access to resources and opportunities make some people considerably more vulnerable to climate change than others. And those inequalities has widened even more because of the COVID-19 and put us in a more vulnerable situation to those most vulnerable people. But despite these realities, the report shows that we're launching today is the first to provide a concrete global evidence on the magnitude of the challenge posed by the climate crisis for rural people who are in socially and economically vulnerable positions due to the wealth status, gender or age. The report draws on data from over 100,000 rural households across 24 countries and leveraged in 70 years of climate data. The report disentangles how different types of climate stressors affect people's incomes and adaptive actions. You will hear more from the lead author during the technical presentation, but I just wanted to highlight a few key figures that stuck me the most. First, the research shows that the magnitude of the challenge posed by climate change for vulnerable rural people is starting. For example, in low and middle income countries, floods widen the gap in income between poor and non-poor households by more than 4%, amounting to a reduction compared to non-poor households of $18 per capita or 21 billion a year in aggregate across all low and middle income countries. Also, it shows that extreme weather events are widening the income gaps between rural people in low and middle income countries by as much as $41 billion a year. These impacts far exceed the amount of climate financing. The targeting is more producers, which recently may show only reach approximately $10 billion a year. Even if we look even at the whole AgriFood system, we are talking of 3% of climate financing coming to agriculture. This is even worse in the case of small-holder farmers. And it's not only extreme weather events that are contributing to an increase in inequality, but the report also shows, for example, that an increase in one degree centigrade in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34% reduction in total incomes of female-headed households relative to male-headed households, another inequality which is widened. Yet amidst of these challenges, we can also offer some promising news. When households headed by young people are hit by hit stress, they demonstrate remarkable flexibility by increasing their off-arm income relative to households headed by prime-age adults. Across low and middle-income nations, this results in collective annual boost of $47 billion in their off-arm income compared to other households. This finding not only highlights the adaptive capacity of young generations, but also underscores the significant contribution to a rural economy. But we also must understand that in rural areas, the populations are each time of higher ages rather than lower ages. Similarly, the report just lights on the role of human in building resilience in agriculture systems. The results revealed that in the event of floods, agricultural plots managed by women generate more value than those of men. Moreover, despite the significant resources and time constraints faced by rural women, they tend to be as able or even more able than men who adapt to their agricultural systems to climate stressors. This point underscores a crucial fact. While certain segments of rural populations face high renewable abilities, they are not met by standards due to circumstances. However, entrenched structural barriers such as unequal access to resources and services based on gender hinder the realization of their full potential. In light of this, it's imperative to recognize that poverty and hunger cannot be eradicated without confronting the ramifications of climate change on the livelihoods of marginalized rural individuals and communities. FAO in December, 2023 at COP28 launched a global roadmap for achieving SDG2 without reaching the 1.5 threshold. The cornerstone of the roadmap is the concept of just transition. Aiming for fair includes the carbonization that leaves no one behind linking it to sustainable agri-food systems. To achieve a just transition, efficiency improvements and global rebalancing or convergence should be our key objectives. We must understand that rural areas and our agri-food system provides the right to food. And of course, they generate externalities, but those externalities can be improved, can be minimized. And that's where efficiency gains can happen. A significantly higher than what we can observe in the energy sector. That's why climate financing to the agri-food system is so important. So this global roadmap aims to make the case that accelerated climate actions can and must be reduced and which will act now prioritizing and addressing the impacts and ensuring equitable access to resources and opportunities for all. This report brings additional evidence of how important this is. Because this just transition is central to be able to improve and reduce those inequalities and to attract climate financing to support the most vulnerable people that are being affected by climate despite they are not responsible of it. Let us commit ourselves to a future where climate justice is not just a goal, but a reality. By transforming our agri-food systems and taking climate actions, we will help people to achieve good food for all for today and for tomorrow. Thank you so much, Lauren. Thank you, Maximo. Thank you so much, Maximo, for starting us off and for putting the report in context of some of the other important initiatives that are ongoing from FAO, but also giving a sense of the scope of the challenge that we're facing. I'm going to turn it over soon to one of the lead authors of the report, my colleague, Nicolas Citko. But before I do so, we're going to show a quick video which presents some of the findings of the report. Climate change is causing widespread disruption to nature and societies, threatening our ability to ensure global food security, eroding years of development gains and impacting people's lives everywhere. When it comes to climate change, we are all vulnerable, but some of us are more vulnerable than others. Extreme weather events disproportionately affect rural communities with the poorest, the elderly, and women taking the heaviest blow. Climate change is widening the global gap between the poor and those who are better off by 20 billion US dollars every year. Because of floods and heat stress, poor families can lose up to 5% of their income annually. A one-degree increase in global temperatures can cause a 34% reduction in the incomes of female-headed households. When disasters strike, women and girls pay an unbearable toll, but they are barely visible when it comes to climate actions, only a small fraction of climate funds reach those who need them the most. This unjust climate is inflaming all types of inequalities. We need to change direction now and forge together a world where no one is left behind. We need to place people at the centre and develop inclusive climate policies, sustain livelihoods with social protection, create more job opportunities, ensure equal access to finance and resources, and bring all people into decision-making for a more just transition. Focusing on people now is the right direction toward a sustainable and equitable future for all. So as I mentioned, now I'd like to invite my colleague Nicholas Sidcoe, who's the senior economist in the Rural Transformation and Gender Quality Division and the technical lead of the report to present the key findings. Nick, it's over to you. Okay, thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Maximo, for your opening remarks, and thank you all colleagues here in the room and online for joining the launch of this event. It's my pleasure to be here today to present on behalf of a team of researchers who's worked over the last two years to put together this report, to present the results or some of the key findings from this report. It's not advancing, hold on one second. Okay, so this report is really building on an emerging consensus that is coming out of the international panel on climate change, and it's most recent assessment report six, which was launched in 2022, which is now really forcefully arguing that climate change's impacts on people and regions are different and distinct, and that these differences are rooted in socioeconomic disparities, as well as historical legacies of inequality and marginalization. The report is now arguing that in order for us to transition as a global community to a more climate resilient future, we need to tackle these inequalities head on. We need integrated and inclusive approaches that address the disparities in climate vulnerability between all people. However, the evidence on the differences in the magnitude and nature of climate vulnerabilities is largely absent. There is very little rigorous evidence that tells us how much different populations are affected, particularly as we focus in on rural populations in low and middle income countries who tend to be the most vulnerable to climate impacts because of their dependence on climate dependent agriculture. And in particular, differences related to social distinctions based on wealth, gender, and age tend to be absent in the literature, at least in a cross-country framework. So that's what this report really sets out to do, is to provide us some concrete numbers, some empirical evidence on these differences. Now, the evidence that we're gonna present here today and that is contained in the report is building on a novel dataset that the team has compiled. This dataset relies