Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome back to Common Home Conversations for part II of our discussion with María Espinosa, President of the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly and former Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Izabella Teixeira, Co-Chair of the United Nations Environment Programme's International Resource Panel and former Minister for the Environment of Brazil. Thank you both so much for joining us again today!

Now, we were talking about intergenerational equity and climate justice. One other thing I'd like to go into just a little bit further, and you both touched on this a little bit, is you're both from countries that house the Amazon rainforest. What could this declaration mean for Indigenous communities?

María Espinosa

Yet again, Kimberly and Izabella, we both come from Amazonian countries, as you said. In the early stages of my career, I devoted so many years to working and living in the Amazon and working with Indigenous peoples myself. And what I can tell you is that they have incredibly sophisticated knowledge about how to manage tropical ecosystems that are so sensitive, so vulnerable. You see a lot of green and a powerful primary tropical rainforest, but you know, any minor disruption can really alter the very sophisticated life cycle of a tropical rainforest. Indigenous peoples have lived there for thousands of years, and they know how to take care of the Amazon. And I don't want to be an essentialist, but basically, I think that there is a lot to learn. The Amazon is at a crossroads right now if you look at the deforestation patterns, at the land use, dramatic changes in the Amazon, but also the living conditions of Indigenous peoples. It's extremely worrisome in terms of the rights in terms of access to basic services. 

Unfortunately, the Amazon, in our respective countries, continues to be our internal colonies. Look at Ecuador, but there are more cases like Ecuador. Ecuador's income mainly comes from oil exports. I would say practically every barrel of oil that Ecuador exports come from the Amazon. And that brings, depending on the oil prices, but let's say 50 to 60 percent of our revenue. And if you look at the living conditions of Indigenous peoples, and not only in Ecuador but in the Amazon, they are the poorest of the poor. This has been so evident, so obvious with the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of access to health care, in terms of water and sanitation, in terms of food security. And I would say thank God that Indigenous peoples have their own organization mechanisms, their own solidarity networks, their own intellectual capacity to gather data to do their own assessments. There is a platform that was organized by COICA, which is the Confederation of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon, you know, really being self-sufficient because of the lack of concern, commitment, and responsibility from their respective governments. 

And with that said, I think that, of course, Indigenous peoples are key players in finding a new way to manage the Amazon. They are key players; their presence is a transboundary presence. They have families across borders. They understand the ecological dynamics of tropical rainforests. And they also have to be at the decision-making table. They have the voice, they have the knowledge, they have the experience, but they are also subjects of a tremendous profound rights deficit. You name it; I mentioned that in terms of food security, in terms of access to health, in terms of quality education. So there is a lot that our societies need to do. 

There is, very soon hopefully, a significant report produced by the Science Panel for the Amazon, which is hundreds of scientists, mostly from Amazonian countries, that have come together to produce this state of the art situation of the Amazon. I have the privilege to serve on their Advisory Committee. I share that also, Izabella, with Sebastião Salgado. We are both part of the Strategic Committee of the Science Panel for the Amazon. And we are working closely, very much looking forward to their report, and it is going to be, in my opinion, a game-changer. But I say that these are strong words, but we need to decolonize the Amazon, and the way to decolonize is to work closely with Indigenous peoples but also with Amazonian citizens in general. The situation of Amazonian urban settings and cities, for example, is one of the most challenging situations. 

Well, I can speak about the Amazon for hours and hours. It's obviously one of my passions, but your question about Indigenous peoples, their roles, and Indigenous peoples from the Amazon, they need to have, they are entitled to have a seat at the decision-making table. But beyond that, Indigenous peoples have made a tremendous contribution to the Paris Agreement in crafting climate-related agreements. They have a strong voice when dealing with agriculture and multilateral decisions etc. Well, to make it short, they are strong, articulate, intelligent, and much-needed voices in the global governance arrangements and in the decision-making processes not only at national but also at international levels.

