 We have about a half an hour for questions and we'll go straight to those. I think what I'll do is I'll try to take four or five questions and then let the panel respond and then we'll do that again until either we run out of time or the process exhausts itself. So breaking with tradition we'll start with the right hand side of the room and does anybody want to pose a question to the group here? Hi, James Thullo from UNU Wider. I was just thinking about your indicators that you're using, Joshua. The indicators you were using and of course some of your governance indicators are about a willingness to respond and so on and you do have some indicators about distance to nearest clinic or something like that but I was thinking about remoteness and whether or not the higher resolution road data might be one way of showing a potential speed of response. To a particular crisis. Tony Allison from UNU Wider. Very interesting presentation. On the first part on the relationship between climate and environment and conflict there's sort of two questions here really. I think we're moving to sort of policy prescription whereby if you can overlay where the projects are and the investments across the maps and then you can overlay the information about conflict and climate change, vulnerability and so forth. You've got quite a powerful tool to guide policy makers. I can see the value in that. There is of course the substantive issue about well if the rate of return on any projects in those areas is going to be pretty low and actually may decline with climate change itself whether as a sort of national strategy it's worth doing it as against alternative uses of those funds. So it would be useful to have your comment on that. The other thing that I think is a little bit, it's not problematic but something to think about is really what's the sort of theory of conflict in this because and this affects your degree to get predictions from this which is obviously extremely useful particularly from a UN perspective. If we look at the Horn of Africa we know that conflicts over land and water and other environmental resources goes pretty deep back into history. But then the conflicts that we saw over 50, 60 years in the Horn of Africa which is a particularly conflict prone area down to the failed or imperfect transition from colonialism. The Cold War where the United States and the Soviet Union went back and forth in their support for their different countries. Somalia is a sort of disaster in that way. The regional dynamics of conflict between the countries Eritrea versus Ethiopia. All of this could of course feed into, there's a terrible path dependence with this stuff. Feed into conflicts in the future including any climate related conflict or one that's initiated by climate change. But I'll be interested in your observations about how we bring in these other historical, political, socio-economic dimensions into this is a kind of predictable or planning tool. Thank you. I think the issue of governance is the major problem especially in sub-Saharan Africa in particular in the Horn. For instance if you take the case of land grabbing problem which is the emerging threat in this area especially in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa which is affecting heavily the woodland and the forest resources and in the meantime contributing for the emission of huge amount of carbon because of this land use conversion for monocrop and other type of non-perennial crops. So what is your reflection on this land grabbing problem? Because I haven't heard about that because it's critical in African context. That is one problem and the other is concerning to regional instability management of the watershed areas for instance in the case of Nile basin area where more than nine countries are stakeholder in that area and now for instance Ethiopia is planning to construct huge dam for hydro power and other purpose but some of the Nile basin countries are objecting this idea because they think that the water volume may decline and that will affect the overall economy and other activities of this country then how you will see the management of natural resource in the view of maintaining stability in this area. Thank you. One more from any side? Here we go. My name is Gahiso. I'm from the University of Botswana in Southern Africa. My question is for Josh. Please could you define what you mean by politically discriminated groups because there were some countries that came up that I was not even aware that this was a problem in and could you tell us where the data came from? Let's do Adam and then we'll... Adam is right. There we go. And then we'll move on. Then we'll let them respond otherwise we'll all forget what the questions were. Adam Schlosser from MIT. First thank you all for really interesting thought provoking presentations. My question is probably an extension of the question from the gentleman over there from wider which is you showed a lot of compelling maps on the spatial variability and in the climate community when we think about prediction we also have to think about temporal variability, time scales of variability and particular persistence. And I'm just wondering do you have a sense from these metrics? What are the fundamental or representative time scales of these? I mean I know we're thinking about this as an abstraction and you have one indices so it's really hard to get traction on it but in terms of trying to think of something as a prediction and as a result of some of one of your controlling factors there's something coming out of the noise when we think about climate change impacts. We really do have to think about things like time scales and the extent of that variability in time so I'm just wondering if you have a sense on that. Let me just summarize so we had a question on roads and road data. Tony speaking about projects investments, those overlays and the issues associated with that. I'll summarize by saying a theory of conflict in a two-part question there. Issues of governance was brought up in the back and then one that I find particularly fascinating that the Nile River Basin Initiative and the hydropower issues in that region. Something just on politically discriminated groups and then Adam on persistence. So I'll just let the panel work this out. Let me take first crack and I might say something about all of them and then see if my colleagues want to weigh in as well. Since the road data our initial effort tried to incorporate that data and this was something that came up in one