on its foundation on socioeconomic data coming from 24 low and middle income countries, covering five world regions. In total, we're working with about 100, more than 100,000 survey respondents across these 24 countries. And this is statistically representative of almost a billion rural people in low and middle income countries. Now, we've taken this data, this socioeconomic data, and we've matched it in both space and time with over 70 years of climate data, rainfall, and temperature data. These data, this geo-referenced climate data allows us to construct variables that identify across a wide range of geographies and places, extreme weather events that are relevant to people. So these include heat stress, floods, and droughts, as well as long-term changes in climate conditions, in particular long-term changes in average temperatures over time. So by bringing these data together, the socioeconomic with the climate data, we're able to better disentangle the ways in which extreme weather events and climate change are differentially affecting different rural populations based on their wealth, their gender, and their age. Now, before we turn over to the results, I think it's useful to kind of outline the ways in which rural people are affected by climate change and how those effects can differ across social categories. So broadly speaking, we can think about climate change having both direct and indirect impacts on people. Now in rural spaces, direct impacts can come through its effect on agriculture, reducing productivity and yields. It can also affect labor productivity by making it much more difficult to work in outdoor conditions. You can think about working in high temperature environments. And it can also undermine the ecosystems that rural people and rural systems, agricultural systems rely on. Now, those direct impacts tend to ripple through rural economies. They start to affect the price of food. They affect the price of inputs. They can make non-farm employment more difficult to find. For example, jobs tied to agri-food systems. They can damage infrastructure and they can change the composition of households that some household members are forced to migrate away in search of jobs. Now, of course, these direct and indirect impacts are always filtered through or mediated by social differences. So for example, poor households typically do not have the resources they need to invest in adaptation and to cope with climate stresses when they happen. They also typically have lower levels of education and it's much more difficult for them to diversify their income into non-farm employment opportunities. Women face structural barriers in terms of their access to and control over critical resources for adaptation. They also face discriminatory norms that place a disproportionate burden on their time for care responsibilities and domestic responsibilities within their households, which again makes it much more difficult for them to access high quality jobs off the farm. Now, age can have very different sort of impacts on people's vulnerability to climate change. For example, older households typically control more resources including land than younger households. They also have much more experience dealing with climate stresses and so therefore might be able to adapt better. But on the other hand, young people are more flexible. They typically have higher levels of education and are able to access non-farm employment opportunities at a higher rate than older populations and part through migration. So these are just some of the ways in which we can think about how climate might affect people. Now let's turn to some of the key results from the report. So now in terms of the impacts that climate change is having on poor versus non-poor rural households, what the results show us is that when extreme weather events like heat stress or heavy precipitation occur, these can cause a dramatic drop in the incomes of poor households relative to non-poor households. We calculate that in an average year, heat stress is responsible for reducing the incomes of poor households by about 5% relative to non-poor households. Extreme precipitation, it's about 4.4% reduction relative to non-poor households. So when we aggregate this up across all low and middle income countries, what we're talking about is a relative loss of $20 billion due to heat stress every year that poor households are experiencing and $21 billion due to flooding that poor households are experiencing relative to better off. So we're talking about a widening gap in income. And it's not just extreme weather events, although that's what we often think about when we think about climate change, but it's also long-term changes in temperatures that are affecting these households differently. So for example, a one-degree Celsius increase in average temperatures, we found to be associated with a 53% increase in the farm income of poor households, but a 33% decrease in their off-farm income. So what does that mean? What that means is that as temperatures are rising, poor households are relying relatively more on climate-sensitive agriculture for their incomes and relatively less on off-farm opportunities. Poor households or better off households are better able to access these off-farm opportunities which enable them to be more resilient. Now, if we turn to women-led households and we compare these to households that are typically referred to as male-headed in these surveys, we find similar patterns. We find that heat stress is associated with an 8% reduction in the income of female-headed households relative to male-headed households and heavy precipitation or flooding associated with about a 3% reduction. So again, in monetary terms, we're talking about $37 billion difference in incomes as a result of heat stress that female-headed households are experiencing and $16 billion associated with heavy precipitation. Again, we're seeing also strong impacts associated with rising temperatures over time. A one-degree Celsius increase in temperatures is associated with a 34% reduction in the total income of female-headed households compared to male-headed households. And this is driven a lot by what's happening in their agricultural income, their farm income, which reduces by 24% relative to male-headed households. So it's highlighting the urgency of the challenge faced by female-headed households and their exposure to these climate events. Now, with the data that we have in six countries, we're able to dig a little bit deeper moving beyond the household and looking specifically at individual women's labor and the plots that they manage. And we're able to compare those with men. And what we find is that when heat stress and other types of extreme events occur, women tend to work more than men. They respond by increasing the hours or the time that they work by 55 minutes per week more than men. And this is happening in a context where women's time burden is already overstretched due to these additional burdens in terms of domestic tasks and care responsibilities that they face more than men. As Maximo mentioned, we also find some encouraging news in the sense that when we look at a plot level and we look at the farm plots managed by women compared to men, when they're exposed to climate stress over time, they tend to adopt climate adaptive practices such as investing in irrigation, soil-water conservation structures, organic fertilizer, et cetera, at similar rates and sometimes even more than men. So that's encouraging news. The challenge is that it's not necessarily translating into better outcomes because there's other constraints. There's capital constraints to improved inputs and other constraints that are hindering their production. And what we find is that their fields tend to be still more vulnerable to these climate stresses. So one additional day of heat stress is associated with a 3% reduction in the total value of agricultural products produced on women's fields compared to men's fields. Again, highlighting the urgency of addressing these challenges in a way that enables rural women to translate the work that they're doing and the effort that they're putting into their farms into meaningful reductions in their climate vulnerability. Now finally, turning to the age analysis, what we find is that kind of contrary to the dominant discourse around the vulnerability of youth to climate stresses, and I'm not undermining that, but what the data are showing is that when climate stresses occur in rural spaces, young people tend to increase their income more than older households. So heat stress is associated with a 6% increase in total income, flooding a 3% increase. And this is being driven primarily by off-farm economic activities. So young people are able to diversify away from agriculture and increase their incomes relatively more through off-farm work than older populations. So it's highlighting the need to start paying more attention to these elderly populations in rural areas, particularly in places where the population is aging. Another important finding is related to child labor. So what we find is that as these extreme weather events occur, for example, heat stress, the amount of time that children work increases relatively more than older people. Now that doesn't mean in absolute terms children are working more than older people, but they're increasing more as a result of this climate stress up to 50 minutes, almost 50 minutes a week. So what that implies is it's coming at the cost of other things, education, play, et cetera. It's an important consideration when we think about