 I'm Jamila, and I've been with Camilla, we've been working on the, and a lot of other amazing people, we've been working on the climate perspective seminars. And for those of you who don't know, these seminars are happening for five weeks, and they're looking at climate change through a bunch of different perspectives. So there has been a lot, or last week was on politics, this week is going to be through the perspective of development, then there's also going to be economics, individual action, and law. So we want to give you a warm welcome tonight for this very exciting seminar with a pretty amazing speaker. I just want to briefly mention also last time it was on Larry Lohman, and he talked about how climate change has always been, is very focused on the western discourse. So even though the community is suffering the most are the poor communities of the global south, international politics are still very much focused on maintaining western discourse. So my name is Camilla, I have been leading the group convening these climate perspective seminars, and I am an undergraduate student here at Soros as well. So the topic for tonight's seminar is climate change and development, and we will attempt to, and the objective of this seminar is to attempt to understand climate change from the perspective, as the name says, of development issues. We want to illustrate the importance of fully integrating climate issues in the development discourse, and we want to similarly emphasize the significance of development issues for discussions on climate change. The talk will be 45 minutes, and it will be followed by a Q&A session in which you are also very welcome to open questions to the floor if you like. We ask that you make your questions brief, and the Q&A session will be about 25 minutes. We will try to end the seminar at around 10.2. If you'd like to tweet about these seminars, the hashtag is climate perspectives. And now it is my honor to present our speaker for this climate change and development seminar, Dr Andrew Neuton. Andrew is a lecturer in international development, and he's a program convener for the dissertations program at the SOAS Center for Development, Environment and Policy. Andrew has previously been a lecturer and convener at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, and at the University of Oxford, he's been a postdoctoral fellow in international development at the Climate Change Research School. He wrote his PhD in African Studies on local participation in conservation and development initiatives in Namibian, Argentina. As with last week's speaker, Andrew fits perfectly into the climate perspective seminar series, as his research in the field of climate change and development revolves around a concern with power politics and inequality on a global and local scale. Andrew has conducted extensive research in Africa and South America, and he's currently conducting research in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Mexico. He currently focuses on three major research areas, these being the vulnerability of local communities to climate impacts, the role of ecosystems based adaptations in protected areas, and on the political economy of climate compatible development. And now I'm not going to say much more. I think it's quite obvious that we have found the perfect speaker for tonight's seminar, so I'd like you to please give a warm welcome to Andrew Neuton. Thank you very much, both of you, for that very glowing recommendation, which I'm not quite sure I'll live up to, but I shall do my best. It's nice to see you all here. It's quite late now, but it's great to see you to have a proper number of people in the audience. Thank you all for coming. So, yeah, as Camilla has said, I'm quite interested in climate change and development, mainly from a vulnerability and adaptation perspective. How do we respond, not we, so much as poor people who have to show off to the burden of climate impacts respond to climate change? What do they do about that? What do they already know about that? But today, this evening, I guess we'll be taking a bit more of a macro look at climate change and development and exploring the implications of a principle which is central to understanding climate change and how it repercusses for development, which is common but differentiated responsibilities. A principle, well, I guess the principle hasn't changed over time, but the empirical circumstances to which we might apply the principle have changed quite substantially and I think it's quite a timely moment to reflect on that and think about the implications. Now, I will warn you from the start. I have some conclusions which are a bit depressing and they're classically academic. I'm not telling you how to do anything about this, how to resolve it, haven't really got there myself in those terms, but at least if we can understand the problem then maybe we can have a sensible conversation about what to do about it. So, that's where I'll take you up to you tonight and therefore the focus of the seminar will be a brief introduction on climate change and development. I'm not going to take you through the climate science, I believe some of that has been covered already and I'm sure you already knew that anyway or knew super smart people in the audience. So, I am going to spend a little bit of time on the so what, why would we worry about climate change and some of the impacts and how to think about some of the impacts and what level of worry we might want to have about them and hopefully in a way which sort of starts to bring out some of the issues around inequity and social justice which are at the heart of trying to understand the implications of climate change for development, possibly vice versa as well. Then I'll move on to common but differentiated responsibility, what it is and how the facts around it so to speak have changed over time or the circumstances around it and the implications for development. So, the brief introduction to climate change and development first of all. Let's take development on a very, very broad sort of scale of human activity in recorded history, if you like, with a view to establishing ever greater and larger collective organisations and processes around particular sort of material dynamics and states of affairs. I think that's kind of a very broad brush crude statement of what's been going on in terms of the history of society anyway and how we've tried to organise ourselves and a lot of how we've tried to organise ourselves is actually intimately linked to a period of time known as the Holocene which you can see on this graph. Now, I don't want to set this up as some kind of sacred truth, if you like. It might be problematic to describe the crisis that we face in these terms but let me just spell out how it has been described and what we have to think about and the potential risks that we face. So, if you look at this graph, I don't want to go into all of the science behind it not at least because I'm not a climate or even a climate scientist, atmospheric physicist or geologist so there's only a certain extent I can speak to this diagram but think about it in terms of the variability in climatic conditions over hundreds of thousands of years and you start to understand quite how odd the Holocene is. You've had this period of relative climatic stability against the background of all of this natural variability which is why critics of people who critique the idea of human cause climate change do have something of a point when they point to the sheer