of the panels yesterday that's used some of the road data from other sources. We had a data set on roads that we thought might give us some traction except that category one road in the DRC might be a dirt path whereas same category road in South Africa would be a 10-lane highway and then a cat two road was actually like a multi-lane paved road in South Africa but if we wanted to just look at comparable categories it was sort of apples and oranges so our map would make it look like if we just mapped all the cat one roads it made it look like the DRC had much better access to do service delivery in times of emergency than it actually possessed. And so we kind of thought we can't use this and so we were kind of waiting until someone came along with better data but we're sort of aware of that we just haven't found traction and there's some other things to get at local capacity maybe lights at night is another you know but then obviously in the midst of an emergency you might imagine a lot of things shut down so we're trying to figure out you know we tried to map airports and again some similar problems so that sort of dropped out but we can imagine that those are important. On rates of return this issue you know I'm a little agnostic I kind of basically said you know you can't you have trouble imagining service delivery and like the absorptive capacity of countries that are unable to receive these resources is a kind of a similar phenomenon so you might imagine that there's a kind of triaging that would take place like well let's invest in the places that we know will spend it well but these are the actually we know that the problem areas are over here but we know we can actually spend the money over there so we're going to spend the money in Kenya and Tanzania because even if they don't have the bulk of the problems we can imagine that the resources are going to be mobilized more effectively and I think that's going to be a perennial dilemma you know in some places and maybe these aren't those ones but you can imagine in low lying countries in Asia there are going to be some fundamental choices about do we need to move populations that some of the island countries are facing at the moment and so that's a similar trade-off like do we invest in this physical space or do we think about investing in these people wherever they live and I don't have a good answer for that but I think those are fundamental challenges now this related question about the theory of conflict you know some of our colleagues work on that quite actively and this field has you know these notions that have been popularized that there are going to be water wars and you know that any changes in precipitation are inexorably going to lead to war we have some anecdotal evidence but most of the econometric work in this space actually suggests that there have been few to no water wars that these are problems that are often resolved peacefully and there's more evidence of you know times in which there's more precipitation or actually ones that are more conflict prone because there's more to fight over and then in drought times people are kind of hunkering down in survival mode so you know we have a slightly different emphasis in our maps because we're interested in places where a large number of people could be exposed to mass death and so that gets at large scale humanitarian tragedies that may divert militaries from doing other things to focus on humanitarian assistance whether they're domestic or international militaries and so it's a slightly different theory about where the security consequences come from but we're sort of agnostic about you know that may or may not develop and turn into conflict I think it suggests a different way security communities ought to conceptualize this problem and not over dramatize the extent to which physical scarcity is inexorably going to lead to violent conflict we haven't really done much on this land grabbing governance issue we're aware of it and I just don't know how it intersects with what's going on here I just know that in you know we have to be aware that in particular circumstances there'll be the kinds of problems that we've illustrated and then that may take some of the adaptive capacity off the table if governments have somehow seeded their land to some foreign investor to grow some product for export and so I think it could feed into some tensions particularly at the political level as governments respond to domestic political pressure to oust maybe some of these foreign investors that we've seen in a number of countries but I don't know exactly how to come to terms with that in a spatial geographic sense other than maybe if someone had maps of where the land grabs are happening be happy to overlay them and that could provide another area where we think of contiguous areas of land grabbing nearby in which there's a concentration of vulnerability we might imagine that those populations are going to respond if the good areas that are being grabbed for expropriation for investors are off limits for adaptation purposes let me quickly on the managing water resources I think some of the class that I led a couple of years ago did a kind of basin specific analysis of vulnerability because you know if we just look at a country context or do a wider geographic lens it might not bring into relief the kinds of river basin specific ways of looking at these optics and I think the deeper dives that we can do with our work or people can do with our work to look at how river basins can be managed for adaptation purposes because one of the strongest findings of this literature on conflict and security is that river basin cooperative initiatives are one of the best ways to avoid the scarcity related episodes turning into conflict so I think that's really important quickly on this politically discriminated it's the GOEPR data set it's the ethnic political relations data set it's available on a Harvard website anybody emails me and I can send you the details and they basically look at whether or not a particular ethnic group in a particular location is represented in government and whether or not the government has actually targeted them to kind of withhold services from them but since it's not something that we collected ourselves I might be mangling how they classify it but they also have other categories like politically irrelevant groups or politically there's another category where they're not actively discriminated against they're just ignored and we map those two dimensions as well to