 Today I'm joined by Dina Ionesco, who's the head of the Migration Environment and Climate Change Division here at IOM, and we're going to talk a bit about the work that Dina and the organization has been doing to address climate change environment and the links with migration. We've seen that between 2008 and 2016 there were some 25 million people per year that were displaced by certain disasters on average, and that's not even considering people who have suffered from slow degradation of their environment. IOM has been leading on environmental migration programs in 40 countries. What can you tell us about the work of IOM and how it has evolved over the years? Yes, thank you. Yes, you mentioned some figures that are very striking, and it's how I think the topic has evolved and appeared in the organization. There has been a push, I think, from the reality, from what we've seen on the ground, that people were affected by natural disasters such as floods or typhoons, and this was leading to migration. We saw more and more that people are affected by very slow events and processes like desertification or coastal erosion, and that also can lead to migration. More work started from, I think, two directions. One is the reality call from the field, which I think makes the nature of this organization that is so connected to people and their needs. This is connected, I think, with a real vision and a real political will to bring to light the environmental drivers of migration. So there is this connection between the vision that current migration, contemporary migration, cannot afford to ignore this climate change and environmental degradation, and the needs to address people on the move because of the environment, climate change, and disasters. So the work has evolved a lot over the years. To tell you, I found one of our first research papers from the 70s, and then I found another report from the 90s, but around COP15 in Copenhagen and around 2007, 2008, there has been really an acceleration of activity on connecting climate change, environmental issues and migration. What we saw is that we as IOM had to move into the climate work because that's where there were negotiations, that's where states opened up a space for discussion, and we worked a lot on integrating migration into that, because I think the migration world wasn't yet ready for this conversation. And this recognition by states, is it reflected also in the global compact for migration, for example, which is this intergovernmental negotiated agreement that will hopefully be signed by the end of this year. Is there also a component that addresses migration and climate change? As I said, I think this migration and environmental and climate change connection has evolved very much in other agendas for many years, environmental one, ecosystem one, climate one, land one, water. We have simply a historical opportunity for states to now recognize over all processes and climate change on migration, but it's more than that. It's also about recognizing that there is also migration that has an impact on the environment. The way we manage and states manage programs, activities and migratory movements has also a big impact on resources, on waste management, on water, on the way the environment is protected as well like forests. So there is this positive recognition and we really hope that it will continue and that it will be in the text and that in the follow up in the capacity building mechanism, in the implementation mechanism, we will have a very visible dimension. And talking about the comprehensive approach, are we only focusing on addressing the needs of the people that are hit by disasters in order to prevent them from moving? Or are we also looking at the people who are already on the move due to disasters and slow onset events? So in fact, I would say beyond what you just said, in fact, we address three dimensions. I would maybe make it in three dimensions, three main dimensions. So IOM provides solutions for people to allow them to stay by investing and partnering with environmental key stakeholders. So you can imagine it's about the preservation of ecosystems, mangroves in America or in Asia. It's about fighting against desertification in the Sahel. It is about investing in all the environmental solution with the partners so that people do not have to move in a forced way, that they have an alternative to stay. So that's about first solutions for people to stay. The second dimension you mentioned, it's about supporting people on the move. So when there is a hurricane that hits like in the Caribbean at the beginning of the year, when there are major floods, when there is important drought in Africa, as we saw also in 2017, millions of people displaced by drought, for instance, from Somalia, then it's about supporting these people. It's much more, I would say, humanitarian type of solutions, assistance, and also the whole work on trying to understand why these people move and what supporting their needs. And then the third element that you have not mentioned, but I think which is at the heart of our work and its key, it's providing solutions for people to move. And that connects us back also with the global compact on migration. Solutions for people to move, it means to see migration also as a part of the solution. And it's about our own vision about how we see contemporary migration policy. So it's about providing people with alternatives for voluntary migration, for dignified migration, and it's the small island states from the Pacific. And all the engagement we saw from Fiji Kiribati, it's at the forefront of such work. So imagining regional solutions, frameworks, agreements of migration, imagining labor migration for very degraded areas. So it's about knowing that these climate change impacts are happening and not waiting for people to be under the water because of sea level rise. It's about offering them possibilities to use migration in a positive, dignified, safe mode instead of speaking only about displacement, forced-formance migration, tragic migration, migration of despair. So this, I would say, that's free dimensions. Yeah, it's about sharing the knowledge in a way as well. And I just wanted to ask you, finally, about this Atlas environmental migration. When was this published and what does it contain? What is it about? Okay, so thank you very much for the question. So the Atlas of Environmental Migration, it's a publication that is available now in English, French and German. It was published in 2017. And the objective of this book was to put in one single space, in a one document, what we know and what we don't know about environmental migration because there are many myths around environmental migration. It's a topic that came from total invisibility to almost fashion and extreme exposure. So there's a lot of myths, also, conceptions about, for instance, confusing people at risk and people who are really migrants because of climate change. So the idea was to partner between the International Organization for Migrations and we partner with an academic partner, François Gémen, with whom we work on many other dimensions of this topic. So we wrote this publication with three energies coming from... Which is not short, by the way. It's not short, but there was a major effort, in fact, to make something extremely complicated as simple as possible. It is about putting in simple words something that is extremely complex at the end of the day. So for the experts and also the general public who want to access the material. I really hope so and this publication has received also a lot of support from states. It has received a lot of support from our director general. It's part of our vision to put the topic on the agenda and it has received a lot of support from the academic world because it's all a partnership with hundreds of academics. We are a migration band, organization, so our role is to be able to bring environmental and climate change dimension into the migration policy world and work we do and operations we do. Tina, thank you so much. I hope that you will continue leading this amazing work. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. Please feel free to leave your questions in the comments and we'll see you next time.