magnitude of natural variability but if you look at some of the temperatures that the earth went down to a lot of what we've come to take for granted such as the great European civilizations this is a diagram from an article by Johann Rockstrom and others talking about planetary boundaries I should have put the reference on those aren't my words but if you look at important events in the history of collective human existence at the beginning of agriculture the emergence of I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea of a great European civilization but of collective organization on that level focused around particular modes of political activity be they democratic, imperial, whatever technologies and institutions which allow for a greater level of coordination of humans and control over physical territory again it happens in the Holocene if you like it's a facilitator of some of the most important historical trajectories and processes which define our times today now some people are starting to argue that we are moving into or indeed have already moved into something called the Anthropocene this is another geological age whose key signals and drivers in terms of global environmental change are caused by humans and are characterized by humans more than by natural variability this again is something that we could debate and discuss I mean I'm aware of these debates I'm not sure how good I would be at following them in any detail but I know that some stratigraphers for example and other types of geologists are concerned by the idea that we can measure in geological terms the effect of humans upon the planet and the makeup of the planet but there's quite a lot of people who are arguing that we can rock strum at Al who wrote this article amongst them and climate change is held by some people to be one of the planetary boundaries within which we need to stay if we are going to keep ourselves within the Holocene now you could just say actually this is all just a political discourse which is focused around ensuring that some people maintain control over some political processes through having this big scary threat which justifies and legitimates particular forms of intervention by particular forms of actors you could argue that you'll find a whole literature on that and it might be that that is the case and that this is also the case so it's something to think about are we actually going to propel ourselves into a new geological era characterised by environmental states that we as humans are going to struggle to live within are we going to beg the question of exactly under what conditions can we continue to cultivate for example I guess at the highest level that's why at least it's something to think about even if you're sceptical about the kinds of science and the submerged politics which may to a greater or lesser extent underlight this kind of presentation of the evidence to bring that through to a sort of more tangible reading of what then are the projected climate impacts and with reference to what we used to call developing regions I think now we've adopted some other problematic terms around high, low and middle income countries which I won't go into the issues and problems of those there but you'll feel free to ask me afterwards but you can see that across a number of key areas in terms of food or key environmental resources or key environments if you don't want to call it a resource there are potentially very large and increasingly scary impacts as the temperature goes up with global warming at one degree C I mean this is some of the science on this is changing and we'll come to that generally speaking things aren't as bad as they are if we get to six degrees global average that is a global average six degrees C global average temperature rise probably means something like 20 degree temperature rise in the poles where we have the ice caps so that's why there's this big concern about sea level rise that may start to threaten major cities and giving ourselves more to do in terms of trying to maintain development trajectories be that defined purely in terms of maximising economic growth and returns from economic activity or be that defined in terms of reducing multi-dimensional poverty achieving some state of wellbeing however you want to do that at some point there are going to be material effects which you're going to make it harder to maintain or to protect if climate change does reach six degrees C by that point we might well be out of the Anthropocene but nobody actually knows as far as I'm aware anyway so why climate change is or should be a fundamental concern for development should be relatively obvious if you look at the distribution of climate impacts the ones that we're most scared about around water scarcity demography that's a bit more problematic let's say but there are demographic things happening in particular parts of the world which may not intersect in ways which are very helpful I guess with other stuff that's happening such as crop decline or hunger, coastal risk etc so there's a bunch of things which in terms of their geographical distribution mean that development practitioners have really started to think about the consequences of climate change for the kinds of places that they're working in for the kinds of places in which they want to see some kind of good change I guess that would be my definition of development I'm not going to offer a definition of good in that context here I guess it would have to be much more context specific and therefore not universal and of course it's to put it you know there's going to be lots and lots of graphs and I don't want to sort of I guess enlist sort of very emotive value laden images for the sake of it but it's some people are going to be more affected than other people and these are the kinds of landscapes and circumstances to which it seems they will have a greater likelihood of being subjected and of course this is one of the issues at the heart of the intersection between climate change and development is that the people who are least responsible contemporaneously or historically for the production of climate change are most in the firing line say to speak in terms of where climate impacts are projected to occur and indeed to make things that we do and things that we feel we need to do or that we do need to do like eat or get water more difficult now whatever we do about climate change now even if we decided globally right that's it no more global emissions we're just going to turn off climate change carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow if that were possible we would still be locked into some level of a future climate change you know in terms of temperature stabilisation might take a few centuries sea level rise might carry on similarly for up to a thousand years we don't know because it all depends on what happens and how many emissions we we put into the atmosphere what level of ocean acidification actually occur and how precise we can get in terms of our oceanography and our atmospheric physics about how many particles of this or that greenhouse gas lead to how many degrees of warming there is still controversy uncertainty over that we have models and assumptions about it but I think that there are things still being learned about how that works even though it comes from science which originates in the 19th century but whatever we do do we put enough into the atmosphere as it is that it's going to carry on going for quite a while whatever our response to it is and that's