Izabella Teixeira

Yes, I fully agree with you. I would like to add two or three comments because my first perspective is something that you mentioned as a critical issue. We need to decolonize Amazonia. And for this, it's not only the national interest with national perspectives; we need to know Amazonia or the Amazon region. My feeling is that the world also does not know or has different ways to approach Amazonia without necessarily understanding all the dimensions of the Amazon's regions. Indigenous people connect almost all of the dimensions of the Amazon region. This is something very important to pay attention to because, politically, I used to say that Amazon puts Brazil in the world, and today Amazon keeps Brazil out of the world. Because we need to have a common understanding not all about the importance to protect for climate security, for example- climate stability of Amazon protection- but we need to understand much better what the Amazon means. And you go into the international community, and you know this better than I, that when you go into our countries that are part of Amazon regions, we are seen as middle-income countries. But when you go into the Amazon region, you have low-income countries. This is a huge mistake for the international community when you go to address funds, for example. International funds- "No, I cannot support you because you are from Peru, from Brazil, middle-income countries, etc." It's not true. 

We need a new lens to approach Amazon regions, and in my perspective, I believe that you need to specialize in Amazon diplomacy to understand how to address common goods. This is very important to pay attention to politically and geopolitically because everyone's allowed to discuss Amazonia- even Brazilians- without necessarily knowing a lot about Amazonia. I'd like to mark this because you have your passion for Amazonia as I have my own. And but we cannot forget that in Brazil, 80 percent of people that live in Amazonia live in cities. I'm talking about 27 million people that live in the Brazilian Amazon. It's not one million people; it's 27 million people. So it's absolutely important to understand that that's why I mentioned so much about local needs. And Indigenous people are part of this because we also have a diversity that is so rich. The diversity of Indigenous people that you have in the Amazon region- you need to understand how to add...

We need to promote inclusive development but with nature. Homosapiens are part of nature, we cannot forget it. 

Maria Espinosa

To manage, wisely and responsibly, ecosystems and the earth system, we need to rethink sovereignty.

Izabella Teixeira 

There is no future for humankind if you're not able to address social inequality.

Maria Espinosa

the voices of civil society, of academia, of science, of young people, of Indigenous peoples, are more needed than ever. 

Izabella Teixeira

The challenge is not based on small-scale projects. The challenge that we’re facing now, the solution that we need requires a really ambitious project.

Maria Espinosa

Stockholm+49 and the Stockholm+50 is going to be an opportunity to rediscuss, to recommit, to rethink, because of the profound changes that our world has experienced in the last 50 years.

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by María Espinosa, President of the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly and former Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Izabella Teixeira, Co-Chair of the United Nations Environment Programme's International Resource Panel and former Minister for the Environment of Brazil. Thank you both so much for joining us today!

Izabella Teixeira

Thank you for inviting us. 

María Espinosa

Thank you, Kimberly. We're delighted to be with you once again, and it's a privilege to be here in this conversation with Izabella Teixeira.

Kimberly White

Alright, leading up to Stockholm+50, civil society is organizing Stockholm+49, a global event focusing on building common ground and creating a common short declaration to spark a much-needed paradigm shift. In your opinion, what issues should be at the center of a meaningful declaration? Maria, let's start with you.

María Espinosa

Well, I think that it is extremely timely to come up with a renewed commitment to having a planet that sustains life and human societies after the landmark declaration at the Stockholm Conference 49 years ago. I think it is time for a recommitment, not only from governments but from society as a whole, to make sure that we respect nature, its life cycles, its very existence. On the other hand, I think that we need to think in the 21st century what it means 50 years ago, practically. The right to a healthy environment and to live in a healthy environment. The idea of the earth system being a common heritage and a global public good or a common good. And to also see what is the relationship between politics, nature, and the economy. I think that there is a need for a new commitment and a new pact between society and nature. So I think that this declaration cannot be more timely.

Kimberly White

Absolutely. Thank you, Maria. Now, Izabella, I'd like to pose the same question to you: What issues should be at the center of this meaningful declaration?

Izabella Teixeira

Oh, thank you very much, Kimberly. I think that Maria brings some critical issues, but I would like to add two or three things. We need to understand the right and the moral obligation to a healthy environment and what it means. Because we are coming into these new challenges, but unfortunately, not with the same conditions of development around the world. You have inequalities, not only the social ones- you also have environmental inequalities. We are looking forward to addressing the future with new footprints, but more than this. We're looking forward to understanding better how we go into the future to tell new stories based on the future, not based on the past. My feeling is that we need to understand what a healthy environment means for us, for humankind, considering the next years and what the challenges are that we need to tackle better. 

