Left to right: Kathy Baughman McLeod, Adil Najam, Erum Sattar, and Irfan Nooruddin

 

Expert Panel Tackles Global Climate Change
By Elaine Pasquini

Washington: The closing panel of the recent conference on Pakistan organized by Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the University of Lahore, the Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research, Engro Corporation and the Atlantic Council addressed the global problem of combating climate change.

This program “reminds us that no man is an island, and no country can solve the challenges of climate change on their own,” said moderator Irfan Nooruddin, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. “So, while each government in South Asia has to take responsibility for its own actions, we are stronger together. And if South Asia as a region – home to almost two billion people and neighbors with several other billion people on the continent of Asia – can’t work together, the future is bleak.”

Nooruddin told attendees if the region can work together on climate change, perhaps it can also serve as a roadmap on working together on other issues of relevance to the region.

“We have to talk about it [climate change] loudly…forcibly…and unsparingly,” he stated. “To not talk about it borders on criminal negligence.”

Erum Sattar, program director of the sustainable water management program at Tufts University, stressed the need in a destabilizing environment to move toward development security and adaptation (the change in processes and practices to offset the damage of climate change.) Sattar pointed to the actions of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley in helping developing countries secure climate finance and banking reform.

There are many cities around the world that have green infrastructure and climate finance plans and are working forward with ten-year plans, she related. “So, investments are going into those communities for those adaptations.”

Local governments are where people are closer to problems, and the nature-based solutions used by local governments are critical, Sattar said.

Kathy Baughman McLeod, senior vice president at the Atlantic Council and director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, focuses in her work on issues of climate change, adaptation, resilience and policy change in regard to climate with renewed attention to heat as a fundamental challenge and overt manifestation of climate change in the 21st century. In this regard, she helps governments design critically needed heat policies.

“We’ve been talking about global warming for 60 years but not talking about heat which is the driver of all of these impacts – floods, drought, fire, bigger storms and more storm surge,” she explained.

Heat is a mass casualty event across the globe, even in the United States, McLeod said. Heat seasons are now like hurricane seasons and heat waves are now getting names, such as “Zoe in Spain” last year, and more will be named in the future, she added. In the United States, city mayors are the frontline in dealing with heat waves because they must account for the dead bodies.

As nature-based solutions are a cost-effective way to fight climate change, planting trees is important, she said, noting that tree maps show poorer areas have fewer trees. “A map of trees is a map of poverty and wealth.” In some countries, such as Sierra Leone, people are assigned a tree and get paid for taking care of it. McLeod noted that there is a temperature difference of 22 degrees Fahrenheit between areas with trees compared to those without.

McLeod also pointed out that US government policies that support the oil and gas companies “are working against what we know we need to do.” 

Adil Najam, inaugural dean of Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, noted climate change is an existential issue …“which is why it is the ultimate security issue. It literally is about whether we exist or not.”

The fact that we could lose everything “might be an impetus to do something – the things we haven’t done,” he said. Claiming the problem is global not regional, he emphasized the need for a global response, not “this jigsaw puzzle approach we’ve taken to climate change [which] is just scientifically wrong.”

The floods have made climate change personal, Najam said. “The smog has made it personal for Lahore; the heat has made it personal for Karachi.”

When asked what can be done, Najam responded: “Without major lifestyle changes there is no way out of climate change. It’s not just a rich country, poor country thing. I think it is a race between human knowledge and human wisdom. I have no doubt that we have the knowledge to do better. I am not sure if we have the wisdom.”

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)