one of the things which has been sharpening if you like debate around what level of warming should we try to contain ourselves within if we can and for much of the early part of the 21st century the agreed sort of number if you like was 2 degrees C I don't know if you guys have heard of the Stern reports which came out gosh 11 years ago now that was the figure that the Stern report was trying to keep to and it was something which over time became a politically acceptable number in terms of if what we're going to have to do in terms of the costs of adapting to climate change and the costs of mitigating so that we can hopefully take we've not put so much in the way of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the first place you know that was the number that gained traction but the science on this as you may know has also been shifting you've probably I don't know if you've ever been to a sort of climate march or rally or demonstration or something but you'll see people from 2008 you will see people with like let's reduce it to 1.5 degrees let's keep it at 1 degree as a target rather than 2 degrees and that's because as I say what is seen to be dangerous climate change is not is felt now is projected to happen at lower temperatures so previously to take the example of risks to unique and threatened systems you probably can't see the writing at the bottom now it's so tiny you might in 2001 have thought that the risk starts to come in you know with any sort of level of seriousness around the sort of the 2 degree level but if you look over on the right hand side it's the same bar on the first if you look at that bar the red comes down much further and the pattern is repeated across a number of other phenomena so risk of extreme weather events distribution of impacts aggregate impacts risk of large scale discontinuities that's the sort of we leave the Holocene type event becomes likely at sort of lower temperatures although you know they're still higher for what we see as risks of large scale discontinuities so it kind of seems like less warming is going to cause more damage I suppose that's the basic message and that's why it's such a concern that we already have put so much into the atmosphere and that there is this inertia effect that is held then to obtain for ending up to over a thousand years so how close to the wind are we sailing I guess that's the basic question that's being begged here and I mean this reference is from 2011 there's been more you know this kind of study will be done on a yearly basis really and often by the same people this is Anderson and Bose they're both at Kevin Anderson Alice Bose they're at the University of Manchester part of the Tindall Centre of Climate Change Research which is what I was part of when I was at Oxford and they wrote and they're still talking about this about the likelihood of keeping global warming below a two degree C threshold and they think they thought back then it was vanishingly small and that's because with what we've already put into the atmosphere we have less that we can then put if we want to keep the overall emissions envelope within a safe level of relatively less dangerous level of warming so and you make the task more difficult for yourself because the more you put in there and then the shorter the time you have to do something about it and the bigger the emissions reductions every year have to be and back in 2000 and well 10 when they were doing the calculations it was published in 2011 they were thinking that we would have to see emissions reduction rates of around 7% to 8% per year just in order to keep to a target of I think it was 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 and of course we're not doing anything like that and if you look historically at least in recent history of what would you need to do to get that level of carbon or greenhouse gas emissions reductions happening you're basically looking at global recession so if you look at what happened in 2008 with the financial crisis there was a dip I think it was in the order of 5% reduction in carbon emissions so we kind of did ourselves a favour there even as we cast lots of people into poverty and hopefully there are other ways of reducing emissions by that much but that's the only thing we've got any historical evidence that actually has done that so reasons for optimism obviously so there's no real analogue in human history to tell us then if we didn't hit that what would we like to say to go up to 4 degrees C we don't really know there's no recorded history which will tell us that but there is history of the mini ice age that we had a few hundred years ago when the average temperature was 4 to 5 degrees C lower than it is now and as I say that was like a nice age which is a much harder climate in which to grow stuff and to live of course and of course it wouldn't be colder it would be warmer and it doesn't give you a sense of how that would be would it give you a sense of the order of magnitude of the change so you know 1.5 degrees C would be hopefully quite nice if we could keep to it which it seems that we can't so that's the broad if you like kind of implications of climate change for development as defined very broadly as I did throughout that discussion want to move on now to common but differentiated responsibility what it is and how it has changed over time so it's a principle basically that was established as part of the United Nations framework convention on climate change the UNF triple C which you may have come across at some point and that's one of the international environmental conventions that emerged from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit right in the sort of halcyon days of sustainable development we're going to do it everyone's kind of enthused about it you know and there was an energy around it which is difficult to find today sadly but maybe we can reactivate it somehow and maybe there's more stuff going on under the surface that we realised but the idea is that everybody bears some responsibility for climate change but some substantially more than others because of primarily differences in the historical responsibility for climate emissions because of this point I mentioned before about the distribution of exposure and vulnerability to climate impacts and because of differences in the resources that some countries have available to fund adaptation and mitigation relative to other countries so you can't expect someone who hasn't really caused the problem to take the lead on solving it is I guess the basic idea and this was enshrined in what the early sort of in the early years that the UNF triple C the international UN climate negotiations were trying to achieve which was to get everyone to sign up to the Kyoto protocol do you all know what the Kyoto protocol is or was rather yeah okay so did you know that some countries had to reduce their emissions and some countries were kind of off the hook so that's because of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities because countries like the UK like the US you know the science was already pretty clear that we had emitted loads of carbon and other greenhouse gases and so we should be signing up to a target an internationally legally binding target to reduce them which of course the UK did and the United States famously didn't but loads of other countries like China India lots of countries which could not have been said in any way at that point to have had responsibility historically for the for the sorts of climate emissions that were