 Okay. Oh, yeah, you can hear me. All right. So it is lovely to be here today. My name is Adana I am a project management consultant a veterinarian a teacher and a lifelong learner So along with my sorry along with two eminent professors Brian Perry. Thank you I'm Latifa Hassan. Please please stand or wave so people can see you We are the external advisory Committee and set up to give support to cohesive. I am actually from the Caribbean healing from the Twin Islands state of Trinidad and Tobago No, these are my formal credentials more importantly I am a mom to a little Christmas miracle named Joseph a wife a Passionate advocate for women in STEM and social justice. So let's get started Okay, so what are we gonna talk about today? I am going to take you on a little island tour and give you a brief overview of where I'm from Then I'm going to talk a little bit about some conservation efforts that I have been a part of and what Environmental change looks like and how it affects us now, of course, this is a one-health workshop So I plan to explain how one health fits into all this and finally some takeaways Okay, so island tour begins so Trinidad and Tobago also called sweet tea and tea Right is a two island country and it is the most industrialized country in the English-speaking Caribbean And our economy is based mainly on oil and gas and there's about 1.5 million of us living on two tiny islands So a quick history lesson. We were part of the colonized world once ruled by the Spanish the French the Dutch and the English and Sugar and cocoa were kings long before oil and gas. So we are very small but mighty We have Sun Sea and San Turismo and one of our biggest exports is something called Carnival And we are known for great parties actually and every year we have the ultimate Street Party, which is our Carnival So apart from parties. We are a tropical eco-paradise. So basically there is a lot of stuff for a tiny space From Carnival. What else are we known for? Well cricket climate Crime and corruption so we lay claim to one of the greatest batsmen I want no argument here of all time Brian Lara Right in the climate realm. We have professor John A. God He is a world-renowned climate scientist, but it's not all sunshine and parties We have an extremely high crime rate. We are ranked sixth in the world on the most criminal countries list Gender-based violence is on the rise and we have been featured internationally because of violent crime and femicide Now our dubious claim to fame is corruption one of the most recognizable corrupt faces coming out of sweet TNT is The former disgrace vice-president of FIFA Jack Warner. He was a very influential Senior government minister and acting as prime minister on occasion Now over the past 20 years I have had the privilege to work with and alongside some amazing organizations including NGOs and Community groups who are passionate about all things environment And I was lucky enough to work with some people and programs that included chasing butterflies Coral reef management species at risk protected areas and sustainable livelihoods and in recent times Some of my most rewarding work was in northeast to Bego where we were awarded the UNESCO Man in the Biosphere designation in 2020 and this designation included our grand old lady The Tobago main rich reserve, which is the oldest legally protected reserve in the world She is now 248 years old. Sorry years young not old young now TNT is not just about Jack Warner and his crimes Thanks to some grassroots superstars. We are associated with some fantastic work So top left that is a killer and her daughter who runs a community base funds a man's community reforestation project since the early eight 1980s and her work has grown over the years to become one of the most innovative and successful Community eco projects around reforestation in the Caribbean so the jewelry that I wear comes from a killer's garden It seeds from a killer's garden and actually made by her So Suzanne Lacan-Batisse the other woman is one of the faces known globally when talking about sea turtle conservation And she and her colleagues are responsible for the highly successful Community-based group nature seekers and they transformed her village from the wild west of poaching sea turtles to a place That is now recognized internationally as a sea turtle haven for leatherback turtles Now all my work and that of my colleagues has happened in the dramatic effects of climate change So our weather is not predictable Our dry seasons are drier and our wet seasons are wetter and our infrastructure. It just cannot keep up So we flood we lose our agricultural produce our homes get damaged We have more mosquitoes more mosquito-borne diseases our coastline is disappearing thanks to erosion We have water shortages in the dry season. We have dry season fires leading to significant habitat loss And this is just to name a few It is also Constant it never stops and this happens to us in the context of us being a Small island developing state. We are not drivers of climate change yet We are very vulnerable to its effects and we also do not have the resources or institutions to effectively adapt or mitigate and make us climate resilient quickly enough So in essence climate change happens to us not because of not because of us Okay, so climate change gets a lot of airtime, but it's not just climate change so the challenges are rapidly changing environment that is less and less conducive to human well-being and this is painfully evident when looking at a global perspective in 2009 Rockstrom and colleagues publish a safe operating space for humanity and they propose a concept called Planetary boundaries and they argued that human civilization has benefited from an unusually stable 10,000 years in the Earth's environment, but that human activities are hastening and enter that stability And they identified nine earth system processes that are critical preconditions for human well-being in 2009 they said that safe boundaries for three have already been crossed now Let's skip to 2023 six safe boundaries have been crossed and you can see that Hopefully you can see that climate change is just one of those boundaries So put simply humanity's collective actions are making the biophysical conditions in which we live less stable Okay, so in the face of rapid environmental change It can make us feel, you know quite powerless and helpless in my small island Decades of work can literally be washed away by a hurricane or a storm and For me this raises two key issues What do we do and how do we feel and I will talk more about this later, but obviously these two are related Okay, so what do we do? Well, we do one health because I believe one health is a way to bridge the Implementation gap from knowing to doing so other concepts that tackle wicked problems such as sustainability Climate change resilience, etc. They are all good at the knowledge side of things There is excellent research amazing modeling, but to do something tangible with that knowledge It's not always straightforward. It is not empowering and it is certainly not inspiring Things get done when small groups of people act together So we pay attention To and a lot of attention is paid to the science and data that goes into let's say creating a systems map For instance, we tend to pay less attention Helping people to act together Just because the science is sound does not mean that people will be able to act together to implement The assumption that they must Because it is science