 The 2022 Norris and Marjorie Benditsen epic international symposium on problems without passports and to our first panel of the day on power, equity and the global climate crisis. My name is Margo Myers, I'm a senior studying international relations and environmental studies here at Tufts and I'll be your moderator for this panel. Today we hope to dive into the disparities created and exacerbated by climate change. Climate change emerged as an obvious and unavoidable topic when we were thinking through this year's theme. While both global inequality and climate change are dauntingly large issues to contend with, we hope that this panel keeps pushing our conversations and imaginations forward towards a more just and sustainable future. The existential threat that climate change poses has proven difficult to address because of its slow moving nature, active disinformation campaigns, and the geographical and economic gap between those who have historically contributed to the most of the crisis and those who live with the results. International institutions have frequently failed to reach consensus on binding agreements as seen in the struggle to get climate refugees recognized as refugees under international law and the lack of compensation for climate change, loss and damage in COP26 this past year. Yet there has been major success such as the 1987 Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer. It is the only UN treaty that was unanimously ratified by all member countries and with its implementation the ozone layer has been repairing itself. Now more than ever we need the same type of action and political will to envision a future that is both sustainable and equitable so that this can be built into international frameworks and into our everyday lives. And with that I would like to thank all of our panelists for being here today and before I introduce them I would like to explain how this panel will run. First each panelist will give an initial five minute speech and we have this time constraint to ensure that we have enough time for a discussion among the panelists followed by a brief presentation from two of my classmates and me followed by a question and answer session from the audience. And so without further ado I would like to introduce our first panelist, Harjeet Singh. Mr. Singh is a global expert on the issues of climate change impacts, disaster resilience and mitigation, migration and adaptation. And has been supporting countries across the world in tackling climate change. He works as a senior advisor for both Climate Action Network International and the Global Partnership to the Fossil Fuel Non-Polliferation Treaty Initiative. Mr. Singh, if you'd like to start us off. Thank you, Magu. Can you hear me properly? Sounds great. Thank you very much for having me and apologies I could not be there in person. And thank you for providing the flexibility to join online. I must mention that this is the most important and relevant topic that you have chosen and particularly talking of power inequity and global climate crisis. You know, how these three are so connected and the reason we are facing this crisis is because of the power imbalance and inequity that exists. So I'm going to speak a bit on fossil fuels. As you know that I work as strategic advisor to the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. We are talking about the problem of the climate crisis and we cannot not talk about fossil fuel system that is responsible for 80% of carbon emissions. And speaking of power imbalance and inequity, we must also remember that it's only 100 companies that are responsible for over 70% of cumulative emissions. Yes, there has been growth in renewable energy, but despite the increase in the investment, the share of fossil fuels in the global energy demand has barely changed in the past decade. Can you imagine it remains 80% over the last 10 years? You know, while there has been a lot of talk about how renewable energy demand investments have been growing, but the fact is they are largely feeding into the increased demand of energy and the share of fossil fuel remains around 80%. And we also need to recognize that the fossil fuel system is complex and it is integrated with energy, with financial and other systems. And it's also a coordination challenge and that's why we need cooperation across borders. And it becomes very relevant to discuss in this kind of a conversation where you talk about problems without borders. And it's also important to recognize that how fossil fuel system contributes to a world that is already defined by historical and existing inequities. And so to most effectively coordinate, we must address the equity challenge, which means that our responses have to be fair to those most disadvantaged and build the broadest and most inclusive resilient response. Speaking of resilience and risk, in 2019-2020 risk perception survey by the World Economic Forum declared climate action failure and extreme weather events as the risks not only with the highest impact, but also highest likelihood. In fact, they compare that with the weapons of mass destruction in terms of impact, but in terms of likelihood, the climate action failure and extreme weather events have the most likelihood. And the recent IPCC report clearly talks about how due to lack of mitigation action over the last three decades, we have reached a point where there is a narrowing window of opportunity for climate resilience development. We're also reaching the limits to adaptation, both soft and hard limits to adaptation. It clearly shows that how failure of the last few years are now putting pressure on vulnerable communities and they are the ones who are losing homes and their farms and income. And more we delay in terms of targeting the fossil fuel industry, we will see that the pro-fossil fuel lobby is going to get far more powerful. It is going to make the transition even more harder and it will also create standard assets and it's going to risk financial turmoil and there are also increasing risks to workers and communities. It will further delay the expansion of renewable energy and the kind of economic diversification that is needed to tackle the challenge. In fact, another danger that is looming right now is the whole discussion about geoengineering because we are late and now we need to, and that's what is being told to us, instead of dramatically reducing emissions and targeting fossil fuel industry, the discussion is about geoengineering which is full of unproven technologies which means it can cause further damage to the environment and also people. And if you don't move forward quickly, we know how it's going to risk warming well above 1.5 and 2 degrees, which is going to be absolutely devastating. Now, despite knowing all that, the reality is that the Paris Agreement does not even mention fossil fuels. Imagine the landmark agreement that we all celebrate that, yes, it's going to put the world to a much more safe and sustainable path, seven years have passed and we realize that we have not yet tackled the core problem of targeting the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there was a glimmer of hope at COP26 last conference in Glasgow where fossil fuel were mentioned and coal is now included, but still we don't tackle the problem entirely because we cannot just talk about coal, we have to talk about coal, oil and gas. And that is the reason we advocate for a fossil fuel treaty, the initiative that we're part of, because we need to change the global norms on fossil fuel. We need widespread action on fossil fuel supply. So we have talked about mitigation, which is more consumption side of the discussion but not the supply side. We need to provide the missing framework and mechanism for a multilateral agreement for a trust transition, because if we need to protect economies and workers and communities who rely on fossil fuels, either for their income or for energy, they need to be supported through a trust transition and what we need to do is to support the global movement for that kind of trust transition by putting equity and justice at the heart of our analysis and action. So as we talk about power, equity and the climate crisis, we must be talking about the poor cause of the problem, who is not letting us make progress, how they are sucking the resources and I must mention that the recent IMF report analyzed that fossil fuel industry is getting the financial support of $11 million a minute, $11 million a minute, which means billions and billions of dollars are still going to the fossil fuel industry that is cause of the problem. So as we talk about the impacts, we should also talk about who is responsible and how to target and how to challenge their power. Thank you very much. Over to you, Marco. Perspectives on this and discussing the role of this industry. So our next panelist for today is Amali Tower. She is the founder and executive director of Climate Refugees, an independent nonprofit created to bring attention and action to help people displaced across borders as a result of climate change. She has extensive global experience in refugee protection, resettlement and forced migration. Her research on climate conflict and displacement in the Lake Chad Basin was presented as evidence of loss and damage at COP26 and we're delighted to hear from you next. Thank you, Marco. Thank you to Tufts for inviting me. Harjeet, it's good to see you, even from a distance. Great to be here with Laura as well. Okay, I'm kind of blown away by Harjeet's last share there of 11 million, was it, per minute? I'll touch upon where the money's going as well and how much that erodes all of our rights. But let me begin by defining some terms. So we're using the term climate refugee a lot. It's a term that does not exist, although that is very provocatively why I've named my organization such. Refugee is defined as someone who has left their country, has crossed an international boundary, has a well-founded fear of persecution. So it's fleeing for reasons of persecution or conflict. There are five grounds upon which you can seek protection and are awarded, granted refugee status. You have this well-founded fear of persecution, you've crossed an international boundary and you meet that need based on having your human rights violated or eroded on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Therefore climate change does not even come close to any of those five grounds. Now in 1951, when the convention was codified, that was within the context of World War II. It did not reflect the realities of climate change that we are living in today. It also at that time had a geographic limitation of only applying to refugees who came from Europe that, since does not really apply, that was removed in 1967 through an additional protocol. It also had a geographic limitation, sorry, a temporal limitation, meaning that it was not meant to exist this long. In fact, for year after year after year, the General Assembly in the United Nations would have resolutions that kept renewing the 1951 convention as ridiculous as that sounds. Today, we have over 26 million refugees in the world that number has since grown by at least 10 million because of Ukraine. Not everybody, even though I've read you those or rather mentioned that definition to you, not everyone, even if they meet the definition, qualifies because of a lack of political will. And because of a lack of dignity and care that we afford everybody equally. That is a fact that we, I think, have to just say I love. The term migrant has absolutely no legal definition whatsoever. I would say that that is not an accident, that is a reflection of a lack of political will. Migrants is seen as having agency moving voluntarily, moving for reasons to make their lives better. Migrants, though, are afforded the same human rights protections that all of us have and as do refugees. However, there is no legal obligation to protect them to the level that I spoke about. In here lies a massive problem. The lack of political will is the greatest impediment to solving those problems. Are people then moving across borders for reasons of climate change? Yes. Can we prove that? Not really. Do people move for just reasons of conflict only? No. But is that usually the final sort of driver and impetus that makes situations untenable? Yes. But it's not fair to say that people leave on the first instance of conflict either. I know that from talking to people from all around the world who will tell you that they will leave when the situation becomes unbearable. I found that climate refugees, because I heard people describe climate as one of the many drivers that created those situations that were untenable. Somalia is a very good example. 