get at groups that might not be actively targeted by the government but they just might not have representation in the government and might not actually get services in the time of need and I won't say anything about temporal time scales because I've gone on a long time as it is so I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues to answer any or all of these comments I just wanted to pick up a little bit on the theory of conflict and to jump ahead a little bit there was a great paper in the Journal of Peace Research special edition in January that did a similar vulnerability analysis but at the river basin scale and the authors, the names of the authors escaped me at the moment but if you're particularly interested in river basins then you might check that out that same special issue of JPR did a lot of work on this theory of conflict on how do we link climate changes to conflict and as Josh pointed out there's not a lot of evidence of water wars and pastoralist conflicts get a lot of attention and I've done a little bit of work on that along with some of our other colleagues and idiosyncratically we know that it happens we know that there are instances of these type of pastoral conflicts are happening or pastoralist versus agriculturalist conflicts happening it's very difficult to find statistical evidence that changes in rainfall or climatic changes are a driver of that so I think that there are other causal mechanisms behind it and one that I believe that I've done a little bit work on is food prices and this is where I focus more on strikes and riots on SCAD the social conflict in Africa data set that was developed by Idean Salan and Cullen Hendricks our colleagues versus the armed conflict people shooting each other but we know that these types of strikes and riots can explode into larger scale political conflicts which may be sometimes good in fact but that aside I've recently found evidence that dry times lead to increases in food prices which lead to social conflict I don't find although and periods of abundance, rainfall abundance lead to a decrease in food prices but they still lead to social conflict so that's not the causal mechanism there that's worked there now like I said scarcity, high prices, conflict somehow somehow rainfall abundance is leading to social conflict through a different mechanism that we're still struggling to figure out now I don't know if it's floods a competition of a resource available resources like perhaps what we saw in Pakistan a couple of years ago I don't know but we're still struggling with that the names of the authors on that paper are, where are they DeStefano, Duncan DeStefano at all I'm just going to comment briefly on the land grabbing question because I think this is an issue that becomes really important when we're thinking about mainstreaming climate change policies or mainstreaming disaster risk management policies so if we just take the example of Mozambique this is a place where I heard, I had people telling me yes the government is very focused on disaster risk management we have this organization, this is what they do they organize everything, they deal with all the NGOs very organized at least centrally if not in remote parts of the country at the same time I have people telling me about all kinds of new natural resources that are being discovered contracts over those, the role of the government actors in their interests in these contracts and there are obvious risks associated with investment in exploration of natural resources and risks for new natural hazards and effects of climate change down the line so I think these are issues that absolutely have to be taken into consideration when we think about whether or not a country is really comprehensively dealing with climate change or dealing with disaster risk management and it's not simply enough to say that yes there is a policy in place to deal with this particular issue it really is about incorporating that into policies across the board within a country and that's the kind of attitude that I think is being promoted but it's not necessarily being adopted explicitly on the ground to deal with these issues I wanted to say something about time scale since you asked that question so we have our sort of chronic maps that we anticipate in the future might be the places that are vulnerable based on historic vulnerability now we have these 2050 projections of future physical exposure how do we make those kinds of different stories sync up with each other one of the things that we're trying to do with our climate modeling colleagues is they have simulations of present day we have 2050 predictive scenarios can we see about the pathways of what are the intermediate steps of physical exposure that we're likely to see by 2030 or 2020 one of the problems is that climate scientists have until recently been low to do these kinds of 2050 scenarios let alone 2020 ones it took a lot of work for us to convince them that the policy community needs shorter term scenarios and trajectories than 2080 and 2100 which is typical among climate scientists so we got them to 2050 but it's harder to move closer in so our expectations for particular places are in the future between now and the lifetime of concern for the policy making community that has pretty short term time in the horizon but being able to say with any precision about how soon those consequences are likely to manifest themselves is not really something that we're able to say other than you should focus your attention there and the problems are likely to manifest sometime in the horizon that you care about which is you know 10 to 20 years let's take three pointed questions from the left hand side Felix thank you very much that was a good presentation my major challenge is the generalization of what is happening in Africa it was good that you picked data by the sub regions and my question is if you had analyzed this what you did by the sub regions I don't think you might get that conclusions that are coming out because I mean a similar example of the generalization is the example you just gave your last response that when the dry season food prices goes up and leads to conflict the countries in Africa has different ecological zones and different resources and arrangements for off season activities so when such a generalization comes it becomes there are some hotspots you might you can conclude that but there are very few places that you can make that conclusion but my question is if you had done this analysis especially for