meaning that humans were causing climate to change more than natural variability was they didn't have anything about it so for obvious reasons but there's a departure from this kind of classic position at the Paris climate negotiations in 2015 you may have come across these it's still under the you know the UNF triple C process and it was the one where there was well depending on your perspective a break through a cover up a distraction but there was something different that happened there because there was agreement not just by wealthy rich countries who's historical responsibility for putting carbon into the atmosphere had been well established but also the all of the you know what formally we refer to as the annex to countries were have been signing up have indeed signed up to this it's on a voluntary basis there isn't a legally binding target here but loads of countries and especially the ones with the highest level of emissions have been coming up with their plans for how much they are going to reduce in terms of carbon emissions and within what time frame even though there are arguments over the baseline and should it be 1990 or should it be 2005 which is the one that suits countries like China or India or Indonesia or Mexico better so why is it that that would happen why why is it it implies that some countries have become more responsible for climate change over time and this is what I want to talk about a little bit now just by why doing this I want to just show you a map of the world pretty much as it looks I guess in terms of the size of land masses and I just using the carbon map here I think you've been to this website but it's really cool it animates all of this but I've tried to do this before a lecture and I've never actually been in a lecture theatre anywhere whether internet actually works so I've just done some screen grabs but go and go to the actual website itself because it shows you all of this in animated ways it's not just it's it's cool in a very saddling and depressing kind of a way but this this shows you sort of in terms of a distribution of land masses this is what countries tend to look like so we think and the the levels of wealth within those countries and you won't be surprised that the lighter colours are poorer countries and the darkest colours are the richest countries so the thing that this map does is it changes the size of the country according to their the the propensity of of that country to contribute or not to to any particular of the phenomena that this software maps so look what happens when you look at historical emissions and current emissions per capita so the colours change the colours change to indicate per person how many tonnes of CO2 are emitted each year and we can see you know there's no surprise really here in in in the culprits the UK looms pretty large the United States looms even larger that's what we'd all expect some parts of the African continent you you just they they disappear you just I you know where is Sierra Leone where is Liberia where is where is the democratic Republic of Congo one of the biggest you know countries in the world so I guess it's a sort of you know a visual tool to get us to think about about this and it follows very much this sort of narrative of well we have responsibility in the west or the global north whichever you prefer to deal with this because look historically that we've caused the problem however however if you look at CO2 emissions both in per country terms and per capita I'll get to this it's harder to this to disentangle the responsibility because China overtook the US in 2008 was it or 2009 as the the world's biggest emitter of of carbon and this is a fact which people in the United States environmental protection agency have have have propagated in many different for not not just then but but lots of people there is a sort of change if you like in the calculation around responsibility if China is emitting the same as the United States is emitting sorry more substantially more than the United States then who becomes responsible for dealing with climate change and where does that common but differentiated responsibility lie do we now give more responsibility to China even if we don't give less responsibility to the United States although the United States as we know is now even less interested in the climate negotiations on the Donald Trump but it was a challenge you to go and find anything on the the White House website these days about climate change it's all been taken down as will the environmental protection agency be by Scott Pruitt it would seem so if you look at the incidence of poverty per capita it's I probably should have chosen different chosen different colours but you see that the lighter colours of the ones where there aren't very much there aren't very many emissions and the darker ones are where there are quite a lot so the US for example shrinks into a very bizarre kind of shape you know but is is deep red at the same time whereas the African continent you know some of it on my screen is actually invisible it's that it's that sort of light in colour so but but it looms so large on the map because of the incidence of poverty and again it has something around the fact that poor people tend not to contribute very much to climate impacts but of course they're very much exposed to the distribution of those impacts 15 minutes okay I'm I'm good for time I think I'm going to finish before 25th date and then if you look at the incidence of people at risk you see that it must mean is you know the African continent still looms quite large but actually it's in Asia where a huge amount of the risk is the so-called kind of you know climate hotspots in places like the Mekong River Delta where there's going to be huge amounts of flooding and glacial melting but there are other sort of things coming together to make people more exposed and quite often more vulnerable to climate impacts although we shouldn't conflate exposure to an impact and you know assuming that that makes you vulnerable lots of people have spent their whole lives dealing with climate variability and know how to do that much better than we do in this auditorium but the red in this case the red in this case actually indicates not the CO2 per capita but the emissions change so how much these countries have started to emit since 1990 and in the case of China and India for example and some African countries as well some parts of Latin America it's it's up somewhere between 100 and 1000% or it's up over 1000% so again we can see that there's a real overlap here between the people who are most at risk in some ways or at least the most exposed to climate impacts and where emissions are going up so again it raises questions about who then becomes responsible for dealing with climate change and what form that response should take on now this is showing some of the same information in a different way and I want to single out China because it frequently is single out China and to beg this question of you know is China really the culprit here if you look at the global emissions that China is implicated in and on this graph you would well you might say well yes it is because if you look from 1990 the line that goes up really radically is China's line the other line at the top there is the US they have a bit of a dip again it's because of recession rather than because they're being really good with their emissions reductions similar thing happens for Europe it's starting to go down mainly because of the recession but