2.9 million people are internally displaced in Somalia. Last year, 75% of the people who were displaced both within the country and across borders were displaced for reasons of climate. Somalia is classified by the international community for all intents and purposes as a failed state since 1991. Billions and billions of dollars have been poured into Somalia, and yet climate change is eroding those gains. We are looking at situations where climate change creates development setbacks. So we'll talk a bit later about climate reparations. I would say that it may be more helpful to think about this because of what I said about political will as what development setbacks, which are really human rights setbacks, are we looking at today in the context of climate change? So anybody who, let's say, we've made gains in terms of health care, in terms of the right to health really, the right to an education for girls and women, those things are being eroded, right? So climate change is not an environmental issue only, and it never has been for much of the global south. And the global north needs to recognize that. It needed to recognize that yesterday. And unfortunately, the global north will recognize that when it hits them because we do live in a selfish society. So, you know, I can't be more plain about these things because the situation is dire, and we can't wait till it's dire for us. 90% of refugees today come from countries that are climate vulnerable. I get really upset talking about these things, so I got to accept. 70% of fragile countries today are climate vulnerable. Angola is going through a drought where people are moving, rather being displaced and having to flee into Namibia. Mozambique is facing the first climate change-induced famine. There is no conflict in Mozambique. Sorry, not Mozambique, Madagascar. Madagascar, no conflict, climate change-driven famine. People are eating bugs and leaves to survive. Central America, the dry corridor of Central America encompasses about one-third of Central American countries. It is the economic backbone of the region. Not only is colonialism, imperialism, neoliberal policies continuing to erode the rights of Central Americans, but we have a situation in which indigenous, Afro-Caribbean populations live in the dry corridor and are coexisting with multinational corporations who are creating all kinds of deforestation and degrading the land in order to keep these businesses in power, much of what Harjeet was talking about. There's been a drought. There have been two hurricanes in 2020. Millions and millions and millions and millions of people have been displaced and affected by both slow onset and sudden onset. You're seeing people flee for violence, for conflict, for persecution, for climate change. They're at the US-Southern border. Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, this is cross-list party lines, does not allow these people into the country. You cannot seek asylum even if you meet the threshold for that 1951 definition. Why? Because you're just not who we want. Simultaneously, we are now five, six weeks into Ukraine. Ukrainians and Russians are pressed in the border. And that's a fact. So we have to talk about these things and how much is dignity, the law, equality, and equity afforded to everybody. And how much does climate change also have to factor into that conversation? Because climate change does affect us all, but it certainly does not affect us all equally. So I'll leave it there. There's a lot to unpack. I think I'll lastly say, just to kind of compliment what Laura's about to talk about, really important to note that seven of the biggest global emitters are choosing to spend, knowing this, are choosing to enforce their borders at a ratio in terms of climate finance of two to one. United States is historically the biggest emitter. When you look at GDP, it's about 13 to 14 to one in terms of what we're spending our money on. So if you're paying attention, you can draw a correlation here that governments know that climate change is forcing people to have to move in terms of survival, in terms of distress, not the adaptation that we are saying migration should be. This is distress migration. Knowing that, knowing that you're not the kind of people we want, they're enforcing their borders. And that's where the money's going. Thank you for speaking to this and setting us up well for our next speaker. So our final speaker is Laura Cole, who completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Climate Policy Lab at her own Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She currently acts as an assistant professor of public policy and urban affairs and international affairs at Northeastern University. Dr. Cole research examines climate adaptation, finance, resilience, and tech transfers primarily in developing countries. And delves into the moral, transformational, and policy implications of these pursuits. And we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much. And it's really nice to be back here at Tufts, although this building's not here when I was at Fletcher. And so I really just want to kind of continue our discussion and pick up where we just left off on these questions of global inequality and how the climate crisis affects different people unequally. And I mean, I think this is clearly stating the obvious for all of you, but the most vulnerable people in the world are the least responsible for having caused climate change and are experiencing the impacts first and foremost. And so I don't think we can have this conversation about how are we going to manage this crisis without putting these questions as we began with of power and equity and inequality front and center. So there's a lot we could cover here. And I just want to kind of hone in on one specific piece of the puzzle potentially on moving us a little bit from analyzing some of these problems, just starting to think about how power dynamics play out in some of the potential solutions that we could look at for addressing climate change. I want to focus on climate finance as one tool that we have as an international community to support policy change for climate change. And I want to give to start off with a disclaimer that climate finance is actually a pretty small piece of the puzzle. And that's part of the problem. And throwing money at the problem is not the full solution either. But there are lots and lots of potential strategies and policies that we could put in place that require finance. And so it's a piece of the puzzle that we need to have in order to implement a lot larger range of options. So I want to just give you kind of a snapshot of where do we stand with climate finance right now. The scale and scope of finance that's available from all different types of sources we can think about grants and loans and private sector money and public money going to climate change is really only, even if you take all these different sources of finance, it's still only a teeny tiny fraction of the identified need for climate finance, the amount of money that would be required to actually address the impacts. And just if we're looking at adaptation, I'm actually gonna leave kind of the mitigation piece of this puzzle aside for a few minutes, although as we begin, we can't address this without addressing the underlying drivers of the climate problem as well. But even if we just look at adaptation, the amount of money that's available is drastically inadequate compared to the needs. And of the climate finance that's available, adaptation only is receiving about 30% or less depending on how you look at the numbers of the available climate finance. Which when we think about how, what this means in terms of inequality is really a huge moral and ethical problem that we're not transferring resources to those people and places that require that support. So just the sheer quantity of finance is one big problem and a power issue of that those who have the money and the resources aren't transferring that money to where it needs to go. I also wanna touch on what happens within the sources of climate finance that are available and the fact that even within that, there's significant power imbalances between those donors. And I think it's very interesting and we often talk about this in terms of donors compared to recipients. And that dynamic of donor recipient relationships really sets this up as if it's a gift. But I think as we ended our previous conversation, this is a moral obligation of those who have created the problem to provide resources to help address the problem. And so this language of aid or donations really doesn't fully capture what that relationship could and should look like. So we have this language, we have this mentality around what does this look like. And then there's these questions of who gets to make decisions about what kinds of policies, what kinds of strategies, is that climate finance going to go to support? There's a lot of international agendas around climate policy. Do those align with what the priorities and needs at the local level might be. And so I wanted to share with you just a set of really interesting principles that have recently gained momentum to try and address some of this power imbalance within climate finance. And these principles were first promoted by the Global Commission on Adaptation and they've now been adopted by over 70 organizations working in this space. But it's really a journey, even once they've committed to these principles of how to change the practice of how to do development, how to do climate policy differently. So these are known as the principles for locally led adaptation action. And I'll just share these with you to frame our discussion today. The first principle is devolving decision-making to the lowest appropriate level. Really thinking about how can we ensure that those who are most impacted are empowered to be engaged in making decisions about what would be appropriate for them. The second is addressing structural inequalities faced by women, youth, children, disabled, displaced, indigenous peoples, and marginalized ethnic groups. And really trying to ensure that marginalized people are at the center of these decisions. The third is providing patient and predictable funding that can be accessed more easily. And this really gets at some of the challenges of development aid and the structures that we currently have that are very project-based with short timelines that don't necessarily give the space to engage in the deep structural transformations that need to