We need a new expression of humanism around the world and what shared responsibility means, not only rights but also obligations. That's why I think when Maria mentioned that not only the government should lead the commitment- they need the commitment, a new behavior, a new understanding, considering from the societies. When you discuss societies, not only the global society- we need to understand local needs. We need to better understand how you can manage local needs with global carbon, how you can address local needs to achieve global carbon benefits. We need to understand that the global impacts should not be seen as transboundary impacts. It is something really important. It's science. It's a good player to come together with us because transboundary impacts it's an understanding that you had in the last century, and it is very important to be addressed, but global impacts move beyond transboundary impacts. This means that we as a global society, with societies interconnected at the global level, we have a new responsibility, we need to understand what it means, we need to understand how our gaps of development should be solved, considering the future that we were looking for, to design or redesign, but we need to understand the right to choose. This is something very important because we need a choice. This is the power that individually and collectively, as a society, to have. 

We need to look for new alternatives for economic growth, not necessarily without limits. This is something very important to observe. You need to decouple the environmental impacts from economic growth. It's important. We need to better manage natural resources, and it's absolutely important. But we need to understand the limits of growth and economic growth and consider the challenge that the planet has opened today- like a Pandora box- say "Look, I cannot manage ten billion people on the planet without managing new conditions, a new way to approach economic growth and social development." So inequality is a critical issue.

In my perspective, I think that the declaration- not only the declaration but the process, the movement that global society is doing now- we need to look for a new enlightenment, we need to make sure that we can have a democracy and have a new relationship between humankind and nature. We need to move forward to understand that this is a big challenge for humankind, but also, if you want to change, we have the power to change, we as individuals and as a society. We need to put pressure not only on the states, but we need to put pressure on ourselves because we need to understand how we need to demand change. This is my perspective, considering the new declaration and the process that you put into practice now.

Kimberly White

This leads to my next question. International environmental law seems unable to bring about social-ecological change at the level and speed necessary to address the converging crises that we face. It has remained state-centered, beholding only to the state for the central source of its legitimacy and authority. Non-state stakeholders, NGOs, and civil society movements do not play any meaningful role in the negotiation, enforcement, or revision of multilateral environmental agreements, which still seem to be the mainstay of international environmental law. Maria, what should be the role of civil society in the design of this declaration?

María Espinosa

Well, I think that we hear time and again that we need a rejuvenated multilateral system, that we need a new architecture in global governance in what we created 76 years ago when the UN was established. The social fabric, the geopolitics have changed so much. The voice of civil society is very important, not only because they should have a say in global affairs but also because we are experiencing a crisis of trust and legitimacy in institutions. And in my opinion, the only way to counter this deficit trust is to make sure that all the voices are heard and that we really advocate for what the UN Secretary-General has stated so many times, an inclusive and networked multilateralism. What that means is that when you are to take a decision about the future of humanity because a declaration, a renewed declaration after 50 years of Stockholm, really needs the voice of academia, of younger generations, youth leaders and changemakers, women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, the pr...

We need to understand what a healthy environment means for us, for humankind, considering the next years and what the challenges are that we need to tackle better. 

Maria Espinosa

We need to reinterpret sovereignty in the context of our common heritage and common good.

Izabella Teixeira

We need a new expression of humanism around the world and what shared responsibility means, not only rights but also obligations.

Maria Espinosa

Let's be clear- it is not only about the environment. It is about our development models, about our value systems. It is about the way we think about the future. It is about our collective security and our human security. It is about living in harmony, in a way. 

Izabella Teixeira

we need to have actions today in the present. If not, we cannot understand what the future means.

Maria Espinosa

We need to make sure that we can have a democracy and have a new relationship between humankind and nature.

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Thomas Boudreau, Professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Thomas Boudreau

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. 

Kimberly White

So, you're a Professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University. Can you tell us more about this and the focus of your current research?

Thomas Boudreau

Yes, we're a relatively new department. We grew out of one course taught by a charismatic professor, Phil Bosserman, and now we're an undergraduate program and a graduate program. In 2018, we were recognized as the second-best program in conflict analysis in the United States. So in a very short time, we've made a mark both in our undergraduate teaching and our graduate program.

Kimberly White

That's fantastic- congratulations! So earlier this year, renowned naturalist David Attenborough told the UN Security Council that climate change is the "biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced." Similar sentiments have been expressed by leading climate and environmental scientists. Now, you have proposed an Earth Armistice to address this existential threat. Could you please tell us more about this and the benefits such a resolution could have for our global community?