also for other reasons the line at the bottom here is Brazil those guys are not changing too much but it's China that really stands out to that sort of progression India to a much lesser extent India is the sort of reddish line that's going up towards the end there but not nearly to the same extent as China is so it's the kind of graph that you might use to say we need to hold China more responsible for what it's doing because you know before maybe they weren't responsible but now they're really driving climate change and this is where the policy focus should be in times of stopping them from doing that but to get back to that shading we were seeing before on the emissions per person per capita that we saw on the map before the line at the top is not China that's the United States and then the yellow line is the European Union and the line that is going up towards the end there that's China and at the bottom there that's all of the least developed countries according to the UN classification so those guys as we can see are really not part of the problem so but Chinese people arguably are not either because they're still their average emissions are below our own 10 minutes cool thank you so on this reading you would have to say that actually we still got a point back towards countries like the United States where you know they're using 20 tons of carbon emissions per year just to live their lives in the way that they live massively sort of resource intensive way of living so depending on how you present the data you have to then think about the consequences for how differentiated are our responsibilities a constant in all of this is that poor people are not very responsible I think that's the uncontroversial thing whichever graph you use but then you know these kinds of graphs are beg this question then of you know back to is it about is it really fair to blame China for having the largest emissions just because it's got a population of 1.3 billion people as opposed to is it 370 million for the states is that 350 yeah who have a much higher carbon footprint okay so that's another I guess sort of thing that needs to filter through to our thinking and has been filtering through through to our thinking around common but different different different types of responsibilities but there's another set of considerations which if you look at a country like China start to come into play so if you look at the sub national dimensions in China and start to ask that okay what responsibility is born and by whom and it also becomes quite tricky and this is in the context of China I mean we can talk about it is the world's largest emitter it's also the world's largest largest producer of renewable energy technologies I'm sure that you will know and it's got some you know it's got some pretty serious commitments to reducing carbon intensity even if those are not necessarily measured to the standards that some environmentalists would like it's a big step in the right direction just like Donald Trump is a great step in the right direction if you are on the alt right so not that endorsement in any way so the difficulty of really either of the two ways in which we've been thinking about common but different types of responsibilities and how this has changed over time whether you take this graph or whether you take this graph is the other countries if you like outsource their carbon emissions to China so 57% of China's emissions are derived from goods consumed outside the province of of origin and when we calculate our carbon emissions in the UK when other countries do it we don't take into account all that stuff that all the emissions from all that stuff that we have bought but which is actually made in China another concern here is that consumption levels are growing in China and if they did reach to US levels I mean I'm not the best person to speak to I guess cultures of material prosperity in China but I get the sense from the little I've read on this object that that is a definite increasing phenomenon as it isn't so many parts of the world it's not you know exclusive to China of course but if they reach say US levels then the efficiency improvements you could get even from installing a renewable energy would according to some studies be insufficient to offset the increases in carbon emissions and then there's the question of how is responsibility for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions calculated within China and one of the plans that is linked to China's broader effort you know for example through its bilateral deal with the United States through its commitment to the Paris climate settlement deal is to reduce its carbon intensity through giving each province a target and has to reduce its own carbon intensity. The thing about this is that 80% of the emissions from goods consumed in the richer coastal provinces which used to be industrial but which shipped after the poorer central and western provinces because it's pretty dirty environmentally contaminating not very good for human health kind of stuff is imported from the poorer central and western provinces and so if you look at a carbon intensity production target being set for those provinces not only are they already experiencing the worst of the environmental problems from that level of industrial production and that kind of pretty dirty industrial production they also in this regime bear the greatest responsibility for for emissions reduction whereas richer provinces which consume the goods made in these poorer provinces will more easily meet these targets. So this dynamic of the teleconnectivity if you like of responsibility is manifest both both globally and you know sub-nationally just within China this is without looking at any other country but of course China is a very interesting case study because whatever happens in China is going to make such a difference to to the rest of us. So to conclude common but differentiated responsibility remains a fundamentally relevant principle in terms of working out who should make decisions about what in relation to dealing with climate change. There is still a very strong correlation between bearing the cost of climate change and other environmental problems and not being responsible for carbon emissions and that's the area in which I guess climate change continues to touch most upon what it is we should be thinking about and doing in relation to development activity be that defined narrowly in terms of aid land or the kind of you know national development trajectory that that governments like the Chinese government are pursuing so so actively current global trajectories of development at the moment especially those in serving global consumption as a conduit to economic growth and we haven't quite financialized the whole of the global economy just yet continue to perpetuate a dynamic in which the poorest tend to suffer most in one way shape or form. And then the changes in which countries are the biggest emitters arguably reproduce rather than resolve the questions of social justice at the heart of thinking on common but differentiated responsibility as we saw for example in the provincial breakdown in China. So I shall leave it there for now but that's it thank you very much. Questions. We will take three questions at a time. We do understand that many people would want to give background information about and kind of it's I mean I get this myself. I want to when I ask a question I want to explain the background for why I'm asking this question. But we also really want