be happening. The fourth is investing in local capabilities to leave an institutional legacy, recognizing that this fly in, fly out mentality that has characterized a lot of development aid is really disenfranchising for people and places where this work is being done and that really there's a lot of other ways that we could be engaging as a global community in local places that could be much more impactful. Related to that, the fifth is building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty and ensuring that these strategies are really informed by the best climate science so that there's not this danger, which we've seen in a lot of current practice of best intentions leading to maladaptive outcomes. The sixth is flexible programming and learning and to be sort of increasing the humility with which development aid and climate finance is delivered, recognizing that there's a lot of mistakes to be made along the way and a lot of room for kind of adjusting programming as we go. This is new issues, new opportunities to do things differently and that requires flexibility and learning. The seventh is ensuring transparency and accountability and this is really about kind of trying to open up those power dynamics, recognize that inequality and transparency and accountability are one mechanism to support that. And then the last is collaborative action and investment that's really trying to think about how do we engage a wider range of actors to support these kinds of initiatives and really bringing together more people to the table to increase the level of action. So I'll leave it there, but I think these principles can form a foundation for not where we are at all today, but where we could be moving. Thank you, Dr. Cole and thank you to all of our panelists. Now we will head into the discussion portion of the panel. And so to start us off, each of you have experience with the United Nations in some capacity and based on these experiences, what do you see as the role of international institutions and international law in working towards a more equitable future? And if we could bring Harjeet back, whoever. Can you hear me? Yes. Margo, can you hear me? Yeah, you sound great. Okay. So I would say the problem that we are dealing with at this moment, it's because of global inequality. So we have to find solutions at the global level. It is about justice. And there is no other alternative to the multilateral system and working with these institutions to achieve justice. Yes, it is slow. It is very frustrating. It's full of power dynamics, but this is the only way we can ensure that vulnerable communities and countries are able to raise their voice. Now, because these institutions are not going to deliver justice on their own, what we need to do and building on what Laura was saying and what Amali did talk about on how the problem has increased, we have to talk about how to build power, how to strengthen the voices of people and how they can influence these institutions. Yes, when we engage with these multilateral institutions because of the technicalities and it is not ideal that we get to represent the voices of the most vulnerable communities, but we have to create spaces for the frontline communities and we have to make sure that these systems and these processes respond to their needs. So on one hand, we have to work on the technical side and develop understanding, use science, but at the same time, we also have to make sure that people's power is what influences these institutions. We have to go back and work at the community level. As an advocacy organization that I'm part of Climate Action Network or the work that we do at fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative, for us it is about not only contributing in terms of research and analysis, but also advocacy and what we call in our advocacy term is connecting the inside and outside strategy. So this is the only way we can actually influence these institutions where policies are crafted, but unless we work with communities, unless we draw from their experiences, their information, their knowledge, we do not have that credibility with which we can engage with these institutions. So I would underline the fact that yes, this is the only way we can influence because global institutions hold that power, but that does not mean that we only operate in these spaces. We have to make sure that the voices of people inform and influence these processes. 100% agree with everything that was just said. And I guess a couple of things that I would add is, I think it's useful to think about what different roles kind of the international process can play in supporting these other scales and levels of action. And here I think we can look at what kind of policies get crafted at the international level. And here I think can often feel very frustrated with the slow pace of progress in the climate negotiations and what certainly from the outside can at times appear to be rather petty discussions around exact language within the negotiations. But I think it's important to recognize that that's only one part of what's happening in those spaces. Another really important role is being a convening space where a lot of that collaboration, that sharing of ideas, particularly not just transfers from kind of things like finance, as I was talking about before, but from the global north to the global south, but it's also a space where there can be joint learning and sharing transfers of ideas and knowledge among actors that share interests, particularly across the global south. And so I think that's something that the United Nations is particularly well set up to facilitate. And we need those kinds of structures to bring people together to have those conversations. So I think that's one really important piece. And then just want to reiterate that we need these spaces where there's an equality of voices and there really is no other mechanisms that we have. So for all of the limitations of these multilateral processes, they're so, so important for making sure that the voices of the most vulnerable are at least represented. Yeah, I want to echo on that and build off of it to say that I think the meta problem here is that it's a flawed system, the multilateral system that we do have, but as Harjeet and Laura have said, it is the only system that we have. And I think the barrier, the principal barrier is this issue of sovereignty that underlies all of it, but has been used as a way to circumvent responsibility. And we have to find a way to ensure that states are using sovereignty not to protect governments, but to protect its people. And we've bastardized what sovereignty really means. So I think that that has to come from the will of people. That has to come through representation. That has to come through voicing your concerns. That has to come through a democratic process. And we can demand that even of our multilateral institutions. One of the ways we have to do that is to break down the siloed responses that the UN has almost culturally now adopts. Development is over here. Human rights is over here. Climate's over here. Then within climate, you have finance and adaptation and mitigation. Never the trains shall meet. And this is clearly not getting it done. If there's one body at the UN who has power to make law, it's the UN Security Council. And that's good and also bad. Because why the issue of climate change is gaining a lot of traction as a peace and security issue, right? This is good to some extent, but then it has the dangerous effect of being securitized. And by that, I mean the people, the migrants, the people impacted, the people forced to move. I don't have to draw your picture. It's happening right now, right? If that is what we mean by climate action, then we failed. So we have to recognize that we have to find ways for the inclusion of migrants and marginalized people and not through civil society as representatives of them, as Harjeet was saying. So right now, I'm sure a lot of you know about this, the Global Compact for Migration, which was adopted a couple of years ago in Marrakesh. It's a non-binding instrument we haven't made a lot of headway, but it did accept climate change as a driver of cross-border migration. And there's the International Migration Review Form and already, and this is the first one we'll have and already, it's been clear that migrants aren't being represented nor are marginalized people. Just people aren't represented. So that's already being voiced as a concern. Then I'll also say that we have to make sure that we're focusing this as a human rights-based approach, that this is a human rights issue. This is a development issue, much as it is a peace and security issue, which I've kind of touched upon already. Then also, the UNFCCC has the principle, it's just an international legal principle, of common but differentiated responsibilities which Laura talked about. That's a moral principle. That's also a legal principle. But again, there's no enforcement capacity behind that. What does that mean? That means that the polluting states, and Harjeet talked about this a little bit too in the Paris agreement, accepted, granted, not binding, but accepted that they have a responsibility to help the developing countries who are impacted by this disproportionately. That's not happening. So again, it's us. We have to make sure that our voices are demanding that action. But even more, I think the Global North needs to make sure that it's kind of not amplifying, not giving agency, because people have voices. But are we making space for them, for impacted people to tell their stories? I really think you have to think about what's missing and make sure that that's included in the conversation. Because there are a lot of bad narratives out there. And instead of trying to say, that's wrong, that's wrong, I think it's very helpful to think about what's missing and fill that void. And often what's missing is the humanizing, truthful elements of how does this impact so and so in which place and why do I not hear that? Go out and get that. And it's not your story to tell. It's your story to make sure that it's being heard. Onto the next question. While displacement has become a reality for many, as environments become unlivable with heightened natural disasters and changing agricultural and living conditions, what role do you see migration playing as a climate change adaptation strategy and can this mobility be made equitable? I think I've said a lot. Oh. Archie. Go ahead, Archie. Magu, do you want me to? Yeah, that's great. No, Amali, you did talk about the whole issue of migration and how migrants are characterized. I think it's really important, and when she was talking about the definition part of it, it's really important to look at what do we mean by migration and how do we characterize it. Just looking at migration as adaptation is not the right way to look at the issue because when you talk to these people, you realize that they are not leaving their homes out of choice. They are being pushed out of their homes as climate impacts increase. And when we just say migration, and as Amali was saying, there's no clear definition that would talk about what forces are pushing these people or the pull factors. In our work on migration, we define these push and pull factors. So migration becomes value neutral unless you talk about safe or unsafe migration or distressed migration. Going to the UNFCCC parlance, the way they define, they use an umbrella term called human mobility. And under human mobility, there are discussions about migration, displacement, and also planned relocation and also referring to