 Well, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Can you hear me? No. Is that any better if I come closer? Yes, it is. Excellent. So let me give you a very warm welcome to this evening's Royal Philosophical Society lecture. My name is Adrian Bowman. I am a council member and I have the great pleasure of chairing tonight's event. Thank you for making the effort to join us through rather challenging weather and welcome to to those of you who are listening in online. Let me deal immediately with the usual housekeeping issues. For those of you who haven't been in the building before, there are toilets downstairs and an accessible one outside in the foyer. This is from the main entrance and the signpost the door at the back. And finally, a reminder if you wouldn't mind to switch off your mobile phone, I will do the same, so that we have no embarrassing interruptions. Thank you. Now, our first lecture of the 2023 to 24 season. If you recall, discuss the rise and fall of the dinosaurs highlighting among other things the huge changes brought about by major climate change. Our second lecture dealt with the extinction of the great talk with human activity, bringing significant changes to its environment. Forgive me for pursuing the ornithological metaphor, but this evening in our third lecture these teams come home to roost so to speak, not in the past, but in the present and the near future. Climate change is one of the most challenging issues that we all face. And one of the consequences commonly mentioned is the possibility of significant human migration. So this evening, we have the benefit of hearing from Professor Neil Adger, who is a world expert on this topic. He is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter, a clear indication of his scientific standing is the extent to which his work is highly cited by other scientists. He studied and engaged with many different aspects of migration, and in places across the globe from Bangladesh to the Somerset levels. He is an alternating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and so he's uniquely well placed to speak on the issues of tonight's lecture. Neil, I congratulated the audience on winning through against today's weather. So I'll thank you even more for having made the journey from Exeter by train today, very successfully and completely on time that's a real achievement. But at some point during towards the end of Neil's talk, you might hear me shout out. That's not an expression of dismay at the content of the lecture, but an instruction from Neil to give him little signal on the timing of tonight's events. So thank you very much for coming Neil. It's a great pleasure to invite you to give tonight's lecture. Thank you so much, Adrian, and thanks to all of you for coming this evening. My thesis this evening is that climate change is going to affect the economic geography of the whole world, every corner of the world. By that I mean it's going to affect what we do, how we live our lives, what we make, what we trade. And the result of that, the result of this changing economic geography of the world because of climate change will affect where we live and where we move. And this is a profound consequence of climate change that we might not notice. We might not notice it on an everyday basis, but is a long term process of change in terms of our settled settlement patterns where we move and decisions that we individually make around this. I'll also suggest this evening that climate change related migration is already happening. And it is happening even though even in places that you wouldn't expect and certainly in places that you would expect climate change to be a big factor in terms of migration. But it's not the dominant thing that is driving migration at the minute, it's not the principal factor that is driving migration because migration happens everywhere and it happens all the time, and it is as natural as breathing. It may become, it may well become a more dominant factor in how migration happens, migration as a social and demographic phenomenon in future. So although it's not a major factor at present, it may become more so in the future. This also has profound consequences, I would argue, on what we do, how we plan our cities, how we cooperate globally, and how we plan for this changing economic geography. So let's just start by thinking what we mean by migration. There are north of seven billion people in the world and quite a lot of us are migrants. I'm going to speak about migration as a social scientist, as a geographer and as a demographer would. So in some senses it's a technical term and it means nothing more than moving your permanent place of residence across a jurisdictional boundary. So if you think about it, many, many people in the world are, by that definition, a lifetime migrant. I have an admission to make, and my admission to make in front of this audit in front of you all is that I've never lived in Wales, but I have lived in the other three nations of the United Kingdom. And according to the Office of National Statistics, that does make me a lifetime migrant. I've lived in a couple of other countries as well, but it makes me a lifetime migrant. And so if you think about your own situation, so it depends where you draw these jurisdictional boundaries, and in terms of definitions of what we mean as social scientists whenever we talk about migrants and migration, it doesn't have to be across international borders. In the public discourse probably in your minds when you think about migration, you principally think about people moving across international borders. And so migration is conflated with or is only really thought about in terms of international migration. And again, in the public and political discourse around migration, the consequences of migration are thought about in terms of identity in terms of multiculturalism in terms of social cohesion in terms of people fleeing from war and persecution. And also some elements of this in terms of the economics of migration, in terms of its effect on labour markets, it's a depression of wages for the places where people are moved to issues around brain drain. People in countries and regions losing skilled workers. And all of these factors are completely irrelevant and are really important ways that we dimensions of migration are completely important things to talk about. But when I talk about migration here I'm going to be talking principally just about that decision to move from one place to another. And all of these decisions to move of which there are, which are all taken individual taken within households, it's a sort of bargain between people within the households have consequences, and all of them are affected by climate change going forward. So, again, we're speaking here at the philosophical society I just wanted to make sure that we are defining our terms very well before we start off. And that's what I'm going to be talking about. But just to put some flesh on this and the sort of scale and the scope of what we're talking about globally, and is that we're a much more mobile world than we realize in our day to day lives are a bit sedentary, or sedentary in our everyday life. But, but perhaps we don't move that often and we have this, as it's known as sedentary bias we think that everyone else doesn't move as well. So let's just have a think about this. There are 7 billion people on more than 7 billion people on the planet. And in my way of thinking about migration as I've just outlined to you, possibly a seventh of the world's population well over a billion people have moved during their lifetime. International migration stocks are only a small relatively small fraction of that the stock of the world's population that moved across an international border in their lifetime in terms of permanent residence is about 3%. That's round about 250 million people. What's that about four times the population of the UK are basically international migrants at present. Most migration is internal to countries. That takes it from 280 billion up to around about a billion so that's more like one in seven of the world's population. This has not changed. This has been pretty stable this 3% of the world's population for about 30 or 40 years, where a massively more globalized economy and a massively more globalized world. But yet the rate the propensity for international migration has stayed round about the same around about 30 sorry 3% of the world's population. The other big thing that we think about when we think about migration is forced or involuntary movement associated with war and persecution. That is right about 0.3% of the world's population. It's right about 40 to 60 million people. Depending on when you want to take a take the average and over the last number of decades that number is going down. That's good to say over the course of a couple of generations and certainly was highest probably at the end of the Second World War. This fluctuated very dramatically and as a consequence and we're talking here about refugees would mean people moving as recognized by the Geneva Convention for fleeing war and persecution and constitutes. Yeah, it goes up and down with particularly in the last decade with the wars in Syria wars in Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine. So that is a just a sort of picture or a set of numbers about the scale and the scope of this. So it's very common. It's happening all over the world and it's happening mainly within countries. What's climate change got to do with this. Well here's just a couple of sources or a couple of projections by some authoritative sources, which don't worry if you can see these I'll read them to you or I'll give you the gist of them. Climate change effects are expected to increase global tensions. Again, this notion that that migration is only ever involuntary or principally or that type of migration that we're worried about is involuntary migration. As nations complete for