to ask all of you to keep it brief because you want to have as many people as possible a question. We're going to try to end this at 8 10 to 9. And yes and Andrew if you could just repeat the question in the microphone so that it will come on to the report. Oh sure OK. First question is about development because I failed to get any idea about what development is in your book. I think this is a problem. The problem is that you talk about current global development strategies but I don't know what that means. The trajectory of the world economy is debilitating as you know for well. And what we need when I say we I mean the world what the world needs is an idea about how this trajectory is going to be. Confronting with sound policies to deal with the contradictions emerging as a result which climate change is just one of them. So you need it to I think in your lecture the question is what is development. How is it connected with the problems that you've outlined. Yes and to bring up the causal story more because the causal stories seem to be lacking. So we have a question on global development strategies. Any other questions. I also wanted to ask a question. As individuals we often we want to know that everyone here is very keen on taking some kind of action on climate change in general. So but if you think of climate change and development. If you think of the topic of climate change and development how can we as individuals take action on that specifically. The link between what sorry. So we often ask that how can we take action on climate change as a whole. But so take like the discussion between the term common but differentiated responsibility or the terms mitigation adaptation in say what we heard in March is or what we write articles about it. Or when which term should we be using. How should we be thinking about it. What in your objective is the most effective way for us to address the link between climate change and development. And that probably also in some ways is linked to your question. Do you have a last question as well. I think my question wasn't as close as it feels. But looking at the trade with the huge emissions right that was a huge financial rise. And in the common discourse of development. It's very much industrialization. Do you think that sustainable development not broke handle on that. Or is that connected with the terms. So let's start off with those three questions. OK. Thank you for three very good questions. The first one. I guess broadly what is my definition of development. And what kind of policies sound policies we need to confront the current trajectory and the problems that we're having with it. And the contradictions that are emerging. The causal story which I haven't said very much about in terms of how development is causing climate change. I think was your point. You'd have to say a little bit more about that before I could understand your. Is it supposed to be responsible for most of the emissions you talk about. No it's it's the lead emitter of global carbon emissions. It's not responsible for the majority of carbon emissions. OK. OK. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I do. Yeah. OK. Thank you. Thank you for clarification. The next question was about how we should be talking about and thinking about the link between climate change and development in terms of our own individual. What we might choose to do. I guess is that right. And the third one is about can we have sustainable economic development in the future. I think your your concern is is to deal with the first question first. I mean the way that I understood it is you're kind of talking almost in the terms that you know marks might have described what you're talking about as the metabolic rift which is the way in which capitalism environmentally creates the conditions of its own destruction because of the way in which you're talking about. It draws upon the environment. Marks was talking about this in terms of the shift of of nutrients which were necessary for local agriculture which previously would have been fed back into the into the ground but which didn't make it there because they went to the city. But you can extrapolate from that sort of logic up to the ways in which we shift nutrients and other environmental properties and services around the world these days because of the globalised character of. Of the economy. Is that a contradiction? Can we rely on that model to solve the problems of climate change? Well that of course is the question of the 21st century. Yes. And you're right. I didn't dwell very much on the extent to which development if you understand it as efforts towards maximising global economic activity. Okay. Would you like to clarify? Are you saying the development you'd like to see or the development that we have? How do I want to see? Okay so I don't think it's a very wise course of action. I think you can call it development because we do call it development. There are governments who pursue a strategy of maximising their own country's GDP as a form of basic underpinning of most of the policies that they use. Whether we would want them to do that is another question but I think that there is a sense in which that exists however contradictory it may be. So we could call it neoliberal capitalism. How about that? Very kindly to acknowledge me as a development theorist. I don't know if I've quite reached those echelons. But in terms of is it, can you call something development which will destroy itself or parts of the planet? Maybe I'm just, it seems, sorry, there's something it seems that I'm not getting in what you're saying because every time I say it you sort of shake your head. But let me just, yeah I think as a global system right now it is and therefore arguably, and this is the question, it speaks to your question as well. Can we reform what now seems to be quite a destructive model in terms of its own internal logic to be less so? That's the question that I posed at the start of the lecture on are we going to go out of the Anthropocene? In terms of are we going to destroy the world, I don't think we are. It's more that we're going to move into a kind of social ecological state that we might struggle to exist in. That's the thesis of the Anthropocene and it's most sort of environmental prophecy of doom kind of guise if you like. The earth will survive, we're not going to blow it up or something and say that there's nothing left of it. It's just that we are going to make our own survival a lot more difficult if some of our projections about exceeding planetary boundaries have explanatory purchase and predictive power in the future. It's not a development trajectory which is very edifying or one that I would particularly espouse, but at some level you have to acknowledge how language is actually used and the meanings that people give to it. And whether or not you agree with that, then yeah, sure, okay. Okay, so I think in theory you probably could decarbonise capitalism if you like. If I can put it that way, it may not be still a very, it may not happen, but if it does happen it may not bring us the kind of development that we would like or something we would like to call development. Because if you think about some of the trade-offs that a green economy will entail, take the example of South Africa. If you think about the importance of the unions in providing support to the apartheid resistance to the very existence of the ANC and their importance of the establishment of democracy in South Africa, it's huge. But we're talking about