internal and cross border. And this is really important because we have to look at displacement separate from migration. And as I said, even when we look at migration, we have to define the push and pull factors. The reality is over the last few years, and again, Amali was talking about massive numbers of people who are being pushed out of their homes as the face climate impacts. The scale has been increasing. Migration cannot be seen as adaptation. Even in the UNFCCC discussions, it is housed under loss and damage. So what's the international mechanism for loss and damage is dealing with the issue of displacement? That's how the mandate was issued in Paris in 2015. And the current framing is a word, minimize, and address displacement. And when we talk about displacement, and which in this case also includes migration discussion, we need to look at the entire spectrum of averting, minimizing, and addressing the issue of human mobility. And social protection plays a very important role to make it into a safe migration. So how we use social protection policies and practices to provide access to food, healthcare, education, protection of women, and so on. And similarly, the issue of permanent relocation or planned relocation, as it is called in Paris Agreement, is going to be such an important issue. Again, climate science has been telling us how billions of people who are going to be impacted, the ones who are living on coastal areas are the ones who are going to be affected by a glacial melt. And that report came out in 2019. And every new report from IPCC is that it's painting up an even grimmer picture. And in that situation, we need to look at the whole spectrum of displacement, migration, and how we are going to support planned relocation. And there is very little discussion that has happened so far, particularly on planned relocation. So I'll stop here. I know Amali and Laura are going to be also responding. So yes, we need to really understand the issue of migration from various dimensions and not just look at it as an adaptation solution. I think picking up on this, I think it's helpful to think about a couple of different types of migration and just getting into a little more nuance here. One of the big types of migration that we're seeing both from climate change, but also just more generally is rural to urban migration. And so I think one of the big questions this raises is what are we doing to adapt to cities as we have this huge flow of migrants coming to cities, perhaps driven for climate related reasons, for rural areas, but also for economic reasons and opportunities. And this creates a lot of challenges for the fact that many of these are coastal cities that have their own climate challenges. And so how do we ensure, following up on this question of how do we ensure that this migration is safe, is are we doing the kind of urban planning that would create spaces where people can migrate if that's what they're choosing to do into places where there are opportunities, where they're not just as is often happening right now being located in flood plains in the most vulnerable places within cities. So I think that's a really important piece of the puzzle. Obviously we wanna be thinking about how do we prevent forced migration or distressed migration. We also have to recognize that migration is going to continue to happen for many, many different reasons and we don't necessarily wanna be kind of stopping that, but we wanna be ensuring that the places where people are going to, they have the opportunities and resources that they need to be successful. And then the other thing I just wanted to raise is that this question of temporary versus permanent migration and the other phenomenon that is often the case is that we have certain members of a household that are migrating for labor conditions and what does that, and I think one of the really important questions is what are we doing in terms of supporting those who are left behind, which is often women and children and are particularly as kind of climate conditions change, are we putting in place adaptation strategies that will support them as well. So not just the migrants, but also those who are left behind. Yeah, I think there's so much to say here. I'll add to what Laura said and a little bit of Harjeet. I think there's a lot of attention being paid to rural to urban migration, which is happening as I would say a coping mechanism more than an adaptation because there's really no support for that adaptation. So attention is being paid to support, shall we say, shore up cities, make them more resilient because this is where 80% of the populations are going to be living in cities is kind of what the projections are, right? But I have some pause with that because I wonder about what are we eroding in terms of cultural rights, indigenous rights? How adaptive is that? Are we giving people agency? If you put, I just think about this in terms of projecting, right? How does our world work? Oh, we see a problem over there. Everybody runs there. What's the unintended consequences of that? I think we have to be a little bit cautious about this because what you're seeing in the climate context, unlike conflict, in so many refugee contexts I've worked in, it's not uncommon for people to move in agricultural settings, herders, farmers, they'll move with their livestock, we'll say. In climate context, you're starting to see people leave, like they're not leaving with their livestock because the land's degraded. They know they can't go back. You're seeing this happen in the Horn of Africa. It's very telling. It's very telling that we should be listening to local populations and to me, that speaks a lot about rights that are being eroded. Now, you're talking about people who may not, who already have maladaptive lives to urban context. So do you have a whole other set of problems that you were not paying attention to? If we go shoring up cities, cities, cities, don't get me wrong, we need to make cities resilient. I might, one of my best examples is Dakar, think about how vulnerable Dakar is on the Atlantic seaboard, right? But our, and people are moving to Dakar, Legos, already highly vulnerable and underdeveloped city. These are places where we need climate adaptation finance, which is by far the most expensive thing to do is to make these places resilient. So that's one thing. The other thing is there's also a lot of conversation that goes, hey, don't be so alarmist. People are mostly moving internally. And I, two things on that. One, okay, you know that from disaster context. What about the slow onset? What about the way climate change happens in droughts, which you can't quite attribute, right? Because you're talking about climate variability then. Attribution is another really important thing that you have to pay attention to. Not everything that's happening today, we can definitively say is a result of climate change. So attribution becomes important when you wanna assign responsibility. So slow onset climate impacts, you know, they, they, how can I put this? They exacerbate, they're embroiled within other underlying vulnerabilities. So it becomes very difficult to unpack what the driver is and therefore find solutions that someone is responsible to support. So when somebody is only, when you're only focused on, hey, all the migration and displacement is happening internally, one, that's an issue of sovereignty because, you know, you're internal and so your own government is responsible for you. Well, if that own government is a fragile state and now fragile climate state, right? Like what resources do they have to deal with an increasingly fragile situation? Second, as far as human rights and protection needs go and the responsibility of climate change, which is does, knows no borders, it doesn't really help us. It's really a way to buck responsibility. Thirdly, when it comes to the slow onset climate change impacts, like I said, because you can't unpack it, it's really hard to know why people are moving across borders. And in the conflict context, I can tell you it's, I've never interviewed one person yet who has refugee status who'll give me one reason why they left. There's always a multitude of reasons. My job is to figure out how it meets nexus refugee grounds. That's just the human condition. Climate doesn't, you know, it interacts no differently. So I think that these are things that, you know, we have to kind of be like really on guard about and think ahead about. All right. So each of you have dedicated time and effort to addressing climate impacts in the global South. What gives you hope and motivation in this pursuit and how do you balance your own envisionings for the future with what you find most feasible? Do you want me to start? Who's gonna start? Always Haji. Okay. That's very tough. And unfair. Yeah, I know. I'm just kidding. If you look at the past few years or decades, in terms of climate policy, yes, it has been slow, very frustrating, but we have seen some progress, at least at the understanding conceptual level and how communities and civil society organizations and developing countries have been able to create space and push the system to deliver on certain aspects. Of course, when you compare them with the need and the scale of the crisis, we are nowhere there. But understanding that you need to get 200 countries on the same page, countries that have varied levels of complexity in terms of their economy, society, geography, it's never going to be easy. But when we look at how people from the global south, how developing country governments are now far more prepared and how they understand, how to influence this international space, how to demand justice, I think that gives us hope. And we also see at the very ground level how communities have developed their solutions. The gap is that those solutions have not been recognized and supported to be scaled up to a level where we can respond to the scale of the problem that we are facing right now. So for me, the hope is how people's power has been increased through consultations and continuous engagement. That gives me hope. When I look at how developing countries are far more prepared and they are fighting the battle and the recent example of climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, that gives me a lot of power and hope because loss and damage as an issue was not even on the agenda. And as climate action network, we decided that to be the most important issue, we fought for it, we organized civil society, we relayed community voices and we pushed negotiators to put it on the table and we reached a moment where G77 group of 130 plus countries agreed to that demand which they were not prepared to bring it to COP26 because that was only being championed by vulnerable countries as island states or least developed countries supported by Africa. But that happened, we were very close to getting that facility for finance. But of course, rich countries blocked it and this year, you're going to be far more prepared and organized to demand justice. So I think the lesson for us is how do we, and which is what I said earlier, how do we really connect the dots and develop that inside outside strategy? We need to influence these multilateral spaces but at the same time work with communities, you know, provide space to them and ensure that they are able to influence and that's where we all play that role working very closely with governments and various other stakeholders. So of course, as I keep saying, the challenge of climate is massive and we know that we are not nearly there but the hope is about centering our work around people