driven. It is not enough for action. So we are not logical animals We are relational animals. We do better when our relationships thrive We seek advice for instance from those that we trust Relationships matter for action how we nurture ourselves and others allows for sustained action in the face of uncertainty and I maintain that one health is a way to bridge between talking in systems and acting as people Okay, so this was a summary of what I just said before that is a definition from OLAP that you see there So One health is basically a way to bridge between theory and practice and it takes us from talking in systems to acting as people Right and well, you heard the definition from many of my colleagues previously. That is it there. We will fix that And Olaf speaks it out Okay, I Just want to dig a little deeper here. Why do I like the concept of health now for me? Health is a powerful powerful concept. Health is also an empowering concept first It is intuitive Most of us have a good sense of what is healthy and unhealthy in themselves and in other people and second It generalizes to people animals and ecosystems people can understand a healthy animal or an unhealthy river for example And third it calls on the extensive experience of Western medical tradition So field ranging from epidemiology to public health to anatomy physiology diagnostic techniques It is a path that is well-trodden and finally Health is a step on the road to well-being So one health allows us to leverage this powerful concept towards shared action No, I just want to come back to the second question. Remember the second question. How do we feel? Now because challenges are urgent in the environmental sector we focus on action and Emotions are not surfaced and hardly acknowledged Also in the developing world There is so much grief and trauma anyway There is no space to surface these issues but rapid environmental change comes with the loss and grief and Sometimes It creeps up and you and you don't even realize it so in my case I thought I was quite resilient So being a vet in the tropics we deal with a lot of death and disease especially in rural settings that pick top right With the blue sea was a village where I lived and my island has coral reefs and They are the tropical underwater rainforests of the ocean right providing all sorts of ecosystem goods and services That keeps my village and my island healthy So there was this little coral reef that I would see every single time I drove home As soon as I pulled up in my driver I could see my coral reef and it didn't matter the kind of day that I had this site of that reef used to Always make me smile So due to climate change, we have experienced rising sea temperatures for prolonged periods And when corals get stressed due to increasing temperature or too many nutrients in the water They expel algae that lives with them that enables them to eat So with all the algae the corals starve and they turn completely white and this is known as bleaching You know think of a lush tropical forest and then think of that same forest if it loses all its leaves It is a forest under stress and that is what happened We had a massive bleaching event and what followed was an underwater graveyard And parts of my reef did not recover So in spite of all our work in the face of climate change And warming seas and underwater forests that took thousands of years to grow It was gone in a few weeks and that broke me So I have never felt so helpless watching this reef that brought me so much joy It went skeletal white in front of my eyes and there was nothing I could do I can go into the water after that I I didn't want to see and it took months For me to be able to enter that water again So Environmental grief can feel like the privilege of the rich and the educated and the luxury of the global north But that is not the case So my friends who grew up in these marginal coastal communities have dealt with hopelessness, anger and despair all their lives So the late greats Rupert smoky McKenna the pick with the school kids He was a community activist And he grew up harvesting the bounty from the sea including sea turtles which are now endangered And smoky reminded us how fast things change He explained that villages these villages are but a shell of the environmental glory And our reefs are a shadow of even what it was like 30 or even 20 years ago So it was less fish less coral and more waste and he told us stories As a child growing up in this village that you would be tripping over turtles to get home Hawks bill and leatherback turtles would be laying in their yards And smoky lamented repeatedly that those days are gone We don't have that numbers of turtles anymore. So when smoky used to come across a turtle, he would tell the turtle Turtle I used to eat you But now I'm sorry because he saw these magnificent creatures as his friends Not food as they shared the same trials and tribulations as us And his words repeatedly was that mother earth was crying and so was he So it is not just the ecological system that suffers There is a personal price We pay When we experience the effects of climate change or crossing planetary boundaries Like smoky's experience or mine with my reef and that price is usually grief associated with profound loss And it sits With all of us It is in this room Anyone who is working on this or has seen it happen This Is an unacknowledged weight that many of us carry Now there is a literature that speaks to our experiences and validates them and this is from the WHO You can see that this that climate change poses a variety of threats to human health Including mental health and well-being It also shows that some people and groups are even more vulnerable than others So emerging concepts include ecological grief Ecoanxiety and nostalgia. So ecoanxiety or climate anxiety is a response to impending threats by climate change Like rising sea levels or desertification So nostalgia refers to a sense of desolation Detachment and grieving in response to losing an important place, which is like homesick homesickness so Grief reminds us that climate change Environmental change planetary boundaries are not just some abstract scientific concept or some distant environmental problem It's deeply personal It draws our attention to the emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are Debt and changes in our natural world. So practically for us We need to act not just think not just document and this involves Supporting people acting together And unacknowledged trauma and grief makes collective action harder. So I just want to ask you to just look around the room Just look around. Do you want to take a look to the back? Take a look to the side This room here is filled with leaders and agents of change and I believe We can find ways to surface Embrace and deal with our trauma and grief Both individually and shared And when we do I believe it will make us better leaders in the face of uncertainty Now to summarize In the face of rapid environmental change, what can we control? Well, we can control what we do together And together we can achieve amazing things One health is a concept that I believe helped us to act together because we can Think intuitively and practically about the health of humans animals and the environment And being honest about our feelings of loss Grief and mental health can also help us act together because when these feelings are hidden They slow us down. So thank you for your time And I just want to leave you with some reflections