human capital formation over time. Yet despite the kind of increased attention that the IPCC is placing on inclusivity and vulnerabilities and diverse vulnerabilities, and in light of the evidence we're presenting today, the fact remains that very little attention is being paid to this in terms of policies and investments. So in terms of financing, as Maxim mentioned, as of 2017, 2018, only 3% of tracked climate financing was targeting the agriculture sector. Most of that going to mitigation where the adaptation investments are needed to reduce this vulnerability. Only 1.7% of that or $10 billion is reaching small-scale producers, which we've shown is not enough to even compensate for the relative losses that people are experiencing, much less to finance their adaptive capacity. In terms of policies, when we look at the nationally determined contribution policies and the national adaptation plans from the 24 countries that we consider in this study, we identified more than 4,000 explicit climate actions in those documents. Of those more than 4,000 climate actions, only 6% mentioned women, 2% mentioned youth, 1% mentioned people living in poverty, and only 6% mentioned farmers. So there's a huge gap here between the magnitude of the challenge and the attention that's being placed on it. Now, of course, we need more policies, we need more investments, but we also need these to be well-designed and well-targeted. So what our report has shown is that people's vulnerabilities to climate change are diverse and they're distinct. They come through farm and non-farm channels. So what we need to think about are multi-faceted, multi-dimensional approaches to tackling this challenge. Now, the report goes into much more detail here, but what I'd like to do is highlight five key points. The first is that we need to address disparities and access to resources. That means land, that means technologies, that means credit, that means insurance. Many of these vulnerable people are left out of that for various reasons. We need to think more about how we deliver climate advisory services and extension services to these populations, who again are typically excluded from traditional extension services. Maybe they don't have enough land, maybe they don't have the time. So we need to be participatory and we need to be intentionally targeted. We need to think about how we reduce risks and losses experienced by these people. So one way to think about this is through using national social protection programs, which can be scaled up and scaled out in response to or in anticipation of crises and which have been shown to enable vulnerable people to take adaptive actions and economic risks. We need to enable off-arm opportunities. So that means investing in education. That means investing in hard and soft skills, infrastructure and credit for small enterprises among other things. But we need to also think beyond just the material constraints. We need to think about the discriminatory norms that keep people in positions of vulnerability. So for example, the gender transformative approaches that are being worked, that FAU is implementing in a few places where local solutions are identified to the challenges of discrimination and are made visible and talked about. This is a promising approach. So we need, I hope that the evidence that we present here today is able to sort of push this agenda forward to translate this evidence into policies, investments and programs that leave no one behind. We need policies that acknowledge and prioritize people and their distinct vulnerabilities. We need investments that address disproportionate losses and can enable vulnerable people to adapt to the climate crisis. And we need actions that challenge and make more visible these social norms and historical legacies that have left some people more vulnerable than others. I think that the report has shown very clearly that climate change is producing very unjust impacts and that by addressing these impacts is really the only path forward to a more sustainable and resilient future. Thank you very much. Nick, thanks so much for the excellent presentation which I think helps us to understand a very complex set of data that you and the team have put together over the past couple of years in a very straightforward way and really just shows the sort of the shocking nature of the gaps and losses that we're talking about. And so now what we're going to do is to go to some reactions from our panelists and I'm gonna introduce them in turn. Each of the distinguished speakers is working on climate change and has a strong interest in this topic of justice and climate change. So I'm gonna start with Shor Das Gupta who's here with us on the panel in person. The other panelists are going to be online and I'm very happy to welcome him. He is a researcher at Fundazione CMCC and is also a lecturer at Kavoskari University in Venice. His research is focused on the impacts of climate change on labor, food security, health and inequality and in fact he's very interested in identifying hot spots, vulnerable populations and looking at the design of tailored policies to mitigate and adapt the impacts of climate change on people. He has a PhD in science and management of climate change from Kavoskari and an MA in economics from the University of New Hampshire. So, Shor, let me pose the first question to you. You know, you're working on this topic and doing research on the impact of climate change on people all the time. So can you tell us a little bit about the gaps in literature that this report is helping to fill and also where you feel future research is needed in order to advance our understanding of climate change and its impact on vulnerable people? Hi, thank you Lauren. First, congratulations on your order. I'd like to congratulate again, Nico and his team for this brilliant, brilliant report. I think as an academic, the biggest compliment I can give is that this report is already a prime top journal publication. It's there, you guys have done this already. So again, this is brilliant. To your question, and this is really down my line, so Nico and his team has essentially done what I also work on. So it's a competition, but I'm very happy that this has already been published. It's brilliant. So some key academic or key contributions to the science itself. One is combining the brilliant socio-economic data that you guys have put together with the high resolution climatic data. I think this is the way forward. Allows us the best of both worlds. The high resolution, the time varying, space varying, climatic data with the socio-economic dimensions. The second, I really like the fact that the report differentiates between climate shocks versus weather shocks. For a very long time, the literature on climate change was dug by what is climate change and what is weather shock. And the report really does a lot of really good work on specifically this topic. And of course, the whole report is about unjust impacts of climate change. It's really interesting and important that we understand for policy formulation, the heterogeneity is the differentiated impacts by age, gender, but also wealth as a mitigating factor. For example, in countries such as Burkina Faso and Bangladesh where I have a lot of work on, just having access to electricity, which we take for granted, lowers child mortality rate by up to 15% in some of these countries. And this report really brings such heterogeneities out in, or not just points them out, but also does it with robust scientific methodologies. Just one more point before I go on is the multi-scale evidence, right? The report focuses on individuals, households, but also pot level. This is really key for us to understand and also the decision makers that what type of policy can be used to mitigate climate change impacts on individual workers or just households as a whole, for example, subsistence farmers, and then also adaptation techniques at the agricultural or for the pot level for agricultural production. I'm happy to come back to all of this. I have a lot more minimal points to go on. Thanks, Shura. Maybe I can just ask a quick follow-up question if that's one of the things you wanted to talk about. Of the sorts of policy recommendations that Nick outlined and that the report discusses in great detail, which of those is really resonant in your own research or where do you find a series of policies which could be very effective? Thank you. Sorry, I missed that the first time there was, yeah. So the social protection policies, as an economist, I feel the economics as a discipline falls behind because we react to crisis, right? So this report really brings out the fact that climate change provides us an opportunity to formulate and to work on proactive policies such as proactive safety nets. In the projections and the hotspots forecasting the report does, it allows decision makers to sort of anticipate disasters and be ready whether we with food assistance or unconditional cash transfer. I think this is one of the key findings from the report that can be taken forward on this. Thank you. Great, thanks so much. I think we'll come back to you with questions from the audience, but I want to pass now to our second panelist, Aditi Mukherjee. I hope she's online, I think she is. If we could maybe bring her up so we could say hello to her. Aditi is the director for Climate Change Impact Area Platform of the CGIR Center, and she's also a scientist working for the IPCC. In fact, Aditi was the coordinating lead author of the Water Chapter in working group two of the IPCC report published