and claiming the space that is getting squeezed. So that is the most fundamental thing to do if you really want to win the battle. I'll say something next and if there's another question, I'll promise to start. I want to say from a personal standpoint, this is so hard, this is so, so, so hard and it does feel hopeless a lot but I have hope from no joke Harjeet from you. I've learned a lot from people, from Harjeet personally. I love listening to you and I love, I get a lot of hope from people in the Global South personally but also in my work because it's hard doing this work when you know what it looks like in practice and you see the disconnect in the conversation and you're forced to have conversations that are very disconnected and then you spend so much of your time, I think trying to be like this square peg in around hole is not how the expression goes. I don't remember, I'm terrible with expressions but you know and you like have to fight and people like I'm saying this to you Harjeet because like listening to you, being someone who comes from the refugee migration world and then you have to talk about climate, that's something I've had to learn and I'm learning all the time and the science is constantly getting better so we're all learning but it's not my knowledge, it's not my education but then there's also, I'm an immigrant, I'm a migrant, I've even sought asylum once, right? So there's always this, you're always the outsider and so it's just difficult personally and I try to like get out of my own way and I listen to the people who are impacted and I listen to people like Harjeet and I listen to lots of other people who are in this work like Harjeet and Mary Robinson, Salim Haq, I mean people who have just told me straight up, keep talking and I just share that to anyone else here who that might like find hope and inspiration from because that's what helps me and I'll just finally say that, recently I spoke to a refugee who I spoke to about climate impacts about five years ago who told me something that I was floored by, he said, we thought climate change was natural and just something happening, thanks, and he was complimenting me or thanking me and I don't take it that way at all, I take it as like, and this is how people speak to you because they're so grateful to you. I share this as like, what a gift, right? I take it as humility. He said to me, thanks to you coming here and asking us specifically about climate change, it's like made me start reading and thinking and I've read everything I can for the last five years and now I realize that no climate change isn't something happening to us, it's something that is happening, that is being perpetrated upon us and it's only when I repeated that to someone else that tears well in my eyes and I heard it. So that's kind of what gives me hope. Well, I mean, I think this is a really challenging question and I want to start really small, it's such a big question and actually go back to a discussion I had with my students this morning in class and we've been doing these little adaptation success video stories where they're sharing examples of what's happening on the ground as a way of combating this potential for this to be such a challenging, depressing topic and this was a project that we were talking about this morning of a project in India that was working at the local level for drought management with a whole lot of really very simple strategies for water management and agricultural practices and it had been a project that had been implemented for over 10 years and they had a lot of the results and students were really blown away by how effective some of these very simple strategies were with results of doubling crop yields and greening of the communities in areas that have been totally throughout from before and now there was like replenishment of watersheds and really a very inspiring story but what really stood out was how simple some of the strategies were and I just want to raise this because I think sometimes this question of how are we going to manage climate change just so big and because it's so big though there's a million intervention points and this is what gives me hope is that there are so many examples being done around the world organizations working on this but also local communities and people around the world who are dealing with climate change and coming up with amazing ways to improve the situation and so I think a lot of our task for those of us in the global north is to recognize that this is happening this is not a situation where people are just totally throwing up their hands and giving up on the world and to learn from what do those successes look like how can those be as I've heard people saying before how can we be supporting those and scaling those up while also ensuring that they stay locally appropriate to specific contexts so that's one of the things that gives me hope the other thing that really gives me hope is that through addressing climate change I really see an opportunity to be addressing a lot of these underlying structural vulnerabilities and challenges that have existed long before climate change was a problem and so one of the things that I've been really inspired by is this movement in the discourse from a very climate impact focus to so much more discussion of climate justice and one of the things I think this really raises is seeing the intersectionality between climate change and all of these other problems that we're facing colonialism and racism and all of these different issues are really coming together under this umbrella of climate justice and I see this as a huge opportunity to not just address climate change but to make the world a lot better in a lot of other ways too. Thank you and thank you all for the sake of time I think we will conclude this portion of the panel and before we open up to questions from the audience my peers and I have been asked to present briefly on our research we conducted over winter break on Puerto Rico so if you guys can join me up front. Hi everyone, my name is Ellie Murphy and I'm a senior at Tufts studying international relations and sociology and over winter break we were fortunate enough to conduct research in Puerto Rico because of the Institute of Global Leadership to do a fact finding trip on the relationship between climate change and state sovereignty in Puerto Rico. So today Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Its status as a Commonwealth leaves Puerto Rico in a precarious position. They're technically US citizens but cannot vote in federal elections if they're living on the island. Puerto Rico has its own governor, assembly and constitution yet much of its operations as an unincorporated territory are still beholden to United States federal law. Yet this political paradox of Puerto Rico being part of the United States but distinct from it enjoying citizenship but lacking full political representation has limited much of Puerto Rico's individual agency. This was particularly notable during Puerto Rico's recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico was devastated by this category five hurricane. Many island residents were left without power for almost a year and there were just under 3,000 recorded deaths but likely much more. Yet despite the fact that Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, the United States federal government has been criticized for supplying insufficient funds for its relief. Additionally in the aftermath of the hurricane, sorry, and additionally in the aftermath of the hurricane, the prior administration did not waive the Jones Act which is a federally imposed law that permits solely American ships to carry goods and passengers between American ports until eight days after the storm which of course further limited recovery efforts and the United States mainland federal government limited or turned away aid from neighboring Caribbean countries further limiting Puerto Rico's ability to receive necessary resources to recover. So this lack of federal support resulted in an influx in community organizations that formed aiming to aid in resiliency efforts on the island. The scope of our research sought to further analyze the connection between Puerto Rico's fraught relationship with the United States and its ongoing recovery efforts in the aftermath of Maria and its fight against climate change. My research partner, Bree, will discuss some of the people and organizations we spoke to you to further understand this connection. Thanks, Ellie. In Puerto Rico, we are fortunate to speak to many individuals that specialize in climate-related issues. This includes NGO leaders, academics, land supervisors, and experts in Puerto Rico's energy grid and other related issues in the aftermath of Maria and Irma. Today, I want to share two people that we spoke to. We had the opportunity to speak to Alexis Mazul Gonzalez, head of Casa Pueblo, who is a civil engineer and winner of the 2002 Goldman Environmental Prize. Casa Pueblo is a nonprofit environmental watchdog community-based organization and Agentes Puerto Rico. Its mission is to promote the responsible use of the land's ecosystems and resources to educate and enlist others to protect and restore the environment and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives. After Hurricane Maria hit the area on September 20th, 2017, the island was left without power. Casa Pueblo became the sole energy provider of the community, where people came to connect to their life-saving equipment. Casa Pueblo became an energy oasis and it distributed 10,000 solar lamps. Alexis spoke to us in-depth about the importance of community centers and local efforts in responding to Hurricane Maria, particularly due to government failures. We also spoke to Attorney Loveras, president of Perala Naturalesa, an executive director of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico. Perala Naturalesa fights for a sustainable future for Puerto Rico in numerous ways. As many may know, after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September, 2017, the island experienced many interruptions of electricity, water, food, and communication services which caused much suffering in Puerto Rico. As a result of this reality, Perala Naturalesa developed a community fund which strives to retrofit community centers with systems that can capture, store, and filter rainwater and provide clean energy. It is their hope that these efforts will better prepare communities to be more resilient in the face of future extreme weather events, particularly due to the failures of the Puerto Rican government and the federal government and adequately responding to the natural disasters. We spoke to Attorney Loveras about these efforts and resiliency efforts on the island as a whole and gained a lot from our discussions with him. Now, Margo will speak about some of our findings of our fact-finding trip. Thanks. Yes, so our trip called into question the natural and natural disasters. The vast extent of the devastation we've spoken about was a product of preexisting political, economic, and infrastructural issues. Puerto Rico was in crisis long before the hurricane struck. The storm exposed these preexisting conditions and calls us to look at the island's colonial past and present. We learned about how Puerto Rico's financial situation has been limited and directed by U.S. interests. The severe debt crisis can be seen as a factor of this colonial relationship. As Puerto Rico is unable to form trade agreements with other countries, and all imported goods, because of the Joan Act that Ellie touched upon, has to go through a U.S. port and this