scarcer resources threatening health and human rights and triggering conflict and mass migration. So this projection that mass migration may be a consequence of climate change in the future, along with interstate conflict of wars between countries and threatening health and human rights. And the deadly heat waves. So this is chronic heat. This is a slight different point that hundreds of millions, possibly billions would have to move. So migration might be or disinforced movement might be in the order of billions, likely resulting in severe and extended conflict. So this is lots of people having to move on that then causing conflict. This is pretty much a sort of received wisdom in the climate science community. These two sources are, and basically the Council of Economic Advisors report of President Biden's office last year is the top one. This is their annual report. So it's saying that the US is taking climate change seriously because it might result in conflict and mass migration. And the discussion at the bottom is by Nicholas Stern, Lord Stern, the very well known climate change economist along with Joe Stiglitz is co-author who's also a Nobel Prize winning economist or the Bank of Sweden's economics prize in honour of Alfred Nobel. So two very eminent sources. Why are they saying this? Or what's the evidence base for this? Or, you know, does this matter? They're saying it really for two reasons. First of all is it's a justification for significant climate action. It's saying we need to do something about climate change, decarbonise the economy in effect, because we really need to avoid these are potentially catastrophic things that in both the natural world and in the human world that are likely to be significantly negative consequences associated with climate change. So let's do something about it. That's President Biden's office. And then secondly, the economists are concerned about this because most of the economic analysis says we'll be able to cope with climate change because climate change may have consequences to the economy at the margins, but nothing very catastrophic. And therefore, we need to trade off the cost of decarbonising the economy with actually doing something with our ability to adapt. And Nick Stern and Joe Stiglitz are basically saying, no, you've got it wrong. We need to do something about climate change because there are all these other consequences of climate change that are not economic. Right. So what does the evidence from demographers or people who've worked in this area actually say, again, I don't need you to read these. I'm just putting up a couple of sources to show that this is a significant scientific arena for cross disciplinary research. And on the right, you see this report by the World Bank a couple of five years ago now, and by a group of economists and others in the World Bank called and the this report called Groundswell. They basically say that climate change is going to cause displacement of people because of the impact of weather related extremes. Storms, floods, fires are going to displace people and their best estimation was 140 million people by the end of this decade. But they said virtually all of these will be within companies and quite a lot of these will be temporary movements and people will go back to where they live before. So this projection, at least over the next decades or, you know, in the in the near future is for quite a lot of displacement associated with extreme events and a lot of that to be temporary only temporary movement and temporary migration. And the paper on the left from colleagues at the Peace Research Institute at the University in Oslo, Preo, and actually looked at asylum applications so looked globally at where people moved and who were who claimed asylum, who were, you know, either destitute who moved because of persecution or conflict. And was there actually any climate signal in the, in what we've seen so far in asylum claims, and they found that there weren't that climate climate climatic conditions, extreme weather and that sort of thing basically do not explain do not drive where people are moving from associated with asylum claims and serve irregular migration. And they say that what does explain it is basically the incidence of conflict and persecution, as you would expect. So, when the demographers and the political scientists get into this, they basically say that environmental change isn't a, isn't a principal driver of sorry, yeah, that environmental change and climate change is not a principal driver of the sorts of migration that we're seeing at the minute, that climate change does alter potentially and amplify and potentially even suppress some migration flows. So there's a risk that it will happen in the future, but it's principally local, and it's principally internal to countries. So can though there's a bit of a paradox here between these two slides authority voices from the President of the United States and his, and his office through to the scientists looking at this coming up with rather contested outcomes sort of paradoxical almost can they both be right? Well, the answer to that is, this is a live and empirical research question. And what we really need to do is to go back to the basics, go back to how we understand what migration is, how it works and and actually look on the ground and see whether or not this is likely to happen. And that is what myself and many of my colleagues and in the research community have been doing now for around about 15 to 20 years. Some of this coalesced around a major investment by the UK government to answer this question. And this is just the front cover of a report called migration and global environmental change that comes from the government office of science. The government office of science is within the Westminster government and it's basically the office of the chief scientific officer, the chief scientist of chief scientific advisor of the government. By 1015 years ago, the chief scientist was Sir John Bennington, and he had this notion that he put across government departments and said, we've got perfect storm coming. That perfect storm is climate change, food insecurity, population growth and all these are going to come together in this perfect storm and are going to be really, really serious for the UK and for the globe. And we need to be to have foresight for the government to be looking ahead and planning for cross departmentally, not only the UK government but all governments for these coming storm associated with climate change. And part of that, John put to us was actually the issue of migration. So, he charged a number of us, an expert group to actually come to a definitive to look at this in depth, and we managed to engage with the global research community with, you know, colleagues all over the world and we put together this evidence report on, you know, the, you know, the underlying so leaving aside these possibly alarmist statements or leaving aside a sort of look on the ground that says I can't really see any climate change signal here. What are we likely to find what are the principles the demographic principles behind this question. And this is what we came up with. And again, I'm not expecting you to read this. And but basically what we said was that you can see in the middle here we've got decisions this blue circle says every household every person in the world has a decision whether where to live and whether or not that decision is in some senses voluntary and there's lots of agency or involuntary, it's to move or to stay. And that happens with demographic regularity. What that means is that people of a certain age tend to move. Most migration happens in your life during your life course between 18 and 35 people are more likely to move during that period that any other period in their life. So migration is a young person's activity. Right. So we know that demographic regularity, but we know that it's driven on that. These forces are, you know, these underlying factors represented in this Pentagon that actually drive these the social the political the economic the environmental and the demographic dimensions, the underlying drivers of how migration actually works. And the principle one of those is the economic dimension in economic terms, migration is just about the movement of labor. It's to do with special inequality in the in the economy. In other words, people move where they're going to get a better job. And we know that and that economic driver is absolutely key to understanding what I'm by thesis for tonight as I talked about the economic geography of the world that economic driver is the most important one. But climate change is going to affect all these particular drivers, the demographic drivers, the environmental dimensions to this and the economic drivers. So climate change is going to affect the relative attractiveness of some places for from where people move from and for people move to. And we found whenever we reviewed evidence for this foresight report, but this was already happening, and that this was happening for the major migration flows that there are in the world. The single biggest migration flow in the world, just in terms of within countries has been in China, over the course of the last two generations, probably 200 million people have moved in China from rural China to urban China in the last 30 or 40 years. That's the single biggest movement of people we've seen anywhere on the planet. And that's largely driven by the industrialization of China on that move to more to manufacturing and and the relative unattractiveness of staying in rural China. And that sort of thing. But the other thing that we found, again, represented in this in this two dimensional diagram is that for any that who moves or the social distribution of who moves is captured here that the better off you are you don't need to again to understand this or to look at this in detail. But basically what this says is the better off