Thomas Boudreau

Yes, well, first, I'd like to recognize the extraordinary work and achievement of Sir David Attenborough. He's just a world treasure, and we should all thank the United Kingdom for sharing him with the rest of us. Extraordinary individual. Sir David is absolutely correct in characterizing climate change as the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced and certainly faces today. And we have to address this in the next 5 or 10 years, or it will become a runaway freight train. And I think if we wait too long, it'll be too late. So I asked myself, "what organization can make a global law with one vote in one day in one place?" And that's obviously the UN Security Council. And the UN Security Council is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. And there is no question that climate change is increasingly threatening the maintenance of international peace and security and will continue to do so in major ways in the coming years. So, the UN Security Council is a natural place to address this. It also, by the UN Charter, is responsible for the regulation of armaments. And so the Earth Armistice idea is, namely, for the UN Security Council to vote. As I say, and they could do this in one vote, it's not simply a resolution. They have the power, the legal authority under the charter, to make binding decisions on all the member states. That's why the great powers watch the council like a hawk. But they could vote an Earth Armistice; they could approve it, which would require every state to cut from 10 to 20 percent of its current defense budgets and devote it exclusively to addressing climate change. And to do so, nation states have to do the obvious- namely, redefine and expand their understanding of national security to include the threats that climate change presents to us today and will increasingly present to us in the future. I don't think the Earth Armistice will be adopted today or tomorrow. I think it will be adopted at some point. My fear is that it will simply be too late to address the coming storms that are now inevitable.

Kimberly White

Now, you said that the Earth Armistice would be essential to ensure sustainable development as well as achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Could you please elaborate on that?

Thomas Boudreau

There will be no sustainable development unless we develop a sustainable climate. But to do so will involve enormous costs as well as opportunities. The transition from a carbon-based global economy to a green-based global economy will involve tremendous opportunities and new jobs in a variety of sectors. And what's needed is the funding, and the global militaries now spend almost $2 trillion a year on national defense defined in terms of defending the nation state against other nations. What they need to do- and this you see this thinking already among the military, unfortunately, don't see it as much with the politicians- but what you need to do is redefine your national security in terms of sustainable development. To do that, you need to invest in green economies. There's tremendous work to be done in the conversion of current carbon-based energy sources to green sources, such as solar and wind, and making them resilient and ensuring that they can sustain the coming winds and weather that could do a lot of damage to existing infrastructure. At the same time, you want the green economies to develop the necessary negative emission technologies, or carbon sequestration, to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. And we've made very little or no progress in this area whatsoever, and that's, again, a reason for the Earth Armistice. Creating negative emission technologies can create hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially in the developing world, and thus encourage sustainable development and the very rapid emergence of green economies throughout the globe.

Kimberly White

I'm glad you brought up carbon sequestration- I think that's such an important part of tackling climate change. People don't realize how important natural solutions- such as soil- are to our environment and to the health of our planet. 

Thomas Boudreau

Well, I think we're gonna have to go beyond soil sequestration or carbon farming, although that can play a critical role. I think we need to try a whole variety of approaches to carbon sequestration using the land and the oceans. And I'd like to make a distinction between carbon sequestration, which is land or ocean-based, and geoengineering, which is the spraying of aerosols in the atmosphere, which I am very skeptical of. Because we had an experience in the States with sulfuric acid killing the lakes, acid rain, and I think the current plans for the use of aerosols in the atmosphere, solar geoengineering, could be a repeat of that acid rain experience, if not worse.

Kimberly White

Absolutely, the risks associated with solar geoengineering are far too great. I believe that restoration efforts are essential moving forward. For instance, with the peatlands. Peatlands cover just three percent of our land globally, yet they are a carbon sequestration powerhouse. They store over 550 gigatons of carbon. And recent studies have shown that restoring some of these habitats could prevent the release of as much as 394 million tons of CO2.