increases the price of goods and unnecessarily drives up living costs on the island. And as an island that imports the vast majority of their food and energy supply, this quadruples for many instances the cost of living. Puerto Rico can additionally not file for debt relief because it is not a mainland municipality. And because, unlike Greece and Argentina, it is in a sovereign country, it cannot default or adjust their currency or seek to negotiate loans from the IMF. This has led to the burden being placed on Puerto Ricans to repay this debt, who have no part in these financial decisions nor have seen the benefits of this borrowing. The Fiscal Oversight Management Board, also known as La Junta, was imposed in 2016 to deal with the debt crisis, which largely reaffirms U.S. control over the island. They have imposed severe austerity measures, cutting funding for public schools and universities, the public electricity power authority, healthcare and other social services. While raising taxes to pay back, this unfair debt accrued for the benefit of mainland investors and instead acting as a tax haven for mainlanders who moved to the island. So with this background setting, when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, the impacts were largely exacerbated by this defunded and slow moving public sphere. Privatization of services increased with Naomi Klein's concept of disaster capitalism, where no bid contracts were granted to U.S. corporations to build back while the waiting for food, for FEMA and electricity, characterized the lives of many for the months to come. This waiting period proved deadly as the lack of resources, access to hospitals, electricity, medicine and equipment, clean water and food, safe homes and mental health services resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths. After the hurricane, there was an influx of community organizations that formed out of this lack of federal response. And while this level of resiliency can be seen positively, these individuals and collectives should not alleviate the government's responsibility to protect and to provide safe and healthy living conditions. Community organizations are constructing visions for a more democratic future. People from a wide range of affiliations to Puerto Rico's government describe the challenges of working through this highly inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy and are seeking alternatives beyond this institution and its inclination towards disaster capitalism and beyond a system that is geared towards U.S. mainland interests. In conclusion, this heightened severity of this hurricane due to climate change and other the other challenges climate change poses up to the island such as sea level rise, heat waves and flooding all call for equitable disaster relief and resilience, but not a form of resilience that makes people depend on themselves while the governments and corporations evade responsibility. The colonial relationship with the U.S. hold that the U.S. hold over Puerto Rico has impeded the island's ability to adapt, mitigate and respond to climate change. And now we will return to the question and answer session if people can come to the microphones on either side of the staircases. That would be great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Professor Kohl, in your outline of the principles of what we need to do, you said we have to increase our robust understanding of the climate crisis. And in there you mentioned about good intentions leading to malpractices or, and I was wondering if you had any concrete examples of what projects were led with good intentions but ended up harming the inhabitants and local communities. What's the approach are you gathering a number of questions or what are the time times? Okay, so this is a really great question on kind of basically asking what about maladaptation? And this is a concept that's been around for a while but really has gained a lot of attention recently. There's been a couple of really prominent studies that were done that looked at kind of a wide range of adaptation projects that have been implemented around the world and looked at what's the evidence of how effective have they been. And it came up with some pretty disturbing findings that quite a lot of the projects that have been implemented have actually either not been effective but even worse have actually potentially caused more harm. And so I'll give one very concrete kind of like an example of what maladaptation could look like on a very technical level and then also speak a little bit about kind of more broadly what some of these maladaptive challenges can be at a political level. So from a technical level, and this is coming from some of my fieldwork in Ethiopia, there was a project that was implementing, it was an area that had rainfall patterns remaining that a lot of rain was coming in short periods of time. This was a very drought prone area but there's still like significant amounts of water that were a rainfall but it was just coming in concentrated periods of time. So one of the strategies was to build basically pits for water storage. They're very simple, just kind of lined with plastic pit, I think fancy. And the idea was that water would run off, get stored in these pits and then that could be used for irrigation over a longer period of time. One of the things that this project was doing was a really integrated approach of not just this but also upper watershed restoration activities. And the project hadn't been designed to actually map out the whole system and the interconnections between it. And so as some of the upper watershed activities started to be more and more successful, there wasn't what run off anymore. It was infiltrating down in, which is what is supposed to happen but it then meant that this pit that had been designed was totally ineffective. There was no run off that was landing in this pit anymore. So that's like a very simple example of when you don't think through all of the interconnections within these complex socio-ecological systems, you can design projects that will be at their best ineffective and potentially quite harmful. On a broader level, there's a lot of evidence that if these kind of interventions don't pay attention to power dynamics at the local level, there's a real risk of elite capture within these projects. So if you go in to talk to the community about what their needs are and you don't have a really good understanding of the power structures within that community, you're most likely to talk to those individuals within the community that are most powerful and they will articulate what their needs are. And those quite likely will not be the same as those who are not even at the table. And so then potentially your intervention which was designed to support the most vulnerable is actually supporting the most powerful and exacerbating inequality. So that's I think what that concept is really trying to address. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Sana Luisa. I'm part of the Brazilian delegation. And thank you very much for your presentation. It was really interesting. And I'd like to hear more about your perspective of the case of Haiti in Central America because I used to think that Haiti was kind of an unlucky country but after reading more about it, I realized that actually it's not about lucky but about poor institutions and fragile governance. So I'd like to hear more about your perspective about this country. And if you think that it's possible to change their current situation and in the international level, what can be done? I mean, I'll say something here. I'm certainly not a Haiti expert. But there's tons of reading on how Haiti is basically a country that is the victim of imperialism and colonialism and continues to be and not to mention interventionism. Every single coup that you've seen happen even more recently in Haiti is the product of the ripple effects of all of that. And when it comes to climate change and how vulnerable Haiti is to the disasters that are now happening in the Caribbean basin, you can't discount how much that is also a factor. So there are a lot of neoliberal policies that the global South is disproportionately the victims of. And that's really what you're seeing play out in Haiti. Keep in mind too that historically Haiti, Hispaniola, this is a country that actually helped the United States in its own fight for liberation. So there's just incredible injustice when it comes to Haiti. And that's really quite frankly in one word, the core of the historical legacy of Haiti. And that injustice continues today in terms of how much it's shut out and extracted. Haiti is not afforded justice. Haiti is not afforded protection. Haitians aren't afforded protection. Last year when the United States responded late to a coordinated effort to evacuate Afghans when it knew it was leaving the country, that was a terribly botched response, but which I worked on. Simultaneously at the US border, Haitians arrived having fled yet another earthquake. Not if you're being to climate, but there have been multiple climate disasters in Haiti as well, not to mention political issues. What you saw take place in Del Rio, Texas was akin to what you saw happening during the Heights of Slavery in this country. It shocked everybody. I find it especially shocking when you juxtapose the ability of a government to respond in coordinated fashion in Afghanistan and simultaneously that's what happened on its own borders in Texas. How do you reconcile that? And how do you explain the glaring disparity? That is Haiti's legacy. Thank you all for joining us today. My name's Ian Bouldastan, I'm a senior at Tufts. Azorna, if you'd be able to speak a little bit on how global governance might be used to hold responsible multinational corporations who are significant polluters and have them basically pay their fair share, I guess, of climate finance and climate reparations and whether that's realistic or possible right now or if there'd need to be significant changes within the international framework to make that possible. I'm happy to say a couple of words, give Harji to break, I feel like he always goes first. Yeah, I think we need huge restructuring of our system. I mean, I think I've spoken to that to some effect. Largely speaking, the system is reactive, right? Rather than protective, and even when it's preventative, it's preventative in states' interests and it's preventative from a security standpoint and not from a rights-based approach. That puts us always on the back foot. That's why we always have crises. That's why humanitarians like me are constantly called and said, can you go over there and respond and you're in the dark shadows doing these things. I had a really great mentor in grad school who told me, Molly, never forget that humanitarian response is the result of a breakdown in human rights and I never, ever, ever forget that in when I work but also every single day. So that's the approach that we should have as a multilateral sort of like response and I don't think our institutions work that way. What we can do is I think make some great inroads in our justice framework. So that's starting to happen. Last year, we had the UN human rights bodies and instruments passed the resolution on the right to clean and healthy environment. Long before it passed the resolution though, it's about 10 years in the making, maybe more, led by indigenous marginalized black people of color, right? Long before that actually happened though, a lot of countries who are on the front lines of this already passed such laws in their municipal and local laws. So you're