you are the more resources you have, the more networks you have, the more capital you have behind you, you're going to be more mobile. So this is this positive line. This positive line this rising blue line basically shows you that with increasing with a high levels of well being terms of income, natural and social capital, you have an increased ability to move. So the better off you are the more the easier it is for you to move. And probably the better off you are the lesser going to be impacted by climate change. The inverse of that holds true that the less well off you are. The more you're likely to be live in places that themselves are vulnerable to climate change. And whenever you take those two things together you'll see that the people least most affected by climate change are least likely to move. And what that results in, as we've written here is what we refer to as trapped populations. So the people. So the problem is not that there is too much migration as a result of climate change, but that there is too little mobility and too little migration as a result of climate change. And the people who really need to move don't have the resources, the savings, the capital, the networks and everything else that they need to move because moving from one place to another is actually pretty costly, pretty costly in terms of your life, livelihood, your resources, your emotional ability and your competences. So this sort of these are the principles behind it. So to get into some detail of what this looks like on the ground. I've been involved in a significant and research and effort that goes to those places that actually that that all these estimates of climate refugees actually come from. The idea that there are going to be 10s of millions or mass migration as put by President's President Biden's office comes from these ideas and these estimates of hundreds of millions of people moving because of where they're going to live is going to be uninhabitable. And the greatest density and most populous places where that are are low lying coastal zones around the world, particularly in the world's deltas. Myself and colleagues have been engaged in research in deltas over the past 10 years, and we looked in particular deltas where if we're going to find some climate change related migration and find some climate refugees. This is where they're going to be. And we looked in detail at three deltas in Africa and Asia. These are the fault of delta and the delta in the southern part of Ghana it's all virtually within one country of the fault of river. The Ganges Brahmaputra Delta, which straddles India and Bangladesh, and is the single largest delta in the world and probably has about 60 million people, which is the population of the UK living in it. And the Mahanadi Delta in Odisha in eastern India, smaller delta, again, largely, but the whole Mahanadi River and the Mahanadi Delta being within one country. And so we've looked extensively and we've talked to lots of people with lots of our partners in Ghana, India and Bangladesh to look at the migration flows associated with those places and whether or not there is migration associated with these places. So if we're going to find any climate change migration and climate change refugees, this is where they're going to be. So what we find is that the populations are relatively stable, but declining a little bit in all of these deltas. This is just two maps showing the Mahanadi Delta and the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta, the part of the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta in India, across the border from Bangladesh. And where the people are actually moving to from those particular areas. And you'll see these arrows and it basically shows that virtually all the migration from these places are actually within the state, but this shows the interstate migration. So there's no international migration in effect from these or virtually no international migration from these delta areas. People are moving out, but they're moving to other areas of India. Most of what where they go in both of these cases Ganges Brahmaputra and in the Mahanadi is to Kolkata, the large city of Kolkata on the East Coast. So the movements are predominantly internal. There's various forms of mobility, some of it permanent but quite a lot of it circular and quite a lot of it seasonal. So people move out of these deltas, move to the city, earn a bit of money, remit some of that money. I send that money back and also move back to the deltas either during their lifetime or even on a yearly basis. And there's a limited but certainly unidentifiable environmental or climate signal within what's going on here. So we do see that climate change is affecting migration patterns in these deltas. But at present, what we're seeing is business as usual, which is the movement of people from these rural areas to urban areas because of the same has happened in China. The relative attractiveness of moving to the city in terms of your life, livelihood, economic opportunities and educational opportunities for your children. This is just the same result for Bangladesh and just drawn in a slightly different way in a circular plot, which shows at the bottom the delta and the destination for the migration from that. And we can see that the migration from the delta of Bangladesh, which everyone considers or thinks about as being the ground zero of climate change in terms of sea level change and the loss of the Sunderban National Park and the rest of it. And that basically people are moving to three large cities to Dhaka to Colna and to Chittagong, which is the second large city also now known as Chattagram. And so you can see exactly the same again from our sample surveys of that there is virtually there's a little bit of international bit more international migration from Bangladesh but hardly any and basically people are moving to the cities. So. There are a billion migrants in the world, and we can look at just looking at these sorts of places. We look at, you know, so just giving you the terminology here the source or the origin the places where people move from and the destination people places where people move to. And we can see that that the in terms of sources is the changing life, you know the changing food security the changing ability to farm the increasing salinization of water courses in lowline deltas that's affecting the people's prospects for the future. And these economic and educationals which is basically for the next generation, you know draw to move to the cities, the destination cities where there is these potential for increased material well being. And we can see the motivations and we can actually then directly ask people about those motivations for moving and whether or not they have succeeded. But we also want to look at aspirations for the future and whether or not these environmental changes degradation of the environment. Economic insecurity are also driving their aspirations of people who are living in source areas whether or not they're likely to their propensity to their likelihood that they're going to move in future if that's going to be amplified by the prospect of climate change. So these two questions, we report on, you know, just giving you some sources here and some papers and I've just put this up because the title explains exactly what we find that perceived environmental risks and insecurity in source areas. So in these deltas, we asked lots of farmers and farming communities, whether or not they were whether or not they perceived there were environmental risks and whether or not that was going to accelerate or reduce their likelihood of migrating in the future. So we find that it actually reduces future migration intentions in these hazardous migration source areas. So in other words, putting that simply, the impact of environmental change and environmental risk means that people are less likely to move, not more likely to move. The reason for that is known as the resource constraint hypothesis, or put simply is the fact that it's quite costly to move. And if you have bad years you don't have the savings, either to send one of your sons or daughters to the city, or to actually pack up and leave the whole, you know, leave entirely. So this is an observation of what we refer to as trapped populations. And just one other result from this study, this is where we asked people in those source areas in those deltas, what were the what was the principal motivation for people in your household leaving these were all households where in the Ganges, So this is just the Bangladesh, some sample here or the people we spoke to in Bangladesh, then basically all of them said there's economic reasons they left. A few of them said that there were social reasons, you know, education for their kids and the rest of it. And you'll see this third column here is basically environmental reasons. So basically hardly anyone, hardly anyone, and this is the same in Bangladesh, the same in India and the same in Ghana said that migration had happened because of environmental reasons. So we went looking for climate migration and climate migrants. And if you ask people. So in terms of self reported motivations for moving. No one said, virtually no one said it was environmental or climate reasons. So we went looking for climate migrants, we didn't find them. But people did tell us that they were extraordinarily exposed to climate risks, like cyclones, floods, salinity, which is increasing salinization, increasing soil levels, salt levels in the soil, which makes it much more difficult to grow crops, particularly rice, drought, storm surges and erosion. So the, you know, their perceptions of exposure to environmental risk were high. Virtually everyone and their perceptions of how that changed were all was also going up. So people felt more insecure in these places. But whenever we correlated this and looked at it in detail, this meant that their aspirations to move