in February of 2022, and was a member of the core writing team for the IPCC's Synthesis Report for AR6, which was published in March of last year. She was awarded the inaugural Norman Borlaug Field Award, which was endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation and given by the World Food Prize Foundation, and she is a human geographer by training. She has a PhD from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar. So Aditi, thank you so much for joining us remotely from Kenya today. We were really happy to have you here. I'd like to ask you what you feel the potential contribution of the report is to advancing a people-centered agenda for climate actions, both within the IPCC and other science policy interfaces like the CGIR. And also if you could say a little bit more about what you think needs to be done in addition. Over to you. Thank you, Lorraine. Can you hear me? We can hear you, thank you. Okay, thank you so much and thank you for the kind introduction. I always, it just always becomes too much and I forget to take out some bits of it when I send my introduction, but thank you so much. I think the part that I wanted to talk about today was really the IPCC report that the main author of this report, Nick, pointed out, I think that was the entry point for the work that he has been doing. So as you know, I have already mentioned the work that we did in the water chapter that kind of also points to these unequal impacts as well as the synthesis report which actually goes on to say that global greenhouse emissions have continued to increase with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use, land use change, and in bold lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across the region. So this is kind of the first high level statement of the synthesis report that climate change has not just happened randomly. Climate change, the root cause of climate change is unequal society. So for something that starts with inequality also ends up in exacerbating inequality. It's no surprise. So the IPCC, as well as all of us working in this space and hello, Shorro, it identifies the challenge clearly. The climate crisis has been felt more severely by those who did not contribute to it. So some of the, I mean, we already know the global South smallholder producers whose own greenhouse gas footprint is absolutely negligible are at the forefront of it. And therefore, and this report very nicely quantifies and that's I think really the value addition, the quantification of those unequal impacts. We all know the impacts are unequal, but how unequal was also an eye opener for me today. So thank you very much for this. So climate impacts are hugely unequal and unjust. And I think an extension of this is literally that climate action will not be effective unless we address the root causes of climate change, which is really the huge amount of inequality that we have in this world between the global North and the global South. And many of the organizations like yours, like ours, we work in the global South. So we only kind of deal with one side of the picture. But what the IPCC says is that unless mitigation or rapid emission reduction happens among the historical emitters from the global North, we will not be anywhere near any solution in the rest of the world. So I think what this is something our work does not often highlight because we do work with the global South farmers as the CGI does, but we are a part of the story. The other part of the story is really unsustainable lifestyle and high consumption, consumptive lifestyle that is happening in a minority part of the world. And that has caused this climate crisis historically. So I think putting our attention back there is just as equally important as we are trying to create a more equal playing field for the farmers we work with in our global South regions. So as I have already said, I felt that the report makes a very excellent contribution, particularly in terms of the quantification of these impacts and also some of the policy implications in terms of social safety nets are extremely important. Here again, the idea is how do we do this without further increasing the inequalities from the agri-food sector perspective where the CGI works. So I think for us, the challenge is even more acute because the food sector is a whole, it means one third of the emissions, but on the other hand, many of the climate solutions, particularly in the mitigation space actually makes even food security even more unattainable. So the overall roadmap that the chief economist, Maximo mentioned around how do we keep within the 1.5 degrees without compromising food security, something that we also care a lot about and their understanding the inherent inequalities would be very, very important going forward. So congratulations once again to the entire team for this brilliant report. And I'm looking forward to reading this in further detail and using it in our own work, where we are right now designing our next phase of mega-programs, one of it is on climate, but almost all our portfolio would have climate embedded in it and this is a great reminder to say that impacts are unequal, therefore the solutions have to be just. So back to you, Lorraine. Thank you so much, Aditi, that's really helpful. And I'm sure people will be interested to hear more about the new work that you're planning and how climate will be sort of mainstream throughout that work. Let me turn now to Max Lawson from Oxfam who's also joining us virtually. Max is head of inequality policy at Oxfam International and he works on research, advocacy and policy work focused on inequality. He produces some of Oxfam's most high-profile products for media and advocacy along with his team including Oxfam's annual inequality report which is annually published and ahead of the World Economic Forum and has just come out recently. And he was also co-author of a recent Oxfam report titled Climate Equality, a planet for the 99%. So Max, if you're with us, I'd like to pose a question. Can you pull them up? Yeah, can you hear me okay? We can hear you. So Max, thanks for joining us. What do you take away from this report in terms of supporting the work on climate justice? And what do you think are the key challenges for making climate investments and policies more inclusive than they are at present? I mean, the key takeaway is this is a really substantially important piece of work and it gives us some concrete numbers on things that we, I suppose things that we always suspected that the impact of extreme weather events is very unequal and felt unequally, but to quantify that is extremely, extremely valuable, particularly when we look at the difference between rich and poor and the sense in which extreme weather events are impact, they don't impact everybody equally. Obviously they strike countries very differently and cities very differently. I think they lived for a long time in Malawi, working for Oxfam. An extreme flooding event is a very different experience to someone who lives in an informal settlement with very little in the way of protection, probably in precarious land, to someone who lives in a brick house on a hill. It's just a very, very different lived experience and I think the relationship between inequality and the impacts of climate that this report really quantifies is super good, particularly the 20 billion number, that's really good. I'll definitely be using that and I just found it really, really interesting. So thank you to the team for doing that. I think for us in beginning to look at this and understanding, because we have our global work on inequality and then we have our humanitarian work, often in partnership with FAO and others at country level and bringing those together and bringing together discussions around resilience, adaptation, DRR and understanding the kind of intersection between that and inequality is the data availability is so poor. So this is a massive contribution and the sense in which for rich people and I would really, I'm building on what the last speaker said, it is about the historical responsibility of rich countries but there are also massive inequalities at national level. If I think of the incredibly high-end supermarkets in Nairobi where I was recently living when you've got people literally starving to get like four or 500 miles away but the richest people in many of these countries, they don't even do their own shopping. They probably send someone else to do their shopping. They certainly don't notice the food prices going up. So there's a sense in which the rich people everywhere insulated from climate pain and that has big implications for policy as well because they have much more influence over policy, policy-making, if there's a big kind of payout or insurance payout after a disaster it's much more likely to go to the richest people. There's a sense in which the control of what happens when an event hits is also linked to this issue of inequality is not just the impacts but what I would say and I suppose building on this and kind of I do think there are specific policies and it's really good to see social protection highlighted. We're also involved in lots of cash transfer programming and I think all of those things are good. I do think there is a kind of macro point here and I'd like to get into the data with the team a bit more and understand the distinctions between the different countries because I think more, I suspect and we certainly found a few studies like this. We found for instance that deaths from flooding are seven times higher in countries