coal mining for example, right? What happens to those coal miners under a green economy in South Africa? Just because it's environmentally less problematic, you have to ask the same questions of who wins, who loses, what are the implications for equity and justice. We saw in China that they have a, you know, I think you can take the Chinese government at its word when it says that it really is going to try to reduce carbon emissions. I don't think they're just like saying that and they're not going to do anything about it. But the same questions about equity and justice and who really loses from this and who benefits emerge whether you have a sort of green capitalism, if you like, or if you have a brown one. So I think in theory, yes, it can happen, although it's by no means that it's automatically going to happen. But if you look at things like the fact that there are now projections that the cost of solar energy will be cheaper than the cost of coal within 10 years, you can see the kind of the way in which that changes the incentive structure for energy provision and for investment in energy in the future. You know, there are things like that where actually, you know, we could get an awful lot greener, but you know, just because it's green, you know, doesn't mean that it's automatically a vehicle for social justice. And very briefly, OK, so how should we be thinking about the link between climate change and development? Well, as individuals, yeah. And do you mean in terms of what we then would? We have learned a moment last week, because we believe we have debunked the whole terms of mitigation and adaptation, which has said that they were these UN terms that don't actually help the people who will be most affected by climate change, the people in the countries that I know you've done. You've done loads of research into this. But so the people that are being heard by climate change, how we can, as individuals perhaps here in the West, how we can, in our generation also, how we can put more focus on this and take action on the link between climate change and inequality and climate change and development? Sure, yeah. I mean, I guess maybe there's a sort of process of contestation there, which you could see in a variety of ways in terms of contesting what we mean by adaptation and mitigation. For myself, I wouldn't necessarily completely abandon them. But of course, they can be used in ways which reinscribes a politics of indifference towards the fundamental root causes of inequality, and of which exposure to invulnerability to environmental impacts is often pretty good, if not, or be an impact. It's a perfect sort of measure. So there is something there about interrogating the use of these terms, even just, I guess when we're talking about climate change and learning about this sort of stuff, I guess. I mean, you could see it in this kind of Gramscian way of doing that in the context of trying to facilitate some kind of passive revolution in which, as members of an elite where we are part of the hegemony, if you like, as Gramscian would see it, we're not necessarily contesting, we're not necessarily contesting development of some thing of it where it cannot be negative, if you like, however you want, however you would understand that word. But we are actually, maybe through the use of the term or whatever, even if we're critiquing it, also contesting it. And Gramsci's idea of a sort of passive revolution, if you like, would mean subtly influencing the definitions of development, if you like, in the conversations of the people to which we have access. And, you know, we are sort of closer to the elite, I guess, than a lot of people who say have cleaning jobs, cleaning universities, you know. Then maybe that's another way to think about doing it in a sort of softly, softly way, but you might need a bit more Gramsci before you do that, as might I. More questions? Okay, that was one. I was thinking when you mentioned that, I was thinking here, did you see... Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was actually involved in supporting the archetype regime and the Secret Service in the UK, and they were trying to please take a life. But just on this idea of sustainable development, I was thinking of forms of development, which actually I would assume are sustainable in a much lower carbon way. And I'm thinking if you take the life of Japan, given its kind of geographical base, it has a lot of natural energy in tidals, wades and typhoons and wind and all the rest of it. And I really thought that technologically there would be much more for Japan to gain from using natural energy as a form of sustenance than for their kind of influence. Yeah, okay, so... We'll just take one more. Sure. Yes, I had missed the introduction where Christine was mentioned, but I'm kind of curious if you have any critique or deconstruction on the term, because whenever, you know, it's obvious that it's used quite frequently, but I think personally I find it problematic in the sense that it implies that there's something about a notion of humanity as a whole that is problematic right now in the suit. I think that part of the danger that Christine has is that it lumps the entire planet and also all existing logics of consumption production into one kind of universal tendency. And I think it's really key, which you did highlight, but it is really key to emphasise that this is a very specific kind of historical and economic logic that is in the position, which is, of course, not a growing, but it's not universal. And I think in terms of development implications, particularly in terms of things like that and so on, I think it's massive implications to recognise not just the discursive value, but the material value of the post-development period in terms of, for example, the NX0 countries. NX0 is a proposal that came up in COP21 in 2015 by all change internationalists and groups in both south, highlighting the fact that you have the human X1 and X2, but you also have NX0, I think countries that are making most of them at the moment have been COP21 per year. And it's something that, in my studies here, is incredibly disappointing to me, but a lack of justice narratives and the lack of really concrete post-development or radical alternative development theories that are linked to climate justice, which I know across the stuff in a second. But I guess my point there is kind of, in a broader sense, in terms of decolonising saws, in terms of decolonising climate justice for us, how it appears what your vision is as an academic year, or how we might get stuff, how people do all the studies from here become both more decolonial and kind of embrace additional climate justice. I'm very conscious of time, so I think we'll have to say that this is the last round. Are there any final questions? And then Andrew could go on and play. We'll take a few years and two brief questions, but then we'll go over them. It might sound a bit negative, but with the rise of kind of white-wing politics in the West, do you think that there are a gap between hope and kind of international climate frameworks and the richness of the Paris agreement, whether you think it's all a little hot air or not? OK, so first question was about how much climate finance actually reaches local people for adaptation and mitigation purposes. I don't think it's very much, because if you look at sort of what is pledged to deal with climate, you know, what first of all, if you take, say, the dealing with climate in sub-Saharan Africa, I think it's