or probably or their expectations that were going to move were actually diminished. So this was any these are all examples of places where people are less likely to move rather than more likely to move. What happens whenever they do move right so this is the other part of the migration story. So we've looked at source. Now we're looking at destination. So in Bangladesh, people move to three cities, as I said, Kulna, Dhaka, and Chittagon, which is the second largest city, the Port Sea. Also now known as Chattogram, I'll refer to as Chattogram. So basically where do people move from they moved from on the graph on the left they moved from basically the immediate divisions, the immediate regions of Bangladesh from southern Bangladesh, the Delta region into the city. When Bangladesh became independent in 1971. Chattogram was about a million and a half people. It's now five and a half million people. And because people are having lots of children there I it's not natural population growth. It's basically all driven by migration. So for, you know, getting on for four million people have moved into the city from the surrounding areas. Chattogram has grown topsy turvy in the course of a lifetime, mainly because of the growth of jobs. And most of those jobs are in things like the garment industry. And if we actually all go out the labels of the clothes that we're wearing tonight we'd find at least a proportion of all the clothes that are being worn in this room were made in Chattogram. And as made in Bangladesh was probably made in Chattogram in hundreds of garment factories, thousands of garment factories, the migration to Chattogram is also really quite unusual, because it tends to be women rather than men. I'll not go into the detail of that but let's look at the life and livelihoods of people living there. If we're going to have if this is going to be the trend, and this is where climate change is really going to bite if this is going to be the crucible of it in growing cities because of migration into cities for reasons of economic, you know, economic and other reasons. Then this is where we're going to find trap populations and this is where we're going to have to deal with the consequences of climate change. And therefore this is where adaptation is going to have to happen. And again, in our studies with our Bangladeshi colleagues, we actually began to look at this problem and we said that then that our thesis or hypothesis in this research is that to make safe and sustainable and resilient cities. What we need is to be able to integrate or to deal with the fact that people are moving there, that this growth these rapidly growing cities are basically going to have to integrate their new populations into planning for the cities and make them actually more sustainable and safe in the context of climate change going forward. And the reason for that is really captured within the sustainable development goals that you might have heard of. So every country in the world from the United Nations have signed up to these sustainable development goals. And there is a sustainable development goal about cities. It's called SDG 11 of the 17. They're all numbered 117 and SDG 11 is about sustainable cities and communities. And it has a number of goals that by 2030 to ensure safe and affordable housing and to increase the capacity for sustainable settlement planning to protect the poor and vulnerable and poor people in vulnerable situations to increase air quality and environmental things like waste management to give access to green spaces and and to link rural to to their hinterlands. So this is what we mean and a targets and goals associated with making these sorts of places rapidly growing cities from Glasgow to Chittagong safe resilient and and sustainable. And we do that in places like Chittagong. What we did in this particular instance as social scientists was to do something that we refer to as action research. Action research is slightly different to experimental research, and it's slightly different to what we might just refer to as ordinary research or observational research. But action research means actually trying to create some social change and then studying that social change from the inside out as it's going on. It's quite difficult to do has all sorts of ethical dilemmas associated with doing action research, but I'll just explain what that means in this context so we did some action research. And what we did was we tried to integrate some migrants into the city planning process, we tried to give them voice, and we tried to increase their, you know, to try to bring about this thesis, which is we need to integrate migrants into city planning or they won't be sustainable. So we tried to make that happen by giving them voice and increasing the empathy of city planners towards the migrants who had been moved to their. This is just a flow diagram of the different processes we went to. And part of this was done using or known as visual methods and visual methods within the social sciences. And this is a technique known as photo voice. So what we did was we recruited quite a lot of the city planners within Chittagong the people who are making the decisions to build the infrastructure that now allows for five and a half million people. And we gave each of them cameras, or their mobile phones and we said go out and tell us take photographs of what you mean by a safe, sustainable and resilient city. And then we recruited the same number of new migrants to the city people who had moved to work in the garment industry, or people who were just living in the, or who were working in the informal sector in slums in Chittagong. And if they didn't have a smart phone, we gave them a camera or we gave them a phone we said go out and take photographs and tell us what I say if sustainable and resilient city means to you. Some people took 100 photographs in over a couple of weeks. Some people took 1000. And what we did was we sat down with each of those, you know, individuals and went through it and said, give us, give us what what this, you know, what this means to you or pick as your favorite photographs or your most meaningful photographs of the issues that you think really constitutes safety and sustainability here in the city. And you would imagine that the planners would actually have rather different photographs from from the from migrants, new migrants into the city. And there's certainly a big a symmetry of big difference in the sort of power here some people are making decisions some people are the people who are recipients of these decisions. But actually using these methods and everyone had their three photographs that they chose and were most important we brought them together. And we said, okay, let's share these, and let's actually have a common dialogue about and put each put sit in each other's shoes and, you know, and build some empathy between different communities about what constitutes safety and sustainability. And this has been incredibly successful and you know, and very well received by all the city planners and they said we don't have this sort of information that comes from the migrant communities about what's going on. The other the great thing about visual methods is, is then actually narratives around what these recipients told us about the photographs. And the great thing about a camera is that points out. And it basically gives you a narration and being able to explain you know it takes a photograph of the world around you. That's what we expect it. That's not what we got what we got actually was a lot of selfies. So the technology has changed so the camera is no longer outward facing is now putting yourself at the center of this. And this is one of our recipients. He's, we just referred to him CP seven is a city planner in Chittagong. I'll not tell you his name we've anonymized him, and he took this fantastic photograph, and you can see that he's basically sitting on the back of a rickshaw going to work. And he's going down the middle of a street and it's flat and you know so they're all these environmental issues going on in Chittagong. Yeah. And he's talked about waterlogging being a regular phenomenon. He didn't take a photograph of the rickshaw driver, the guy that was pulling him along took a photograph of himself at the center of this and this was his whatever. And, but he was fantastic just in terms of recognizing what these things were. This is also he also handed the phone to someone else who took another photograph of him so the same person. And this is him. And this is down on the waterfront in Chittagong and sort of recognizing the benefits of place and you know how people are proud of Chittagong when they're there and they like to congregate in the importance of green and open space for their life and livelihood. And with the photographs, you think oh that was just a mistake someone's the foot the camera was pointing to the ground and it doesn't really you know what is that that was a mistake, but this was a very meaningful photograph taken by M3 one of our migrants and it's basically sandbags out the back of their house so what that is on the left is you can see this is the back entrance of their house and the corrugated it's in there. And this is the story they told us about their landlord and about the insecurity they felt and the, you know, despite the flooding in their neighborhood, the landlord wasn't doing anything about it and said and basically said if you don't like it leave. And so housing tenure, and these sort of things are major problems and this is not something that you would anticipate that you know this is not these photographs are not taken for their aesthetics. Or for you know they're not going to win any competitions photography competitions but they're incredibly meaningful because they actually highlight what constitutes safety and sustainability for these places. What's that photographs some kids food and well that's actually a plaster on you