with high inequality. So there's a sense in which the overall level of inequality in a country dictates the impact of a climate event and have a great campaign with Oxford Mexico where they said there's no such thing as a natural disaster. You have extreme weather events but what dictates whether it's a disaster is the scale of inequality in a country because more equal countries are more resilient. They're more able to cope with shocks and we know there are gonna be multiple shocks into the future. So I'd love to know, looking across the world did you find that countries that were already more economically equal were showing less in the way of disparities, less in the way of negative impacts on inequality and what does that tell us about the broad push to push for more, more equal societies and the flip side of spending on things like universal protection, more progressive taxation. Can we see domestic resources raised at country level to allow the whole country to be protected? What can we do to continue to make that connection between not just extreme weather events and growing inequality, but also the reduction of harm and the link between that and a reduction overall in inequality and that more equal societies are able to face the future in a much more resilient way. So I think this is a fantastic contribution to really, I think it feels like the bottom rung of a debate that the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are so intimately linked and we can only beat climate breakdown if we beat the inequality crisis at the same time. So thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity and huge, huge congratulations again to the report writers. Thank you. Thanks, Max. And thanks also for showing some of the data that you mentioned about the link between existing levels of inequality and other types of negative outcomes from climate change. Can I ask you one question because you sort of were focusing on macro issues as well. So in terms of, for example, making more climate financing available for people in countries, you mentioned inequalities within countries as well, of course, middle income and lower income countries. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your own work on loss and damage work or work that you think can help push the financing towards those most in need? No, absolutely. I think we have a huge campaign ahead of us this year to look at the successor to the 100 billion target, which is, you know, we need to really have a new quantifiable goal for the world in terms of how much climate finance needs to be put on the table. And we think we've had a real breakthrough in the recognition globally of the new category of loss and damage. But one of the things we're really working on this year with many others in the climate movement is looking at what can be done to raise that money and to make that connection again between inequality and climate change. Brazil has made climate a big priority of their G20. But on the financing track, they've made a global agreement on the taxation of rich people their priority. And we're trying to bring those two issues together that there's a huge financing gap. The world is not poor, but most of the world's wealth is in private hands and most of the world's wealth is in the hands of those at the very top. Equally at the same time, those at the very top and our report showed this clearly with new data, the richest 1% are responsible for two thirds of all global emissions. So the same people who have all the wealth are the same people who are in one journey and their private jets are emitting more carbon than an entire African village does in a year. So we think there's a win-win there with greater taxation, the richest, more progressive taxation, it will reduce their consumption, reduce their emissions, which has a mitigating impact and it would raise trillions in new finance which can be used not just for the global South, for the huge transitions that are also needed in the global North, where you see many rich country governments bleeding poverty and in some ways they are, they're right. I mean, they have historically high levels of debt there, they're not in a great pace fiscally, but there is plenty of wealth in rich countries but it's in the hands, in private hands. So we think that taxation of the rich this year with the opportunities in the G20 linked to a fair financing of loss and damage is something that we could really fight for and win, which would make a big difference to many people's lives. Thanks so much, Max, that's great. I was remiss not to thank our Deputy Director General for joining us on the panel, Maria Elena Cimino who's gonna provide closing remarks, so thank you for joining us. We have one more panelist joining us from India. We're honored to have with us Rima Navatni who's the Director of the Self-Employed Women's Association or SEWA. Rima has been working with SEWA for more than 30 years and has helped to expand its membership to 2.5 million members, which makes it the single largest union of informal women workers in the world. She oversees more than 4,800 self-help groups, 160 cooperatives and 15 economic federations in India, as well as work in seven South Asian countries which help to focus on women's economic empowerment by building women-owned enterprises, women-led supply chains, modern ICT-based tools and facilitating green energy initiatives. Rima is a member of the Advisory Committee of the World Bank on Gender and she has been invited to the ILO's High-Level Global Commission on the Future of Work, representing informal sector workers. And Rima, I'm really, really happy to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. I know, oh there you are, nice to see you Rima. I have a question for you where I hope you can give us some of your experience from the very large membership that SEWA has as we were mentioning. So in your experience, why does climate change affect women farmers, differently from men farmers? And what kinds of concrete actions on the ground can help the poor and women adapt more effectively to climate change? Over to you. Thank you so much. And I would like to congratulate FAO for the launch of this very important report. Sorry, I'm done with the bad viral field. Don't worry Rima, we're sorry to hear you're sick. No problem. And I think which is very really important because it highlights the disproportionate impact on women and the need for more policies and investments on climate adaptation by small farm holders. I would like to share here the lived experiences and perspectives of over 2.9 million poor women workers from the informal economy, all members of SEWA. And these members are the poorest of the poor and have always been largely and most severely affected victims of climate change. Let me explain what these numbers mean for the majority of our members, especially who are small farmers who have very tiny two acres of land on which they cultivate mainly the coarse grains which is their staple food that provides them the household consumption needs and the fodder for their cattle. And when these kind of small households or small farm households face multiple disasters one after the other in just a span of less than six months. For example, in 2023, we first experienced an extreme heat wave with temperatures soaring as high as 51 degrees centigrade. I mean, this led to acute water shortage for the household consumption as well as for the cattle. Therefore the milk production from the cattle reduced the cost of irrigation doubled. The small farmers and agriculture laborers started suffering severe health issues such as heat stress, dehydration, and other stress related illnesses. Just as the heat wave was receding, we were struck by an extreme cyclone viper joy which not only destroyed whatever little was left in the farm but also the homes and the farmers lost their cattle. Overnight, the women became homeless and they were on the streets. And as if this was not enough, the same area experienced several rounds of unseasoned rains and hail storm destroying whatever little was left in the farms. So this is why the women suffered the most and the reason being that women therefore have to work for more hours, as our report also just showed, but their income strength and as a result of that, it affects the food intake, therefore the nutrition and access to health also suffers. With whatever little income and food, women tend to give more priority to the needs of the children. All this results to a lot of trauma and stress leading further to mental health issues. And therefore I think for millions of poor informal sector women workers and their families, no disaster mitigation plan has accounted for the damage these cascading climate catastrophes caused on the lives and livelihoods. Very often the government did after these kind of climate catastrophes takes a long time to trickle down and therefore they are again compelled to go to private money lenders, which pushes them back into that vicious circle of indebtedness and poverty. But I think our experience of working with our members over five decades now have shown that these women themselves have taken on the role of first responders, adapters and solution finders on day to day basis using their own resources and technological know-how. Therefore I would like to suggest here that instead of developing programs for climate action, we need to support these women and their micro enterprises to strengthen their climate action most economically yet effectively. At SEBA we have launched what we call it as our Cleaner Skies campaign