Thomas Boudreau

There have to be massive restoration efforts of reforestation, aforestation, which means planting forests in areas where they don't exist. There's going to be the increasing problem of droughts and massive wildfires. The forests have to be planted or reforested in areas that aren't going to burn down anytime soon. Personally, I find the phenomenon of green lawns in front of homes to be hopelessly obsolete; I think people should get tax breaks for planting trees on 50 percent or more of their lawns. There are areas in Montgomery County, north of DC, that have one home ...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Eduardo Viola, Political Scientist and Professor of International Relations at the University of Brasilia. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Eduardo Viola

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Kimberly White

So you're a Professor at the University of Brasilia and a Senior Researcher of the Brazilian Council for Research. You're also the Chair of the Brazilian Research Network on the International System in the Anthropocene and Climate Change. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Eduardo Viola

Okay, well, I’ve had a very long career as a Professor of International Relations. My focus of research, not always, but at least in the last 35 years, has been on environmental issues, both in Brazil and internationally, and the Brazilian foreign environmental policy. So I am in international relations with a focus on environment and climate change and energy transition. My research has been, over the years, focused in Brazil and South America but also following and studying directly the trajectory of emissions, climate policies of major players- United States, European Union, Japan, Russia, China, India, and Brazil. And right now, I am a lot involved with specific research about the South American governance of climate and biodiversity in the Pan-Amazonia, not just the Brazilian Amazonia but the whole Amazon, and comparing politics of different countries, particularly Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting! So, the Amazon Basin is experiencing threats on multiple fronts. One threat is deforestation. As we have seen in recent years, deforestation for mining, or conversion to agriculture and pasture for beef, has resulted in a staggering amount of biodiversity loss, and the massive fires seen over the last few years have dominated global headlines. At the same time, the melting of the arctic ice sheet and the massive glacial melting in Greenland from global warming is changing the circulation of the Atlantic, reducing the rainfall coming into the Amazon from the ocean. These threats highlight a need for both domestic and international policy solutions. Currently, it appears that economic development outweighs environmental protection at the federal level. Given your expertise, how can Brazil best reconcile its need for economic development with its growing environmental concerns?

Eduardo Viola

So, first of all, we could say that since 2013-14, economic growth has prevailed over environmental protection in the Amazon. But right now, it is extreme because it's actually promotion of deforestation, open and consistent promotion of deforestation. Deforestation right now in the Brazilian Amazon has several players. So we have got landowners, backwater landowners, very small capitalization, let's say, that promote illegal deforestation. We have people that are not landowners, but they occupy the lands and open the forest in order to become owners of the forest; we call these "grileiros" in Portuguese in Brazil. We have illegal gold mining, there is a lot of illegal gold mining in the Amazon, but this is not just in the Brazilian Amazon; it is also in the other upstream countries of the Amazon. Right now, we can say that mercury pollution in the middle and lower Amazon Basin is mostly used in upstream countries, but still, let's say the Brazilian gold miners are constrained a little in relation to using mercury more rationally.

We have other minerals also that are illegally mined in the Amazon Basin. The fifth player that is important in this process of deforestation is the invaders of Indigenous territories. As you probably know, in the case of Brazil, almost 17 percent of the area belongs constitutionally to the Indigenous population. But there are a lot of invasions, sometimes with some cooptations of parts of their Indigenous tribes.  And it is very interesting because Brazil has much more strict environmental protection legislation. For example, there is a significant part of logging that is produced illegally in the Brazilian Amazon, but it is moving to the border to Peru, in which the environmental legislation is much weaker. 

So those are the major drivers of deforestation in the Amazon. But you need to consider, generally speaking, that the Brazillian Amazon is populated by around 25 million people, most of them living in the cities but in precarious conditions, generally speaking. So there is a major problem of lack of opportunities, which promotes or creates incentives for poor people living in urban areas to go to the forest to deforest illegally, many times working for bigger players that are driving the deforestation. But in all the cases, those are all players that are small compared to the large players in Brazil. Big companies have been very relevant in deforestation in the Amazon until around one decade ago, particularly during the period of dramatic control and reduction of deforestation, 2005 to 2012. During this period, the major companies were banned on the policy of illegally deforesting the Amazon, and they moved because of the questions of prestige or branding and all these kinds of things. And because they have the possibility of deforesting legally in the Cerrado savanna, that is to the south of the Amazon, in which the rate of deforestation in the last 20 years has been much higher than in the rainforest.

Kimberly White

Illegal logging has been a problem for all of the Amazonian countries, right? I think it was in 1998 that Brazil had commissioned a report that found that 80 percent of logging in the Amazon was done illegally.