know, one of the sorry I don't have the respondents number there. This is one of the women who took this and it was actually one of their kids and who'd been bathing in the river and actually got cut by glass and had to wrap up and they were really worried about infections because of water quality and so these were the sorts of issues that people raised and sort of photographs that they took. And I again just to show us. So what some of these issues where and what these risks of living in the city are coming from the migrants perspectives are actually about water logging in these low lying some areas landslides and hilly areas, the risk of eviction from illegal settlements and so insecure in security and inadequate access to services like education discrimination and job markets and not accessibility of water not accessibility of toilets and various other things. So this method actually brings all these brings these issues to the fore and you know and lots of other issues. So this photograph and again is very meaningful. And the person taking it is the respondent is the guy in the blue shirt there on the on the right. And this is really meaningful to him, and because he was from an ethnic minority in Chittagong her and from the Chittagong hill track. And ethnic minority which are from the hills and eastern Bangladesh and many of them, and I live in Bangladesh in Chittagong city. And the person on the third on the left there with the white shirt is the mayor of Chittagong. And this was showing solidarity from the mayor, coming to the opening of this new Community Center for the, and in this case, the Buddhist ethnic minority in Chittagong. And this happened at a time when the Rohingya refugees were coming across the border in Chittagong just down the road, and are now in a large refugee camp, and what this showed what and so the, in the majority Muslim Bangladesh. And it was, you know, this idea that this was the Buddhist majority in Myanmar that were oppressing the Rohingya refugees and people in Buddhist minorities in Chittagong were very worried that they were going to get the blame for this and the rest of it. And so the solidarity with the, with the mayor of Chittagong coming along and saying, you know, you're part of the community and the rest of it. So, all of these different aspects about what constitutes migrant well being city their perception of their integration in the city, and all these environmental risks and challenges, you know, we can actually begin to map from all this data coming using these social methods and also from all these interview methods and some survey work that we did, and it basically shows the dimensions that it's beyond material well being an education that it is ideas of dignity social well being an integration, and it's health that they are consequential for migrant populations and constitute safe and sustainable cities in this case, and the city planners were blown away by this because they did not have this sort of information that that and we're not building this into what they were doing in terms of the master plan for the city. And I think I'll skip over some of these but just to say that we're also in the survey data, what we also show is that live it that this city living, particularly in low income neighborhoods is actually really stressful, and that we find high levels of anxiety and depression and measure for the first time this is unpublished data is yet and but high levels of anxiety high levels of stress and low levels of life satisfaction. So, although life might become materially better and moving to the city. It actually isn't for everyone. And actually you find them that these environmental risks and these issues of discrimination mean that people do not have happy lives. But what we from this and again I don't expect you to read this actually managed to promote within this is the set of principles and a set of ideas and some very specific ideas about places about where entrepreneurs should be able to sell markets about reform of the tenure system and you know what landlords were allowed to do within the city plan of Chittagong in terms of where migrants live, where they work and what the city is expected to do for them. So this action research did bring about some action and actually help possibly moved us towards a more safe and sustainable city in the sorts of places where people are moving to where the climate risks are equally as large in the place they're moving to as they are in the places they're moving from. This actually is promoted globally or these ideas are now being looked at in cities across the world. There is a progressive set of mayors called the Mayors Migration Council are sort of spin off of another set of progressive mayors in the group of are known as the C 40 group of mayors C 40 is you know, mayors of this is climate 40 so 40 mayors of big metropolitan cities all around the world are similar to act on climate and a subgroup of them, including the mayor of DACA, North DACA in Bangladesh, including the mayor of Bristol in the UK, I put out this set of principles, and on what cities should be doing in terms of climate change and migration. And it's 10 principles, and these were launched here in Glasgow, two years ago at the conference of the 26th conference of the parties of climate change convention, the city mayors came here. And this is what they said and again I'm not expecting you to read this, but they have 10 principles for what cities could and should be doing for and to deal with this issue of climate change. And those basically include making cities more and more open to migrants coming in particularly migrants playing the consequences of climate change, but also making cities themselves more safe and sustainable from flood risk. Walking up, you know, Buchanan Street this afternoon to all the way through to decarbonising and making, making cities themselves, you know, progressive in terms of dealing with the climate issue. Five minutes, thanks. We've taken this challenge and and again with a group of economists myself and a number of environmental scientists, ecologists and an economist and we've sort of mapped out what these challenges might be. And we basically have argued that it really depends on how climate change is going to unfold and what the relative shape of these different challenges is going to be. If we are going forward in a sort of low my in a world that isn't any more mobile than we have at the minute. And where international migration rates are going to stay together, you know, stay at the same level at 3%, you know, 3% of the world population. So if there's no major demographic change, you know, a stabilization of the population globally, then it really depends. So this is what we've referred to in the lower part of this is low mobility or no changing mobility. Then it really depends on whether or not we're moving from a low impact climate world, or a high impact climate world. So climate change growth and climate change turns out not to be so significant. We still need to do adaptation in cities that I've just talked about in Chicago, we still need to make cities safe and sustainable. We're going to have to redouble our efforts. If we're actually cities are going to be if we're as we move to having from about 55% of all the world's population living in cities as we have at the minute to possibly stabilizing around about 785 or 80% of all the world's population living in cities. So as we move from seven to nine billion people and a stabilization at that level. We're going to have a lot more people living in cities, and we're going to have to make cities much more resilient to the impacts of climate change, because a lot of people are going to move there. But slightly more worst case world, we're going to be faced with equal dilemmas in a high climate change impact world but with low mobility on the top left, you can see the key issue is the idea this issue of trapped populations that people are going to be trapped in rural areas as we're already beginning to see and they're going to be trapped socially immobile and physically immobile in cities. And therefore, you know this is going to be a huge issue in terms of humanitarian assistance associated with extreme weather events. We're going to have to get, you know be much more proactive in terms of disaster preparedness, and in actually in planning for relocation of people from places where they're no longer likely to be. There is international movement on this. I talked about the Mayor's Migration Council. I talked about adaptation, there are adaptation funds within the Framework Convention on Climate Change. But one of the big other impetus in this area is this idea, which also came to the forefront in COP26 in Glasgow and was formalized here around the idea of loss and damage. Loss and damage from climate change is basically an articulation as articulated in the Paris Agreement of the Climate Change Convention that the impacts of climate change that we can't adapt to these losses and damaging damages that we're experiencing from climate change in the present day and increasing in the future should be compensated for those most vulnerable countries. And this has been pushed very hard by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, i.e. the 50 countries in the world, the 50 out of the 200 countries in the world that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. And many of these, led by Bangladesh, are the least developed countries. This is just a fantastic image. It was public art. It sort of lit up the streets of Glasgow two years ago whenever I was here. And it was a public art installation. If you saw it was actually just outside the COP negotiations down on the river, down at the conference center. And also this issue really lit up the whole of the COP26 as well. One of the ways that loss and damage is spoken about is actually economic losses and damages, but also non-economic loss and damage. So other things that we