that focuses on building awareness and education on what led to climate change, what are its effects on our members' lives and livelihoods and what does it entail to build our members' resilience against these climate shocks. So we have several initiatives, we call them as our green villages where the climate entrepreneurs not just do education and awareness but do household energy planning and budgeting, offer a menu of green technologies aggregated based on the households of affordability, links them to the financial institution and brings these technologies at the village level. We also have our green skilling schools that lead to building a corridor of green technicians that therefore creates green jobs for the households. We also implement parametric heat insurance product for our members and this year SEBA will be piloting and climate all weather insurance product also. And over and above this, I think we have launched what we call it as our Climate Resilience Fund. This provides an access to small farm holders in less than 14 days time access to a loan so that they are able to stabilize their work and income. And I think this is one of the shortest way to accelerate climate action. It has also shown that there is a need now to enable these micro-entrepreneurs to be able to access green carbon credit to scale up their climate action. Scaling up of such women led climate action therefore as the report also says, call for investment. Maybe it's the loss and damage fund or the climate adaptation fund. It should be considered more as an investment and be accessible to women and their organizations. I think this is the most critical aspect. Such investment needs to be covered locally, especially through women's cooperatives and unions. We also feel that access to a healthy and safe environment is a fundamental right for all humanity and therefore women should be the leaders in this process. And last but most important, we believe in sisters to sister learning and knowledge sharing. I would really like to call upon FAO to come together and form a learning and knowledge sharing platform to strengthen the building cleaner skies campaign or how do we learn from each other and accelerate climate action, looking at the urgency under women's leadership. Thank you so much. APPLAUSE Rima, thank you. I don't know if you could see the room, but when you were giving the example of the heat stress that some of your members were facing with the 51-degree temperatures, there was a little bit of a sort of a shocked look on people's faces and so I think that that was very helpful. But also, I appreciate that you complemented that with talking about the adaptive strategies that you see women taking and the ways that you're trying to shorten the time and the difference between the access to financial supporting and cases of crises and women's ability to access that money at a rate which is fairer and allows them to escape the cycle of poverty. So thank you so much, Rima. Now we have time for a question and answer. I think that there's a number of questions in the chat, so I could start with that and maybe you, those of you in the room can think about questions you have. I think Max already asked a question maybe to Nick about differences in inequality between countries and so we could actually start with that and then there's a question about gender transformative approaches in the chat which I'd like to pose next but maybe you wanna answer Max's question first. Yeah, no, thank you, thank you Max for the question. So this is not something that we were able to look at were country-level comparisons and the reason for that is that when you start, you know, from a statistical standpoint, let's say, what we're looking at is households that are in different groups, so male and female, poor, not poor, and then households that have experienced a shock and not experienced a shock and so when you start digging in to a country level, it becomes, your sample size gets smaller and smaller and smaller and so your ability to explain relationships also decreases but I do think that there's potential at least at a country level to start looking at, you know, not digging in necessarily to the differences between poor and not poor but differences between countries and classifying them along that spectrum and using a similar methodology that we use to look at differences within countries and so that's something that I think that we should look at. I think that's a great question. Thanks, Nick. So the question from the chat was what local examples of transformative action or policies have the panelists come across that address gender inequalities which are described in the report and are part of the root causes of the impact of climate change as Aditi describes. So maybe Nick, if I can ask you to say a little bit more about the finding and the report on the potential of gender transformative and then we can pass to Rima or Aditi or Shuro for more comments. I mean, the fact is that there's not, let's say, quantitative evidence on this but we have a lot of qualitative evidence that suggests that when you work within communities and you bring out and make visible disparities in groups where men and women are brought together to discuss these things and to come up with local solutions that things start to change, that gender norms within households start to change, that relationships between men and women start to change. And this is something that we intuitively understand but bringing it to scale is also something that's difficult and something that I think we at FAO want to do and prioritize because we see clearly in the report that there's so many differences that are related to resources but there's also differences related to time burdens and abilities to access non-farm employment and to have full-time employment and so many of those are rooted in these discriminatory norms. And so this is something that I think as an organization we want to prioritize. Thanks. Rima, did you wanna add anything to that because there was a specific question about local experience? I think you started highlighting some of that but if you'd like to come back in, you're welcome. Sure, thank you. I would just elaborate on what I spoke about the green villages and I think what we did was that we did started with household energy planning and budgeting and that brought in what were the needs of the women in every household for the domestic use, for the livelihood use, for education and for mobility. And then we aggregated it at the village level and then had the entire village come together and that's how we turned them into green villages and that brought in active participation of women, not just men, but also youth. And it led to spontaneously build a cadre of climate entrepreneurs. We now call them as too young men and women who were willing to take on the role of aggregating, identifying the tools, the technology, linking them with the financial institutions. So I think those are the kinds of initiatives. Again, the whole insurance program. How do you work on collection of the premium on the claim settlement? Those are the kinds of things. But I think what I would really like to highlight here is that there is now an urgent need to take it to scale as Nick was also referring to. And one thing which is really missing is the data on the informal sector. How do they get impacted by climate? And that's the urgent need, I think. Thank you so much, Rima, for complimenting on that. There's another question in the chat, if no, oh, there's a question in person actually, right there, go ahead, please. Yeah, hi, thanks for this presentation. This looks like a very interesting report. So congratulations to Nick and the team for this work. I can't wait to read it and dig into the numbers more. I just have a couple of questions based on what I have heard so far today. I'd like to understand a little bit more how you've managed to disentangle the effect of climate change from the effect of what we call extreme events or disasters, because extreme heat, heat stress, extreme precipitation all classifies disasters, which is different from the effects of climate change. So I know Sheru mentioned that somehow in the report you've distinguished between weather shocks and climate shocks, for me both of those are shocks and hence extreme events, not the long-term impacts of climate change. So that would be very interesting. And another comment slash question, inequality has existed long before the impacts of climate change have come into effect. So how much do you think introducing social protection measures or effects to combat or strategies to combat the inequalities produced by climate change are really going to impact pre-existing inequality or development inequality as we call it, thanks. So Nick, let me pass to you for the first part of the question and then I think Sheru could also compliment on the second part of the question as well, go ahead. That's great, so thank you for the question. So I'm not sure what level of complexity I want to get into here, but let's say in the econometric model that we're using, what we do is that we have a lot of control variables. So variables that are controlling for conditions that are independent of what we're trying to look at in particular, so household characteristics, for example, level of education, et cetera. Geographic characteristics like the agroecological zone that people live in, their proximity to markets, things like that, as well as, let's say biophysical conditions, so the long-term average precipitation in an area, the long-term