the last presentation on a regional basis would some of these conclusions be the same next Tony has one over here if there's not one more on the left okay do you have one more go ahead Tony just coming back to this point about the causes of conflict because the conflict schools have thought about conflict falling to two explanations one is that it's really complex you've got to be deeply historical etc etc the other is that we can just cut out all that and we can look for economic growth or lack of it as a source of conflict inequality as a source of conflict we now have climate change as a source of conflict food prices as a source of conflict so you just pick the kind of one that's kind of deeply attractive because you know then we don't have to kind of explore the whole complexity of the societies but we also know it's actually quite dangerous in a prescriptive sense because not only can foreign policy departments but also militaries international organizations read the wrong conclusions from all of that so you know I just sort of I'm attracted to your to your approach because as an economist I'm looking for the simplest explanations possible but on the other hand the my understanding of some of these conflicts particularly in the countries that you're pursuing is that they are deeply historical and very context specific if I was going to make a question but I'd actually talked to you over coffee about this it would be whether your model would actually explain what happened in New Orleans and whenever it was when that big flood disaster occurred because you know there is a rich society which didn't cope at all well and you know can we actually predict these kinds of things for African societies in the way that you conceptualize it but maybe over coffee Thank you very much. Finta from you and your wider. Mine is a little bit more of a comment or a couple of suggestions and a very pointed question but somebody who was basically the person who started the disaster risk management system in Mozambique this is obviously extremely interesting in the late 70s and I would also say that as somebody who sort of tried to grapple with predicting some of the crisis in Burundi and Rwanda based on FAO land scarcity data and so on this is of course incredibly interesting because this adds a whole slew of dimensions to these things which are absolutely fascinating my sort of maybe suggestion is that implicit in quite a bit of what you were talking about both when it came to the sort of aid allocation but also when you were talking about the model there are some links to the literature on foreign aid which I'm not sure maybe you are maybe you're not aware of it but there are some very strong links to part of the core discussions about foreign aid effectiveness and so on which I would suggest that we might want to just discuss a little bit more in depth one example is that you have very influential literature on aid effectiveness suggesting where returns might be high but which are then emerging out of the World Bank and so on but which are then subsequently shown not to stand up and it touches on exactly this issue of rate of return are you having the highest rates of return in bad conditions or in good conditions potentially you can have them high rate of returns in pretty bad conditions because if capital is scarce and you put capital into there is actually literature on these things which I think it could be quite fascinating we're trying to link up with what you were doing and on the moral hazard question let me just say that this is a I mean it's an absolutely first class example of trying to dig into something that the aid literature is suffering terribly from we are suffering terribly from the fact that theoretical hypothesis become accepted as empirically validated before they have actually been empirically validated and I would just really strongly encourage you to push this as much as you can because this can help change that literature in a strong direction I was a little bit sort of pondering and I'll finish now on the one hand Joshua spoke about all the data and taught as well and then Jennifer was kind of talking about a question of quantitative data and I was sort of wondering whether I might want to elaborate just a little bit but that was... and then finally and this is just to make a point which I hope you won't take as defensive UNU wider is not subject to political pressures in our research just absolutely not we get zero dollars from the UN thanks so please go ahead and a lot of discussion in the questions but some quick answers here so first I thank you very much for the question about the rainfall season and I need to clarify a couple of points one I did not mean to suggest that UN University was in any way had was political beholding to anybody especially since we were funded by the defense department people would make the same assumption who wants to talk but a few weeks ago we Professor Robert Wilson and I were in Nairobi visiting with UN Habitat and they are funded directly by countries and they do have political constraints on what they can and can't say so I think that let me be clear that that didn't mean UNU I meant other UN organizations on the the also I need to clarify that this is a danger about trying to summarize a completely different paper that I was working on in about 30 seconds I didn't mean to suggest that prices go up during dry seasons because they don't the rainfall measure that I was using in that paper was a difference from long-term mean so in individual countries so when a country whether it's the dry season or the wet season gets less rainfall than they expect based on long-term long-term patterns that's when prices go up prices go down it's a you're absolutely right that countries are adapted to various conditions and I tried to deal with that in the paper but that is something that we definitely need to be more nuanced about and I think that these maps are just one tool and maps are a very powerful tool and they can get people to sit down around coffee or around a conference table and talk about these things but they're also a static picture and it is important to bring in historical perspectives cultural perspectives and other tools that other people have talked about here so we also don't mean to suggest that these maps are that end all be all and just point to the place on the map where it is read and put a project there that's not good either I'm going to take chairs prerogative and call an end to this session thank you very much speakers