really care about. And within the Framework Convention on Climate Change, there are nine of those. And they include cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge and loss of artifacts, physical artifacts, and the loss of cultural integrity and place to live, and citizenship, the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the loss of health. So these are all losses and damages that we should be compensating those parts of the world. But also one of these is mobility. So how do we deal with this? How do we say should we be compensating people or facilitating people to move as a result of climate change? So this COP26 here in Glasgow, this has been now formalized at COP27 in Charmel Shake, and we have a committee that's actually moving to generate a very significant global fund on loss and damage. How would we allocate funds towards issues like mobility and migration under loss and damage? That's actually one of the key dilemmas and challenges that we're actually moving towards in this. Scotland actually had a significant part to play in this. You'll notice the first minister of Scotland two years ago was actually the first government anywhere in the world to actually pledge money to this loss and damage fund. It was £2 million, followed by another £5 million. It probably needs $100 billion. So it's a drop in the ocean, but it was a recognition that this is a climate justice issue by the first minister two years ago. And this is just a sort of treat by Nicola Sturgeon in her great meeting with an advocate, a fantastic advocate of climate change and loss and damage. A Bangladeshi scientist called Salimal Hook sitting on the left there who had these lovely interactions with Nicola Sturgeon. Salimal Hook died last Saturday in age 71. You may have seen in the newspapers eulogies towards him. He's a great advocate and a very old friend of mine and a great advocate for climate justice. And so I'm dedicating this lecture tonight to his memory. My conclusions then. I hope I've shown you or I hope I've made these points that climate change is going to alter the economic geography of the world where people live, how they live, and how they're going to live their lives and make a life in livelihood. Climate related migration is happening now. It's not the principal reason why it's happening now. But these flows could increase and climate change is likely to be more important in the future. Cities need to be are the place where the crucible of this is actually going to come together and need to be made safe, resilient and sustainable. We do need this international cooperation on migration flows on an adaptation. And as ever with a climate change talk, I'll have to say this is a matter of climate justice and injustice. And what we really need to do is to avoid climate change in the first place by decarbonizing our economies. Thank you. This is the work of myself but many other collaborators and colleagues and funders around the world. Thank you. Thank you very much Neil that was absolutely fascinating lecture which covered a huge ground and I know that there are going to be many questions in your mind. So the first thing I'll do is invite our roving microphoneist, if that's a word to come and pick up the microphone there is only one this week apologies for that. So whoever has the microphone will have to work particularly hard. Now please begin to formulate your questions as there are likely to be many I'll ask you please to keep your question concise and direct so that we can fit as many in as we possibly can in the time that remains. So thank you let's begin who would like to have the first question. Can anyone hear this. Just a few difficulties with the microphone. Lady over there by the glass wall. On the left. If you'd like to raise your hand as we go I'll just anticipate where we go next with the microphone. Thank you. Thank you for a fascinating talk I was interested in your slides that you said were not published yet. I was interested in your slides that you said were not published yet to do with well being. Yes, and to ask you were these taken in a static way or are you looking at doing these over time to look at what happens when people come into a city and how they their lifespan within that city and and their migration route there in terms of their all being. Thank you for that question. So I'll just I'll try and repeat it or if I get the or repeat the question see if I've got it right, which is these slides that I showed which is that this result that I've diminished well being of people who've moved to the city or an increase in decreasing some markers or indicators of well being particularly mental health well. Those were actually one of those are cross sections so we don't have that over time, but in another study and what we've done. And both in Chicago and another and in other the other three cities in Bangladesh, the other two cities where people moved to is actually to look at those in terms of recent migrants and longer term migrants who've moved for a longer time. And what we see is, and I tried to sort of articulate this is that that migration is still remains a really really popular strategy because actually it works. We tend to have an increasing, you know, there is some increasing social mobility and increasing income, and that's why people move and move for themselves in the move for their children and their children's you know economic future. So you do see an increase in material well being, but we see these measures, at least in this cross section of how people feel about themselves subjective well being actually being very static. This is sometimes known as the miserable migrant thesis. And isn't that these people are miserable is that their lives, you know that their life satisfaction doesn't increase with the same level as their material well being, and because life is hard and some of this is also to do with aspiration. So one of the things about moving to these particular cities is you get trapped in, let's call them slum areas, where actually social mobility the ability to move out of these is actually very, very difficult, and that makes life very hard. I hope that answers your question. So it's not time series data but we have some cross sectional analogies to that. Thanks. Lady in light green in the row behind. And then the lady in dark green further up. And you slide on the action research and the dignity section. You commented that many of the migrants in Chittagong or Chattogram are actually women gamut workers. There's thousands and thousands of them. How many of your action research for women because what I found interesting what was missing was no reference to what is known as Eve teasing. So, in other words, a discrimination against women, which is characterized by women in Bangladesh as Eve teasing Eve as in Adam and Eve. So this is again one of the dilemmas of doing this sort of research, which is in any cultural context. There is a symmetry of economic opportunity or differences in economic opportunity and differences in the way that men and women are treated to each other. This is very difficult research to do. We have all these planners, most of whom are men. And, you know, they're all professionals and they sit in offices and, you know, they have, you know, they've all got degrees and masters degrees and they're doing and most of them are engineers and they're doing all this planning. And they don't actually come in contact with women workers in the factories and you know people living slums are working the in these sorts of areas. And some of the photographs and some of the issues that people raised are is about women's safety and is about, you know, security, you know, sexual harassment and other, you know, things that are contained, particularly to women and also, you know, sort of particularly in terms of shared toilets and the risk of, you know, sexual harassment and all sorts of things. Bringing these to the table is actually very difficult. And I will only advocate for the benefit of the of the power of these visual images. And that the one thing that we managed to do was to put everyone on a level playing field by saying, well, I've here are my perspectives on what constitutes, you know, the things that I'm worried about, because I've got my three photographs. And we actually put them all out on tables and, you know, we printed them and actually put them out. And so my photograph was equally valid to your photograph, even though you were a city planner and a engineer and, you know, you were in charge of a big budget and built a lot of roads and buildings and that sort of thing, compared to women workers in in local factories. Some of the women that we worked with who were respondents in this actually came all the way to Daga, took a lot, took a couple of days off work, which was a big hit on their income and came all the way by bus to Daga, so that we actually with some big, you know, sort of national politicians, they sort of gave testimony to some of these national politicians in Daga about their life and livelihood and the rest of it. I hope it was empowering for them. That was the purpose of doing the research. And we can only do what we can do in the cultural context. Thanks. Lady in dark green halfway up on the left and then the gentleman just two rows in front. Oh, sorry. I had a sort of methodological question for you when you were talking about how people self reported their reasons for migration. You had most of them saying, Oh, I've migrated for economic reasons but then in the environmental reasons category you had listed several things that seem like they would have pretty strong economic impacts and I wondered how you would separate that out both in terms of the self reported surveys and also in broader senses like looking at trends across populations. Yeah. Thank you for that question just in terms of methods survey methods and what we asked people and how they reported this sort of self reporting of environment not