variability and precipitation, the long-term average temperature in the place. So we're trying to account for those long-term climate conditions, and then we introduce into the model the weather shock. And so the weather shock itself is happening in the period when the survey is asking the question. So when you ask a survey question, right, you say, in the last 12 months, what did you do, dot, dot, dot? So it's that 12 months that we're looking at. And within that 12 months, how many days of extreme heat, which we define as kind of the 99th percentile or above with respect to longer-term averages? So we can talk more about that. When it's 51 degrees Celsius outside. And when it's 51 degrees Celsius, it's certainly an extreme heat event, right? So we then introduce that in, and we interact it with the social category variable, and it's that difference that we're presenting here in terms of the report. We do something similar with the long-term change in climate. So the long-term temperature rise, which is then a separate variable. But while we're still holding these long-term conditions constant, the averages, now we're looking at the change. Does that make sense? So that's how we tried to pull it apart. I should say there's extensive technical annexes available for the report. So all of you are welcome to dig into that data and to send questions to the team. But short on the question about whether or not we can use these kinds of policies to get at the long-term drivers of inequality. Can you comment on that, please? Yeah. Thanks, Zara. Good to connect. But before I answer the question, I'd also like to just mention a couple of points on Massimo's question on inequality between countries. Our own research shows that within and across countries, climate change is exuberating, not just the inequality and poverty issue, but also because underlying inequality increases climate effects on, let's say, health, mainly health and labor protection also disintegrates in countries with higher levels of inequality. So we do have some evidence which we can complement with you. The question on disentangling development inequality and climate change in this inequality, it's a level where you start from. So the country is that this report focuses on most of them have rather high levels of inequality already and climate change essentially worsens the issue. And so we looked into South Africa versus US and US, obviously, because of the lower levels of inequality, climate change effects are the, let's say, the impact is slightly lower. Now, how do you formulate policies will obviously depend on the level and the impact of it. But that's a very interesting question. I don't think we have really thought about how you disentangle the two types of inequalities, but as an economist, it starts with the level, right? Where how you formulate and address this fundamental issue will depend on, let's say, Bangladesh, Pakistan versus, you know, where, let's say Sweden or where you start from. Thanks. There's another question in the chat and then I'm gonna take another one from the room about, well, first congratulating the team for the, both for the report and then for the presentations and panelists today. And the question is really what are the next steps given the fact that we're in a climate emergency, a concrete plans for COP 29 or as part of the UAE leaders' declaration for the Food and Climate Converges Initiative? And I thought maybe we could go to the two panelists who haven't yet answered a question for this, both Max from the standpoint of civil society, but also Aditi from the standpoint of the IPCC. So Aditi, can I pass to you first on that question, please? And then I'll pass to Max. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Lorraine. If you don't mind, can I take a question and give an example of gender transformative approaches? Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, follow on, Reema, but so one example that we have been working quite closely in the CGIR is around introduction of solar irrigation pumps, and they are obviously a clean technology, so it kind of ticks some of those boxes. But then two countries, India and Nepal, in Nepal, the way they launched the program, they made sure that some of those capital, I mean, these renewable technologies, as we know, are a very low operational cost, but very high upfront capital cost. So the scheme in Nepal kind of went ahead and looked at while dispersing subsidies, capital cost subsidies actually had a criteria in which they prioritized smallholder farmers and women farmers. They had a bit more subsidy for them, and they kind of were very, very serious in the targeting with the end result that lot more women got those pumps, but also they ran a small pilot where pump ownership was also made. Getting this additional subsidy was made conditional on owning land. So what we found in effect was some of the land was transferred in name of the women farmers so that they could get that additional subsidy. It was done not rolled out country-wide, but in a small pilot basis, but the results were quite interesting about how finance and all those other incentives can work. On the other hand, a similar program, which was actually very, very lucrative for farmers at Gujarat in the Indian state of Gujarat, the government kind of connected the solar pumps to the grid and the farmers had a choice between generating electricity and earn income versus pump water, which had also very many other positive things, but here because the program was linked to existing electricity connection, none of the beneficiaries were women. These electricity connection for wells go back to 60s and the 70s, and none of the women are actually owners of those two wells. So none of those benefits really went to women. So the way you design schemes, the way you start can also make it more gender, at least transformative is the next phase, but at least more gender inclusive. And then we have to keep at it to make it more transformative. On the question around the next steps, I think it's crucial, the UAE COP was a very important one for all of us working in the food sector, partly because of the salience that the food sector got in that COP, including the 154 countries that signed the UAE Agriculture Resilience Declaration, which practically means to up the ambition in agriculture and food. So it would be really interesting going forward in the next two, three years as the countries submit their new NAPS and NDCs to see how actually agriculture and higher ambition has been included in it. And I hope that some of the word counts that you have made in terms of inclusion of inequality, women, youth in those NAPS will change drastically because there's no way we are going to address any climate change challenge without addressing the inequality challenge. Yeah, back to you, Lorraine. Thank you so much and thanks for the great examples as well. Max, can I return it to you for the same question about next steps in COP 29? Well, I think for COP 29, as I said, the key priority is to get commitments to a new goal in terms of climate finance and really looking not just at the quantity of that finance but the quality too. And I think making sure that the new loss and damage fund is adequately funded, we think this next COP is important but we also think that COP 30 in Brazil will be absolutely pivotal to a lot of these discussions. We need to see more broadly, though, at the narrative level a recognition that the fight against inequality and the fight against climate change are the same fight. I think we can see across the rich world the way that climate policies and progressive climate policies are being weaponised by the right are being seen as impositions on ordinary working people. And again, in the global south, we don't want to give any impression that people's exit from poverty or their opportunities will be stymied or stopped because of the need to stop climate change. We think the way to square that circle, the solution to those twin goals of ending poverty and delivering prosperity for everyone on earth and living within planetary boundaries, the key to that is a massive reduction in inequality between the global south and the global north and within countries too. So this is the answer. If we can fix inequality, we can save our planet with prosperity for all. So we hope that becomes more and more of a narrative of the next COP and we're absolutely certain it will be with Brazil pushing that next year. Thanks. Thanks so much. Okay, I think we have time for one short last question in the room. Up here in the front. Thank you. And I'm Romina Gavatassi from EFAT and was lucky enough to spend one year here in FAO and contribute to this report with Nick and his team. I'm very glad to see the outcome. I wanted to come back to Aditi and no more if possible about... I liked a lot the statement in BACs are unequal and we have to start from inequality, because I think that's the key and this report clearly shows that, but that the solutions must bring equality and also to Max on the targeted finance and how policies eventually can support that because one thing that Nick showed and that we looked at how much to what extent and how the nationally determined contributions from countries we have analyzed in this report and the national adaptation plans explicitly target these groups of people and it's dramatically low. And so we were trying to make a point about how supporting countries to have a better formulation of these policies can eventually also drive finance. So I wanted to ask the panellists if they agree with this