Eduardo Viola

Yes, yes. Now it is less than that but still significant, but the data are very precarious. They are all estimations. We know how a lot of loggers moved from illegally to legally, particularly at the time during the most consistent anti-deforestation policy. But there are still a lot, and now it's growing. In the last year, the amount of illegal logging compared with the legal has grown.

Kimberly White

We had similar problems here in the United States with the last administration as far as environmental policy goes. Policies were revoked or basically dismantled. Recently, I read that, under Brazil's current administration, the selective logging that was legal has more than doubled since 2019.

Eduardo Viola

Yes, or more than that. Now, we have logging entering new areas. For example, historically, the logging was more in the state of Pará and also in the state of Rondônia. In the last years, there was a movement, expanding the frontier of deforestation and illegal logging to the southeast of the state of Amazon, Amazonia.

Amazonia is very large. It is as large as Alaska; it is 1.2 million square kilometres.

Kimberly White

That's interesting- I had no idea that it was roughly the size of Alaska! So a few minutes ago, you mentioned something regarding Indigenous communities. You mentioned that they were constitutionally protected. Could you elaborate on that and what that means versus something like land demarcation?

Eduardo Viola

Because t...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White  

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Maja Groff, an international lawyer based in The Hague and Convenor of the Climate Governance Commission! Thank you so much for joining us today!

Maja Groff

Pleasure to be here with you, Kimberly.

Kimberly White

So you previously worked with the Permanent Bureau of The Hague Conference on Private International Law. Can you tell us more about this experience?

Maja Groff

Yes, absolutely. It was really a great pleasure to serve as an international civil servant at The Hague Conference on Private International Law, serving the international community, the member states of the organization, which now number over 80 states. And I worked there for over a decade, working on a whole range of existing, binding multilateral treaties across very diverse areas of law, as well as on the development of new international treaties and legal norms. And really, as we see globalization intensifying across a whole range of areas, the demands on international law really are accelerating. So just as an example, of some of the areas I worked on at The Hague Conference, I worked on very widely ratified vital children's conventions, a convention on the protection of adults with disabilities in cross border circumstances, I worked on a pioneering international Hague network of judges, as well as new potential treaties in areas such as the cross border protection of tourists, the recognition and enforcement of foreign civil protection orders in cases of domestic violence, and facilitation of access to foreign law. So it was a really wonderful experience across so many different diverse areas of international law, international human rights law, which exposed me to diverse legal systems around the world, diplomatic processes, and really gave me a sense of the great potential that modern international law can have, in terms of really addressing global issues, very concrete access to justice issues for individuals, for other actors. So it was a really wonderful background for the current work I'm doing at the moment. 

And just another note that The Hague Conference on Private International Law happens to be one of the oldest intergovernmental organizations in the world, dating from 1893. So it's been also a really brilliant vantage point to see sort of the origins of international law dating from the late 1800s to the first Hague peace conferences in 1899 and 1907, which set the stage for some of the international peace and security law we currently have, and for the League of Nations, and the United Nations. So it's been just a wonderful, brilliant vantage point, as well as being around modern international criminal law institutions, the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon; I've worked at both of them. And to see how international law can progress and make quite dramatic leaps forward with sets of dedicated professionals, dedicated international civil society networks, it's very promising for us and the international community.

Kimberly White

That is quite impressive! And it sounds like you had such wonderful experiences with the different aspects of that. And now you're working with the Global Challenges Foundation. So, the Global Challenges Foundation has identified three global risks to humanity. Can you please tell us what these risks are?

Maja Groff

Yeah, I think the Global Challenges Foundation has been good at raising awareness, public awareness, policymaker awareness about the range of global threats, global risks that confront us. And at the moment, there seems to be, from the Global Challenges Foundation, really a focus on climate change, large-scale environmental degradation, and weapons of mass destruction, which are key and thought to be interconnected challenges. So, of course, climate and large-scale environmental destruction is a newer threat versus the arms threat. And as we all know, they are an accelerating threat, these ecological and climate threats, and also dependent on understanding and policymaking based on very complex and evolving science, so quite a challenging area for international policymakers. 