being particular. So those that first slide which basically shows that people say well of course I moved for economic reasons is basically reflects what you would see in any survey of migrants anywhere in the world. And that basically people move because they want to make a better life for themselves and or a better life for their families and or the next generation access a better access to schools better access to education that sort of thing. We weren't surprised but it was sort of confirmatory where hardly anyone said oh well, you know my house fell into the sea or you know I was completely flooded or whatever. And because the just the flows of people you know that is and what they were doing is much more complicated whenever we then get into perceptions of whether or not the environment is changing. And basically what people told us trying to take the broader sense here is that their life in that the life of people living in rural areas in rural areas in India, or, you know, really, these are some of the bread baskets of these countries highly productive, you know, really dense agricultural areas where every screw you know every field is you know got rice growing in twice a year and you know and there's got a lot of shrimp ponds and all these sort of things that they actually felt more insecure about it. So there were quite a lot of people thought that their food security their ability to grow enough food and or sell enough food to, you know, and other products to actually make a life livelihood was under threat. They also thought things were getting worse over time. So in some senses people weren't self reporting that they were moving for economic reasons, but they could see their their economic, their economic situation was getting worse, because the environment was getting more unstable or there were just more extremes. Yeah, and the likelihood of losing their agricultural livelihood was actually going down. So sorry that was so I only showed the summary statistics and didn't go into these graphs and didn't go into the details of that but I'm happy to talk to you about afterwards or send you the papers and we can have a dialogue. Thanks. Gentleman on the aisle. Yeah, hi there evening. I remember seeing a film a long time ago by Al Gore, forget which year it was now 2005 I'm not sure you might remember it. So there's two questions really did you watch that film, the an inconvenient truth. And did did he not show in that film, all the research as to where carbon CO2 increase and research from the 1950s. And at the scientists who were doing it and also the impacts of the climate change problem that people were not taking on board at that time. This conflict that we're getting now in Gaza and Israel the political conflicts the triggers in the world and also this population migration and explosion. It's all there in Al Gore's film. The government's never heeded it and we're living in a post Al Gore situation aren't we. So to see Al Gore giving the lecture tour and associate it with that film and book, and the book was called an inconvenient truth. It was back in 2005. And I saw him in Cambridge, Cambridge in England. That is, and it was a room full about, you know this number of people that was in the sort of in the city, it's not at the university. And I have to say, every. He was absolutely mesmerizing. He was absolutely fantastic. I'd never heard someone hold an audience together for two hours straight without a break. He was amazing. But I have to say every single person I'm sitting next to and the Catholic Bishop of East Anglia actually and we both said the same thing. There's a slightly random story. We were all think the same thing, which was my goodness. This could have been the president of the United States. He lost the 2000 presidential election because of the hanging chance. That was my thought at the time. And some of us were introduced to him afterwards and because we're working in the area and that sort of thing. And he was absolutely adamant. He didn't want to talk about adaptation to climate change. He said that dilutes the story. We really, really, really need to show that the impacts of climate change are real. They're consequential and we really need to decarbonize the economy as quickly as possible. And I couldn't agree with you more that we basically wasted 20 years since Al Gore was saying it. 20 years is really going to come back to bite us, both in terms of the impacts of climate change and actually the speed at which we're going to have to decarbonize the economy. So I couldn't agree more with your statement. Lady on the front row and then gentlemen for a rose back. Do we have any online questions? Okay. Lady, lady first. She's further up the cube. Thank you, gentlemen. No, that's all right. Thank you very much for the talk. I'm sad it can be longer. I actually moved up to Glasgow recently at the beginning of this year for sort of. Oh, for there we go for climate climate reasons. I've just been thinking like when climate change bites. You want to be somewhere damp with lots of water. And I'm really, I'm really terrified about the future. I don't actually believe that I have a meaningful and happy kind of life ahead of me. And the question I have, it doesn't necessarily reach your field, but you're probably well placed to answer it. But do you think we can reach net zero and fully decarbonize our economy in our current economic and political model which has a sort of insatiable desire to grow the economy and thus create more opportunities for the people. Fantastic question. Thank you so much for that, which was this person at the front. I would say brings down the average age and slightly so I'm not making any aspersions, but you know the current generations are thinking actually the future is not looking rosy. And, you know, am I optimistic as to whether or not we can solve this problem. If that summarizes your question. Let me deal with that in two parts to two parts in answer. First of all, I am optimistic. I think we can absolutely decarbonize the economy. I think we've wasted 20 years or more since, you know, climate science has pointed these things out. Also nearly 20 years ago, Lord Stern next turn made the economic case for why we should be decarbonizing the economy. Both of those have, as you say, sort of fallen on deaf ears in the interim. There are two positive reasons to look at one of which is the economy has moved ahead without us and the ability to decarbonize the electricity system has accelerated like there's no tomorrow. And the benefits of renewable energy and decarbonizing the electricity system are indisputable and it's happening everywhere. And it's likely to happen at speed and scale that we haven't seen before. And secondly, so although the climate science and the economics haven't made the case, I think we're beginning to realize that climate change affects other aspects of life and things that we really care about health, well-being and our communities and the rest of it. And I think that does lead to a change. And therefore I am absolutely optimistic that we can, I'll not say solve the problem, but actually lead to a meaningful future. And I also think based on progressive cities on an, you know, youth movements, youth activism, all sorts of reasons that we are going to move away from a climate change fossil field based economy. We're going to move away from a climate change catastrophe and whatever. But a second part of my answer also is around this. And if I can paraphrase and say an ego anxiety that we have that actually the climate change, you know, comes to us or challenges or whole sense in some ways or whole sense of identity. Amitav Ghosh refers to this as the great derangement that we actually haven't quite realized that the world is not what it's not just stable. It's not just predictable. It's not, you know, that, you know, that we don't have any agency. I think what we can begin to see is that we do have agency to change. We do need to change democratic systems to deal with long term problems that we don't have solutions to. And what we really don't want to do, although I'm really tempted to do it is to say, and it's up to the next generation to solve these problems. I think these problems are all absolutely solvable and they're all absolutely solvable by not by saying it's all about political will. But actually about the application of knowledge and the application of, you know, sort of ideas and the general. And it's basically a failure of our imagination not to solve these problems rather than anything else. And that's why I'm optimistic. Since we're on the front row, we'll take the gentleman here. Then the gentleman four rows back and then one on this side. Thanks. I was interested that you're talking about move to the cities, but shouldn't we be looking at reducing rural depopulation, which is a theme in Europe. I mean, I don't know anything about Bangladesh or India. But that's certainly a major theme in Europe. And it's linked to housing problems. Very strongly linked housing problems in Scotland. You also commented on housing problems in the cities. I mean, I think it's probably useful to link housing insecurity with a need to tackle climate change issues. Just that's one point. The other point about change is that I do think that we need to continually think of new ways of keeping climate at the top of the agenda. Because it very easily slides down one way example of that as I was talking to somebody from Sweden, who said Sweden very progressive trying to keep people in the islands and stop the expense caused by moving to cities. And so they built new roads to the islands, which idea what and bridges the idea was to make them more usable. But what happens is that results in increased depopulation. What he was saying is they should have spent the money dispensable the roads bridges on enterprises and housing in the islands, but rather than increasing transportation. Thank you so much. So I do sort of related points. I'll