something like the recent calculation is that 18 billion US dollars is required, which sounds actually not very much. There's probably estimates that go up to above 100 billion dollars. And if you look at what's actually been pledged, it's about a billion, and what's actually been spent, it's about 379 million US dollars. So you can see the very, you know, sort of, you might even call it sort of calamitous attrition of commitment there in terms of how it actually works out. I would kind of, you know, in relation to some of the comments we've said, I mean, you don't get much in terms of, you do get some stuff in terms of mitigation, but a lot of developing countries are a bit annoyed by the idea that they should be doing mitigation precisely because of, you know, the existence of annex zero countries or, you know, the idea that they haven't got the same historical responsibility. So I think a lot of them are more focused on adaptation if there is funding for that, but not very much. You might get funding which addresses adaptation objectives, funding, like if you look at social protection, sometimes it helps people to deal with climate impacts by not having to do distress sales of, you know, things like their cattle which are effectively their savings. So you can get things like that which are not always measured as an effect and have a, you know, help, but in terms of the actual climate finance it's not that much. So the, to clarify about the unions, yes it was the South African unions that I was talking about, sustainable development as a, gosh I can't read my own writing, yes, you know, it's a bit like the question we were having before. I mean it should be possible technologically. It's totally possible technologically for us to meet the kinds of climate targets that we have, that have been specified by scientists, environmentalists, governments, et cetera. Scotland has, just to say why that's sometimes not happening, Scotland has something like a quarter of all the potential across Europe for wind power generation. The UK could run completely off wind power if we so chose to and we're not choosing to which comes to the question about the politics and right wing politics and does this make it harder for us to make some of these changes because if you think of people like Trump and not just Trump, I mean there were Democrats who supported the appointment of Scott Pruitt as the guy who is now the head of the environmental protection agency who has made it his stated aim for many years that he wants to destroy it or at least severely limit its regulatory extent and capacity. So, and we don't have a Scott Pruitt in, we do have climate skeptics in both the development department and the energy department, energy and climate change departments, but it's not nearly to the same extent and of course we have laws around climate targets. So, unless the law gets changed, there's a certain amount that we have to do, but since the change of, when we had a Labour government we were doing quite a lot of this and if you look at when is climate change ever even discussed these days, it's almost like the elephant in the room because it's not an issue which has much public salience anymore I guess or as much as it did anyway. The Anthropocene criteria, this is the hardest question. My honest answer is I don't really know in terms of your decolonising sort of the way in which we think about climate justice. I think that's a really interesting question. It's not something I don't really work on that specifically. I don't know how far we've got with that, but I certainly haven't read very much about it. I'd be interested to hear from you some of your ideas. You sound like you've done much more thinking about it than I have, so that's a bit of a cop out I'm afraid. On the Anthropocene, the critique you mentioned is the one that I've seen the most as well, which is this whole thing about we then don't differentiate the responsibilities and we talk about humankind in the round as opposed to focusing for example on the 90 private and state entities which arguably are responsible for 90% of carbon emissions in the last 150 years I think it is. I can't quite remember the statistics right now, but I can send you the article if you're interested. Yeah, that's a really good question about decolonising the climate discourse and how would we do that? I mean it's hard enough to decolonise traditions such as political philosophy where you may be able to, it's hard to do because if you think about, I mean I'm thinking about say, in African countries often you have a difficulty that history is not necessarily recorded, people pass down traditions or whatever and some that survives and some that doesn't. So going back that far even things like political philosophy it's quite hard to then do that but if we, yeah, let me put that as something I need to do some more thinking about anyway and I'm happy to talk about that further. But yeah it seems quite hard to do in terms of looking at who's writing about climate change right now but that's a really important question to ask and you know the only concrete thing I could think of is some of the initiatives around the fifth assessment reports for the IPCC. There were some minimal efforts to get people who had local or traditional knowledge about climate to be represented in the authorship of it although there were very minimal and there were calls for that to happen more. That's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. Gosh I can't remember my own writing. Rise of the right, yes. Did I cover your question before? Do you think? Sure, I mean it's tough isn't it because environmental issues are one of those ones which look like sort of the domain of a liberal elite and the liberal elite has lost a lot of ground if you like. So it's not in many ways a hopeful time for some environmentalists but then if you look at the roots of environmental politics and the way it's mixed. I mean I don't know, talking about, I wouldn't know what to say about a country like China, it would be really interesting to know how. I don't see that China would necessarily change its climate policies because the United States is now that it has this trajectory towards renewable energy for example. But of course they may not feel like reducing their carbon intensity by quite that much. Of course it could have potentially really scary ramifications. I don't think that the Paris Agreement was just hot air. That was your question wasn't it? I don't think it was just hot air. It's just that in order to get the level of agreement that they wanted they had to remove the bit about it being legally binding. And they had to remove the bit about southern countries being able to sue northern countries for historical injustices. So you could argue that it's a very toothless agreement because of having just glossed over those two issues which arguably are fundamental to the questions of social justice which climate changes one way into if you like. But I think that there was, it was very hard to bring about even that level of agreement and it was in some ways unlikely and let's see. But at the moment I think that there are quite a lot of commitments, we have to see if they're still kept, which will take us to 3 degrees C of warming. That's what is currently, so there's a gap there about a 1.5 degrees C gap if you can take any of these numbers seriously which I think we're still working out. But I personally think that, I don't think we should just overlook it as a complete, I think it was a hard one.