The weapons of mass destruction issue, of course, with the nuclear age after World War II, has come into focus for the international community, and is less well known, I think, by the general public at the moment, because of some very quite effective arms treaties, bilateral in particular between the US and the former USSR, after the Cold War to regulate bilaterally some of those very dangerous arms races. But now, commentators and experts are also saying that we are living in a high-risk world in the case of weapons of mass destruction, across a whole range of areas, not just nuclear weapons, there's also the threat of new lethal autonomous weapons, the use of AI, we know all about cybersecurity threats. We also know of bio weapons related to different technologies in the development and engineering of viruses, for example. Chemical weapons are still very important and remain a threat. And so on. So I think it's excellent that the Global Challenges Foundation is trying to raise awareness of these interconnected threats, relating to other global threats and try to think carefully and think together, also in an innovative way about how we improve our collective decision making to tackle these threats and indeed, part of the vision of the founder Laszlo Szombatfalvy is to find new international decision making and global governance mechanisms that will, in a consistent, reliable way, manage these risks that we confront.

Kimberly White

Additionally, the Global Challenges Foundation highlighted the three underlying forces of these risks. Can you share more about these?

Maja Groff

So yes, the Global Challenges Foundation has highlighted these three contributing forces- extreme poverty, population growth, and political violence. So I think these are quite interesting, sort of contributing factors that are very socially based throughout our societies. So, for example, we see different polarized movements, unfortunately, across a range of countries and sort of internationalized polarized movements that add to our global risk. Population growth is also highly relevant to our ecological crises and threats and how we accelerate our responses to the ecological threats so that we don't all become over-consumers, as has happened in the developed world without transitioning to economies where we can have really deep circularity, so we really reuse and recycle and make sure that we're not just depleting global natural resources. 

Kimberly White

So international environmental law seems unable to deal with the shared global problems we are facing today. It is state-centered and doesn't necessarily cater to our shared responsibilities toward the global environment, even though the well-being of states depends on the well-being of our global environment. Why is current environmental law unable to achieve the deep structural reforms necessary to address shared global issues such as climate change? 

Maja Groff

Yes, it's a very good question, Kimberly. I think it's one that we have to keep asking ourselves. As an international lawyer, I think it's vital to keep interrogating and asking how ...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Frank Biermann, Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University, Director of the ERC GlobalGoals Project, Founder of the Earth System Governance Project, and Editor of the Earth System Governance journal. Thank you for joining us today, Frank!

Frank Biermann

Thank you so much, Kimberly. It's a pleasure being with you.

Kimberly White

You're a professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University and founder of the Earth System Governance Project. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Frank Biermann

Oh, thank you so much. But there are two different functions. Let me just explain both of them. The one is, of course, my normal professional function. I'm a professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University. That means essentially, I am a political scientist, I also have some background in international law. But essentially, my research, my interest in teaching also is political science, international relations. So I'm driven by trying to better understand how we can create institutions that can deal better with problems of global environmental change. We know that the earth system, the entire Earth system is today, transformed by human actions, climate change is accelerating, and we have to struggle very hard to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees. 

Species extinction, the worldwide spread of plastics in the oceans, ozone depletion, all these kinds of problems are essentially global problems. That means countries have to work together, governments need to agree on joint goals, they have to get together to share resources to share knowledge, governments have to adjust the policies, and we all have to change to adjust to these kinds of challenges. And for that, we need international institutions. We need international governance. And so far, these institutions are not effective; they're not really able to cope with these challenges. So, therefore, we need better institutions. We need better global governance. And this is what keeps me busy for the last 30 years, this is my field of research, this is the field of my teaching, and this is also where I'm personally extremely passionate about. I should also add that it's not necessarily just a picture of a win-win. It's not that we just need to have a better institutional design, and then everything will be resolved, and everything will be better. Instead, I'm very much concerned about conflicts of power and global inequalities and all kinds of conflicts that we have that countries are in a variety of relationships of inequality, dependence, post-colonialism, etc. So this is also part of the story of international institutions that we have to take into account, and we want to understand how we can try together to achieve an equitable and more sustainable future for all within the natural basis and the natural conditions of our planet. So this is my research, this is what I’m working on, and this is the key area of my Chair as a Professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University as part of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht.