seeing, as Harjeet was saying, countries just get ahead of this. Responding, although they've had absolutely no role in creating the problem, all of Central America is like way less than 1% global contribution. Yet they're way on the front lines of it. So look at Costa Rica, look at a lot of these states and what they're doing to sort of like respond and protect and prevent and even rebuild. So that's who we need to be looking to. Not to Europe, not to North America to lead. Look to the global south. There is incredible work happening. There's leadership there. We should be trying to learn from those people, lead with you, learn from humility and incorporate those lessons. And you're finally starting to see that happen at the UN also with another resolution now that's been passed on a special repertoire on the human rights impacts of climate change. I hope that that starts to like build a body of evidence that this is a human rights issue. And this can be attribution also in the legal space can be one of the ways we can make an impact. If I can come in briefly just to build on what Amali said. And can you hear me? Yes. So and also what Laura was saying, which I totally agree to and to the piece of work that we are trying to do using climate justice as a frame, but not limiting it to just the climate arena and looking at things far more systemically. And this is where what's happening right now in the world. It's very clear how fossil fuels have been bankrolling the Ukrainian war. And we need to look at it as part of the system that has created these conditions where climate change is just a symptom of that deep rooted problem. So when we talk about the response, we have to hit the fossil fuel industry much, much harder. And we already have the concepts where we say make polluters pay. You know, applying the polluter space principle we're demanding and there are already campaigns going on. There are even concepts where we are proposing and advocating for a levy on fossil fuel extraction till it is paced down and paced out completely. So that fossil fuel industry must be paying for the losses and damages that are happening in the global south, but also for just transition. And this is where the pressure from the ground and using the demand for climate reparations is extremely important. Even if we know that climate reparations and compensation languages are non-starter in the multilateral space, but on the outside when social movements demand reparations it does influence negotiations internally in the UN space. So we need to look at it as a system issue, look at who is causing the problem and corporations in connivance with governments, they are the ones who have blocked the progress and as Margot talked about the disinformation campaigns. So we have to look at the supply side of the problem and really hit them where it hurts the most. And of course demand, human rights. Thank you so much. My name is Marca. I'm a senior at Tufts. Professor Cool, you talked a little bit about adaptation strategies for kind of those left behind during cyclical flows of migration. And I'm interested in the question of remittances. I know on one hand they have been said to be helpful for development there. In a lot of countries they contribute very immensely to the GDP, but on the other hand they've been criticized for kind of absorbing state responsibility. So I would love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between remittances and the potential for them being helpful for climate adaptation and development at large. Thank you. It's a great question and I'm guessing that my other panelists also will have contributions to this question. I think it's absolutely true that remittances play a huge role in the way that I would frame this is in building the adaptive capacity and resources that households potentially have. But I also think that we have to understand remittances in the context of what are the drivers of these migration patterns and is this really more of a coping strategy, potentially even a more broadly a maladaptive strategy and remittances might be a symptom of these much larger underlying structural problems that are forcing people into these relationships. That said, it is the reality that that is the way that many people are coping with these systems. And so I think that we need to be intervening to address the larger issues while also thinking creatively about how can we build on these mechanisms that are in place and ensure that these are getting utilized in the best ways possible to support people even if it's kind of an interim strategy and not kind of an ideal outcome. Certainly kind of my experience doing fieldwork in Honduras is definitely an area going back to your discussions, beginning of the dry corridor and the sort of migration patterns to the US, almost every household that I interviewed had family members in the United States and remittances played a large role. One of the things that I think we could be thinking about is are there structures or policies that could be put in place to help households use those remittances to invest in addressing adaptation so that if they don't want to end up migrating, they can have support to be using those remittances to make investments that will be climate resilient. Only one piece of the puzzle, but I think there's space to be thinking more creatively in that area. That remittances can be more just to what Laura just said. If they're also like, imagine a world in which you had migration pathways where you could actually like tie in the whole economic part of remittances into the immigration schemes. If you didn't villainize immigration and make this like taboo, then you wouldn't really like make the remittances this like, you wouldn't push it into the illicit, right? And you wouldn't like have this whole cottage industry happening of trafficking and smuggling in order to have remittances that are really at the end of the day supporting people who are very much like what Margo and her colleagues just described you in Puerto Rico. I mean, let's face facts. People aren't moving for remittances because they're building multinational corporations. They're doing this to survive. And to your question about responsibility of their host governments or rather their own states, like I said, how much is the fragility of their own states, right? Like if that's weakening, then people have less and less agency and then those states also have less and less agency in order to protect their states. And that's really what your, I'm sorry, their citizens. And that's really what we're starting to see increase more and more and then climate plays a role in widening that. And that's really what you're talking about when you talk about widening inequality because none of these things happen in a vacuum, right? Like the Puerto Rico example. I mean, how is, does that not look like colonialism to you? And yet we're supposedly don't live in a colonialist world anymore. So you have to, we have to talk about things in real terms. And so I say, to Laura's point about remittances, imagine if you just had migration pathways, what could that look like? And we've had that, they're called temporary laborer, temporary work exchanges, you know. And it actually works quite well with the climate situation we're having as well. Time for one or two more questions. Okay, yes. Please direct your questions to one of the panelists. Thank you. Thank you very much for your input in our symposium. My name is Angelos Kareganopoulos. I'm a senior of political science from Greece. So the Genoa Convention is relevant and able to protect climate refugees. So I would like to ask you, Mr. Hour, please. If ideally we had a new legal framework, it would include those who flee their habitat in advance of our upcoming disaster? I don't believe, let me take a step back. If we had a new framework, right? I think what we need is a new framework, not just for climate. I think we need an international framework for migrants because we don't have one, right? We don't have a legal definition for migrants and that also means we have no international legal framework for migrants. There's absolutely no convention. There are many separate conventions that are supposed to uphold migrant rights in different contexts. They have very little support by member states. Now, in the context of climate, you have this global compact for migration which does have climate in it. It's non-binding, but it was always intended as a first step to get us to hopefully something binding. What we can do is it would quite simply look in its best purposes, it should look like regardless of whether you move pre, post, right? Because you're talking about disasters and you're talking about slow onset impacts and the fact that you can't unpack how climate is impacting your life. You need to have something that's quite encompassing. So then what you do is just like I mentioned those five grounds for refugees, right? You would make sure that it's a definition that doesn't limit this nexus scope of how are my rights eroded and the threshold is much wider, right? You don't have to like say, oh, and let's define climate because how do you define there's climate variability, there's climate change, then there's attribution, what can we attribute to climate? This will be a sliding scale of things. So the idea is that to have something that's all encompassing. But more importantly than that, the bigger issue is even if we got there, enforceability, right? Because we right now have, before Ukraine, 84 million people are forcibly displaced in the world. That's for the, I don't even know how many years, five, 10, I just have to keep, I just have to stop counting. But this is that many more years that it's the largest number since World War II. So we're definitely being going in the wrong direction for a very long time. And you have to address that elephant in the room, which is that no matter how many bodies of law we create, how do we get people to respect them and then respect them equitably is the bigger issue. So Graves Trenum, my name is Felipe. I'm a law student of the University of Sao Paulo and I'm also part of the Brazilian delegation. And I wanted to know if climate litigation, it's a viable option for addressing the responsibility. Because like this is something that is happening in Brazil right now. It's getting the Supreme Court, the concept of climate change and not only like an environmental aspect in general. So I'd like to know. Quickly so I can let someone else speak, yes. Answer is absolutely yes. In Urgenda, how do you say it in Holland? Then just individual cases in France, in England when it comes to pollution and showing how people have been either their rights eroded or their deaths. The Shell case, yeah, absolutely attribution in the legal space is everything. And then there's an ICJ case as well. So yeah, this is the way to go. Way in on this one. Yeah, so to totally agree, this is the way to go in factories, IPCC report, working group two also refers to climate litigation. And we have seen certain successes as Amali was saying, but at the same time it has to be combined with the much larger strategy. The case in Germany, for example, when Fridays for future young activists did not get any headway, then they had to resort to this option. And then of course you have to follow through with the kind of policies governments are creating. And we have seen litigation working more in the global north and less in the global south because of the law system being so slow and not as responsive. So I would say we need to really look at where it works and how we then follow through with a