or what they think about it. Thank you. So Aditi, we are running short on time but let me pass to you for quick response on the question that was posed here and then we'll pass to Max and then we'll have closing remarks. Yes. The answer in short is yes, I agree that finance would be the key and raising a vision on climate action in NDCs and NAPs is available. It's not as if developing countries don't want to take climate action. It's very obvious that it's in their interest but in our sector but all other sector if it actually compromises their current livelihoods then they have concerns and very justifiably so. So climate finance and that if that can be so through reducing inequality for me the whole take away message has been actually something that Max said today right now is if we can fix inequality we can fix climate change and this is something I found myself nodding my head quite a bit and so yes that's certainly true that we have to raise the ambition but that has to come through financing which can be actually come through reducing inequality and the taxes. Back to you. Thank you. Max do you want to add one final thought on that? Yeah let's tax the rich and save the planet I think that would be my final remark on that one. Good that's what we needed to end thanks I think that's excellent. Okay so I'm going to turn over to Mariana Nesemedo the Deputy Director General of FAO for closing remarks so thank you so much for joining us and over to you. Thank you. Thank you Lauren and good afternoon to all maybe good afternoon good morning some of you connected I would like to start by thanking all of you for joining us here today all the panelists and all of the colleagues behind the report. I think you have a lot of work some visible others not but thank you for bringing this report to a subject that we don't talk much and I think through the report the speeches the presentation we have heard some impressive numbers some data some experience some solutions but before I start let me share with you an experience I had on Friday and I was attending the UNEA in Kenya is the United Nations Environment Assembly and we had a discussion on how the multilateralism agreement have been efficient in resolving the triple planetary crisis climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and one of the speakers was a girl 18 years old from Philippines and she put an assembly 2,000 people crying I'm still emotionally motivated and her message was we are discussing in the multilateralism we are discussing about numbers about figures but I would like to remind you that behind those figures you have people we are and she's from Philippines from a seaside coast that is about to disappear and she said please, won't you discuss those agreement bring the people to the table bring us to the table and my messages we had a very good discussion very technical discussion among ourselves but bring these people suffering injustice to discussing this report to discuss what they see a solution and I think is the only way we could us in the international organization in the multilateralism have efficient solution to not we cannot solve but how we can contribute to reduce inequalities and all the problems we are having and this is I think something that we have to keep in mind we are good we are technicians this is our work we have to do it because we have to bring the figures but bring the people to the decision making process this is very important and the bottom line of this report is climate stress is widening the rural income gaps every year by several tens of billions of west dollars and we talk about income gaps we talk about gaps among countries among even in the same country what are the inequalities we are having and these are hurting the welfare the well-being of the most vulnerable we are talking about the rural poor we are talking about the women the elderly and the ones the most marginalized in the society and with this in mind let's think about maybe three aspects that I collect from the report these numbers represent the effects of one climate stressor on one vulnerable group and one year but as it has mentioned the reality is completely different we talk about multiple shocks we talk about multiple groups and we have been living under this circumstance from decades how are you able to be more resilient to multiple shocks and bringing more complexity to the solutions second as I said behind all these figures and data lie real life narratives and solutions of individuals these numbers are not only statistics is an academic report they sum the experience of people battling against the harsh realities of climate change every single day is the the ocean is increasing is drought is floods are the daily life of these people and addressing the challenge outlining this report requires more than just acknowledging the existence it demands concerted action in the local, national and global level and I think all the panellists they come up with some solutions with some experience and this is really what we need as we move forward so as I said to bring the voices of the marginalized people or sidelined their experience in policy making and decision making process and third the report puts a stark spotlight on the lack of policy attention directed towards vulnerable rural population what we heard today less than 21% of over 4,000 climate action analyzed across 24 countries do not even mention people and livelihoods and we are talking about justice or injustice more alarming only 6% mention women 2% youth and less than 1% poor people it is time to shift the numbers we need policies and we need concerted action none of us alone can bring the solutions we need to work together across institutions across governments us saying bring the financing we need bring the solutions we need the civil society we need the government and as I said we need to move at scale and also one word I heard is the urgency to move at scale and we need policy actions and policy attention tailored to the vulnerable people the injustice climate report offers a range of recommendations it is not only about figures but you have several recommendations in the report and I think some of them we need to better we cannot avoid a climate disaster but we can better prevent and if we prevent is an investment you are making is 1 to 20 in terms of you have better prevention we need financing and we refer to the question of taxation how the ones the rich people they can contribute to taxes to have enough services we refer to the loss and damage fund we hope in COP 29 we will be able to have enough funds and we need a social protection program and how we link the social protection program with advisory services to have gender transformative solutions scaling up participatory extension methodologies to investing meaningful and disaggregated data and as we have today we have solutions we have idea and we know what it takes FAO the colleagues will continue to take this discussion forward collecting the solutions collecting ideas that we can come to concrete actions to make climate justice a reality for all you talk about COP 29 and COP 30 I think it will be an important moment to bring this report I hope we can take the information in the report to the climate negotiation that our negotiation they can understand what they are discussing about we have also the goal on adaptation it will be also a moment where we can bring this report and we can have the COP as you know we have the negotiation and we have the presidency track how we can bring this to the attention of the presidency of COP 29 that is Azerbaijan and they want to work with FAO we can take this report as one of our flags in COP 29 those are some ideas that came to my mind and also we are talking about COP 29 but this year we have the opportunity we have three COPs and I don't see them disconnected we have the COP on biodiversity biodiversity loss is also bringing injustice because it's affecting the lively use of people is affecting food security and we have the COP on desertification these people they are talking about they are living where we have land degraded they cannot have they cannot have real life and they are migrating because they have the conditions where they are and how we can also this is just one idea I'm thinking loudly to think also this report as a connector to the three COPs we will be having ahead of us let's work together let's to see how we can give voice and priority to the vulnerable I would like again to think to thank all our distinguished speakers whose expertise passion have enriched our understanding of climate justice let's also look for a just transition to a better world and her thanks to the team behind the injustice climate report whose rigorous research and dedication have provided us with this valuable report and finally again thank to all of you and let's keep in mind that in front of us we have people thank you thank you so much for the closing remarks and also for the good ideas about going forward and for reminding us about the human face behind the numbers that we're discussing here I want to thank everyone who joined virtually and all of you who stayed in the room our panelists Nick thank you so much to the team for the excellent presentation I encourage you all to look at the full report which you can find using the QR code or search for it online where you can find much more information about the findings and for those of you that are here in the room we also will have a reception outside so we welcome you to the reception outside so thank you very much and have a good afternoon