answer that in two ways. The first one of which is, you know, I absolutely agree. And although I've talked about people moving and I've talked a lot about cities, dealing with the consequences of climate change really is a lightning rod or is a basically a way to talk about sustainable futures and, you know, dealing with all of these things in an integrated way. And it's also about where we grow our food, how we grow our food, who's going to do that. And as you say the future of rural areas is just as important as what's going to happen within cities. And also going back to actually Sir John Beddington had a, you know, a time of stability was it was just after the financial crash. There was a decision that actually across government we need to be dealing with issues or the way that governments deal with this need to be dealing with these in a holistic way and you know to see climate change as a cross as a challenge to the future across issues that range from housing policy. You know, regional, you know, sort of, you know, regional policy, let's call it and you know, and, and not just to see this as something that's only to do with the energy system or only to do with transport or that sort of thing. In the Bangladesh case, Bangladesh, and actually my colleague Selena hook who passed away this week was a big advocate for regional redistribution of population within Bangladesh. We're trying smaller cities and not everyone moving to these bigger glomerated cities that are, you know, that guy is now getting on for 20 million people. And, and, you know, so this idea that we're inevitably moving to words and urbanized world, and we do need to, in the context of climate change and many other, you know, for many other sustainability challenges to look at this relationship between town and country. And another element to this, I have to say, is, is mobility as choice, and that people will choose to move and that's, you know, doing these things where you can predict, you know, building roads to say, oh well, you know, allow people to move back and forward but actually it facilitates, it facilitates the population, we have to get inside the mind or understand the social context in which migration and people's choice of where to move and the rest of it matters. But you're absolutely right. We need to look at sustainability of everywhere including rural areas. Thanks. Paul rose back gentlemen there at the wall about passing. Thank you very much for enjoyable talk. However, the question of loss and damage compensation is in my opinion a massive red herring and virtue sink the lane, especially in the part of Nicholas Sturgeon, who went around getting selfies with everybody in their dog. They didn't get the president's dog however, but no on virtue signalling. We, as previous Scottish government decided to give a share load of money to Malawi. And it has effectively done nothing for Malawi. As far as I know, we had live aid and we keep on having live aid every year, because sending them a big bundle of money doesn't in fact compensate them because somebody just hives it off like, we are in fact this audience is about nearly 300 people and we probably give a million or so pounds in compensation to Bangladesh and buying clothes from Bangladesh. That would be a far better thing than taking a big fancy photograph and virtue signalling. Thank you for that. Well, I took you out strong view. Yeah, and in many senses I agree with you. And or in some aspects of what you said I agree with you. And so is a dilemma within this, you know that climate change as we talked about can be decarbonizing the world economy avoiding the consequence of climate change. You know, the seeds of our there in our engineering and our technologies and in our economies. We can do it, but we are input but the impacts of climate change. You know so can we do that without international cooperation can we do that without an agreement between 200 countries and 200 countries turning up here to Glasgow and the next year to Sharma shake and this year to Dubai. And what good does that do. We wouldn't actually be talking about these things without this without the 200 countries of the UN actually bearing witness to the consequences of climate change on them. The climate vulnerable countries, as they self referred to themselves as about 50 of them are small island states in the Pacific. They are least developed countries in Africa. They are countries, you know, big populist countries like Bangladesh and people are suffering there because of the consequences of climate change all the time. What are the solutions there. Well, so let me say this is a matter of climate justice. And the loss and damage discussion is raising is not only looking for, you know, funds to be it's not looking for compensation. All right, this is a one off compensation or reparations that's going to sort of solve the problem or be a one off payment to recognize that that was an injustice. Part of the discussion around loss and damage is what's referred to as recognition justice is actually for countries to put their hands up and say, yes, we have an historic responsibility. And we will partner with you in whatever way through trade through aid and through other sort of processes through technological, you know, and solutions to make sure that you can adapt to climate change, as well as we can. And so it's actually looking for recognition using this sort of language of loss and damage recognition that this is an imposed harm on a matter of, you know, sort of a very, very, you know, almost unprecedented harm and injustice done to the rest of the world by a number of polluters over the last couple of centuries. So I agree with you the effectiveness of single transfers or even any funds the adaptation funds the green climate fund or a lot or a new loss and damage funds to actually solve this is very limited. I also agree with you that many national level politicians have a lot of rhetoric and this and actually doing a little about it other than taking selfies. And but I do think that both the issue of loss and damage and the whole UN, the United Nations process is also a matter of recognition that this that we are globally interdependent, but actually some of us are more responsible than others. One question from the right hand side. I fear we will have to make this the last question for those of you who are thinking of onward travel the clock at the front. It is actually ten nine o'clock rather than time but rest assured, despite the way in which time has passed in this session. We're on Glasgow time. I understand that in order to control immigration and President Trump decided to build a wall of such techniques liable to be adopted internationally, and have they got any chance of working. Yeah. And so border. So it's a question basically about border control does border control work and is climate change likely to or you know these sort of things. Climate change likely to harden borders. And I showed that that around about 3% of the world's population are living in a country that they weren't born in. And quite a lot of researchers in this field basically say that border controls make virtually no difference to this. And you know, up particular borders up particular places where there's fences there may be, you know, slightly more or slightly less and migration, but that is virtually signaling to the end or you know something signaling to the end that actually border controls themselves make no difference to international migration flows and the international. The biggest thing that's driving that's likely to drive immigration flows for example to Europe is the fact that we have an aging population and we just need more working age people. And if we don't have if we don't have increase, if we don't have population growth associated with so we've got below replacement for replacement fertility levels we've got an aging population. And we still expect of an economy, then we're just going to import people, people of a working age. So that's one aspect to it so border control these sort of things are only a minor part I think of population migration policy. Another is, do we are we likely to show more solidarity towards people who are leaving the places they are because of the consequences of climate change. And I would say, at least in the short term the answer to that is yes, lots of put sort of individual polling data in particular places around the world, show that people are actually much more sympathetic to people who've to to involuntary people who've had to flee because of destitution, because of the impacts of climate change, their houses just not being there anymore, then places being flooded than other migrants who they're who still they've got negative perception of because they're assumed just to be economic migrants. So at least in places where people are moving to like in New Zealand and Australia there's some polling data that show that people are actually quite sympathetic to let's call them climate migrants. So whether that continues, it's difficult to tell but that certainly what it shows at the minute, and I hope that answers your question. Thanks. Well folks I'm sorry we're going to have to draw proceedings to a close here, and we have had a really fascinating lecture and thank you for all your questions. So we're really very grateful to you for all the insights you brought on this hugely important topic, and we wish you every success and influence in the important work that you continue to do. There are some refreshments as usual available in the foyer, and another opportunity to keep the conversation going. Thank you that our next meeting in two weeks time on the 15th of November is by Dr Gavin Francis on yet another important topic, free for all, why the NHS is worth saving. It means only to thank you very sincerely again Neil, and we would like to give you this rather splendid Royal Philosophical Society paperweight as a small token of our appreciation.