number of other solutions. Hey, can I just, because you're here from Brazil, I heard something extremely interesting and I don't wanna take us off track too much, but I heard from a Brazilian last week that language I think plays a really important role and I've heard this in different countries as well when talking to climate-displaced people. We have to be careful that we also think about anthropology and linguistics when we talk about these terms because I say anthropology because borders are a very wide issue, right? Depending on where you're from. Linguistically I understood to the Afro-Caribbean person I spoke to who said in my culture from where I'm from in Brazil, there's a huge difference between climate and environment. So depending on where you're from in Brazil, you might want to phrase this very differently because some people might say that government interventions to reclaim land which was never theirs, the climate, the earth is just taking it back in terms of like sea erosion. So it really, and as I expanded upon the conversation, it came down to this Brazilian journalist was telling me it really came down to the difference between climate and environment and how that that was being defined and used. So when it comes to the law, you know, it's an important thing to think about definitions in that way as well. Totally true, thank you very much. Hello, thank you very much for your words. I am Rosia from the Argentina delegation and I just wanted to know what do you think thinking into account that the ETR, that's a think-fang from Australia, projected that 1.1 billion people could be displaced by climate cost, by climate change, by 2050. Just wanted to know like which policy at international level have you seen that really worked, that we should still implement it? Okay, you're looking at me, so. Sorry. No, that's okay. That study, I know, well, I wonder if Harjit also has something to say about that, but the ecological threat register, I believe is what you're talking about, right? I'll say we. Me and my like, you know, climate displacement community, there were some real issues with that study, because the, I would say, I mean, I personally did not like looking into it myself. I can tell you that as soon as I saw it, I immediately was like, what? No, that doesn't look right. Very, very simply, the statistics were a little wobbly because there was a lot of sort of like double counting, and so there's some issues with the statistics, and therefore there's some issues with that final number, and then there were some sort of like changes made, but there was very little transparency about communicating those changes. That's all I'll say about the study. It doesn't matter what the projected number is. It's the alarming lack of protections that we should be focused on. Talking about numbers puts us at, you know, frames us as at what number do you, are you moved to action? And you're gonna keep moving the goalpost. It doesn't give you a goal to move, to sort of aim for, and so I myself am not ever going to engage in numbers because as a human being a number, I don't think so. So that's my path answer on that. If I would very briefly add to that, I would say, I would agree totally with Damali. Numbers can be useful in driving action, but the way numbers are being created, it can also respond to the issue in a very negative manner, especially when it is seen from a much more security perspective, and it gives, you know, an opportunity to hold secure securitization of the issue, and we know there's a big industry using this threat as an opportunity to promote their vested interest and the market around security, and that's how you see people erecting walls and talking about security apparatus, Damali responding to the whole issue as a human rights issue, and then promoting solutions such as social protection and providing support to vulnerable communities through finance. So I think that's where numbers can be really problematic, when we need to be very, very careful, you know, how these numbers are created and what is the purpose and who's behind it. Thank you. Fortunately, we are about out of time. Wait, the next panel starts at 2.30. Okay, all right, go for it. Sorry. Hi, my name is Ellie Murphy and I had a question for Dr. Kohl, although I think any of the panelists can contribute to this. When looking at the role of international institutions and multilateral organizations in working to mitigate and climate change, one of the areas of discussion that came up was thinking in silos and how that limits their ability to effectively work against climate change and that's an issue that's come up a lot in our class when thinking about problems without passports. So I'm curious about what you think looking beyond silos looks like in an international institution as large as the United Nations and whether you think that's a realistic reality in the future. I have a full answer on this, but definitely the part of that answer that I think about the most is the relationship between adaptation and development and the artificial divide that gets created, in part because of climate finance between these two concepts. And I say it gets created by climate finance because there's a lot of questions of what should be the sources of funding to support these kind of initiatives. But on the ground, these don't really look very different and the types of we wanna be doing climate resilient development that really is addressing all of this together. And so I think one response would be that we need to be thinking separately about perhaps it's okay to have some separation in terms of thinking about where the sources and responsibilities for the problem and that there might be different kinds of responsibilities for development problems and climate. I think that's potentially productive because climate change, there's kind of an ethical responsibility to fund. Transfers in a different way. But then that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to keep those silos present all the way through implementation and the empowering governments and other actors to think about these issues much more holistically and addressing them in pooled ways, I think would be a much more productive direction. Hi, my name is Solomi Day-Pirma. I'm a sophomore here at Tovson and part of the epic colloquium. And it's kind of going off what Ellie was talking about, but I was wondering, because we talk about global governance and the responsibility between the global north and historically the greatest polluters and the global south, but I was wondering if you saw any local efforts or regional efforts that were very effective in mitigating kind of climate crisis on the trajectory of Professor Cole, but anyone can also respond. Was that the question? Yeah. I'll start, but I think one of the areas here that's most interesting to me is kind of going back to this question of what does a just transition look like? And here, I think it's a really exciting direction that the mitigation space is moving again, similar to moving towards climate justice more broadly, but this question of what is it gonna look like as we transition from a fossil fuel dependent economy and society to something different and how do we ensure that that's done in ways that center justice? And I think those are conversations that are happening at all scales, certainly a global conversation, but it's also happening very locally. And I think that this is an area where conversations about economic opportunities, jobs, local environmental justice issues all come together. And I think it's a really productive direction for that conversation to be moving into. I can very quickly add and say that indigenous people, local communities do not see those silos as we were talking about earlier and for them, economy, society, everything comes together and their solutions really speak to the kind of governance that is required, where we are able to bring many of these, we can respond to these challenges together. And one positive example, not at a micro level, but at a kind of meta level, we have seen European countries really looking at the inequity that exists within the region and they know how Poland heavily relies on coal and it has been a legard and not allowing Europe to take more stringent targets, but they have been able to deal with it. And as Laura was talking about just transition, they've created a just transition fund to support those countries who need to make that transition in a just and fair manner. And so that does exist and that is based on equity, but unfortunately, when you ask Europe to support the rest of the world, they completely forget about equity and the kind of support that is required for just transition, but within Europe, they have been able to set up this very good example which others should learn from. Some good examples like Morocco, right? With solar and the wind farms, I mean, got ahead of that very, very early because the Mediterranean basin is certainly going to be one of the biggest climate crises regions. The green wall in Africa, I mean, I'm thinking like Metta, so you can, not Metta, but like regionally, so you can look at some good examples. Think of the Pacific Island nations, the Marshall Islands, right? And it speaks to what Harjeet was just talking about in terms of people who are on the front lines, people who are indigenous, who kind of organize themselves differently, don't see it as, oh, the economics people aren't talking to the anthropological people. I mean, it's all of it and all of it together and all of it at once. And that's not necessarily difficult or strange. It's difficult because of the acuity and the intensity and the frequency with which they're having to do it now, but the concept isn't strange. Whereas in societies like ours, I think that's also a conceptual barrier. So we're also dealing with having to win people over to recognize that that needs to happen. Look at countries like Bangladesh, right? Literally making climate friendly cities to, and they don't look at it as like planned relocation or managed retreat, right? They're actually looking at the Sundarbans and that people cannot keep moving and withstanding disasters. And we're talking about homes on rivers. And we're talking about situations in which they're also then saying, okay, and so how do you work with host communities to welcome people who may be different, who may be ethnically, linguistically, religiously different so that you don't have a xenophobic or hostile reception. They're thinking about, they're thinking through, well, what about natural resources? What about like local resources? What about markets? What about community involvement? Much as you would, I've resettled refugees in different countries and when you're on the receiving end of where a refugee goes, you work with state officials. You go to different, as you would hear, you'd go to the Social Security Office in Medford or whatever and you would talk to local officials at various levels and you'd say, hey, look, I wanna bring over 100 Burmese. How, what are your services? We know how to do this, right? So we just have to adapt it and think about it now in the climate context and Bangladesh is doing that. So, and this is a country that contributed nothing. So yeah, there are definitely good examples to follow. My ending words. Thank you to our panelists for providing us with their nuanced perspectives and for giving us so much to think about. Also a big thank you to the audience for being so engaged with this panel. Our next panel is at 2.30 on space, the final frontier back here in the JCC at 2.70. Hope to see you there. Thank you all.