And Earth System Governance is a slightly different story. It is not only about research, certainly not about my own research; it is about the network. It's about global networking to jointly study these questions that I have just laid out. And here we are a bit building on models that have been developed in the natural sciences in terms of global research collaborations. And the earlier years, like in the 19th century, social science was very much an individual activity. People were just there, they read a book, and you write a book, and you read a couple of books, and then you continue the progress of scientific knowledge in the social sciences. And this is essentially the model of the 19th century and the 20th century in the social sciences. And I believe that we cannot continue like this any longer. So we have to work much more together. And the natural sciences have done this already since the 1950s. Working together in large communities and large networks, where you exchange data, you exchange scientific insights work according to large science plans for sometimes five or ten years, where hundreds of scientists work together and try to jointly really better understand the reality of what's going on. And this is a model that natural scientists have done for quite some time. I believe it's also very much important for the social sciences. And this is essentially what the Earth System Governance Project is about. It's a global network. It's a network where hundreds of scientists are coming together and jointly discuss findings, research methods, questions, and theories about this big challenge of governance and the transformation of the entire earth system.

So we're not talking about air pollution; we talk about the transformation of the entire Earth system. We're not talking about the protection of individual species in our neighborhoods; we talk about the sixth mass extinction of species that are kind of being extinct on a huge scale, we're talking about sea-level rise, we are talking about land degradation, we are talking about ozone depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Half of the habitable land on earth we are using for agriculture, and we have totally transformed the planet. And I think this is a situation that requires a new perspective. And this is not the perspective of environmental policy. This is the perspective where we have to discuss these governance problems, the governance challenges, of the entire planetary system. And this is why we have developed this concept of earth system governance, which means institutions that are dealing with social-ecological systems at planetary scale. 

Kimberly White

During your time working in this field, have you seen any shift in environmental governance policy towards a more earth system-based approach?

Frank Biermann

Not on a systemic level. I think some of the key issues are not sufficiently addressed in the political space. Climate change certainly is. I mean, climate change certainly is a big issue also because of the youth movement that is associated with it, and I think it's a key issue in many countries. Not in all countries, but like in the Netherlands, where I'm based, it's certainly one of the key issues in political discourse. So there, I certainly see a change. I mean, when I started my career, it was a marginal issue; it was a fringe issue. And we went to international conferences on international relations; for example, the environmental committee was extremely small. And now the International Studies Association is one of the big institutions in science, in the study of international relations, Now, the environmental studies section there is one of the largest. This change is certainly there. I missed the change on a variety of other issues like food, for example. I am missing a strong focus on some of these big, big issues that we have to discuss, like the provision of food in times of climate change, and also many of the responses to climate change, where I believe that the provision of food is one of the big challenges in the future. And here, I'm missing strong political attention to these kinds of issues. And this is one of the issues that I'm working on to bring this forward. But generally, there is an ...

Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Princess Esméralda of Belgium, journalist, documentary‐maker, environmental activist, and President of the King Leopold III Fund for Nature Exploration and Conservation. Thank you so much for joining us today!

Princess Esméralda
Thank you for inviting me.

Kimberly White
So you’re the President of the King Leopold III Fund for Nature Exploration, and Conservation. Can you tell us more about the King Leopold Fund and what it aims to accomplish?

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, sure, it was created by my father in 1972. And I have to tell you that my father was a pioneer in the field of the environment because as a young, very young man in the 1930s, he was already very concerned about the state of nature and the way human beings were having an impact on biodiversity. And he made a speech in 1934, in London, saying that his generation had absolutely no excuse not to see all the damage that we were already doing on the natural world. So that’s pretty early in the time. And then, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he traveled extensively, especially in Latin America, in the Amazon. He spent several months with Indigenous communities there. And he decided to create this fund, not only to scientifically explore nature but also to protect it, and to protect the Indigenous communities that he had seen were the best custodians of our biodiversity. So he created this fund, and after his death in 1983, I became President, and we are very active. Actually, we finance probably between 10 and 20 missions a year all over the world, both in the field of exploration and in the field of conservation.

Kimberly White
That’s very impressive. So can you tell us about some of the most recent missions you’re funding?

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, sure. So we have done a lot of missions in Africa lately, related to the big apes. So you might know that there is a very important park in Africa called Virunga, which is a jewel of biodiversity and has also the famous gorillas, which at one point were on the brink of extinction. And luckily, now really, their population has grown again. And it’s really a big success, although it’s a part of Africa, which is extremely volatile because there’s a lot of violence and armed conflict. And so there are many problems. But we work also closely with the park, and we have done some missions there to scientifically study those species, and that’s only one example. But then we have also a lot of missions in South America, also sometimes in North America. Whether it is to study some new species of insects, so it’s very diverse, we have really a lot of different missions.

Kimberly White
That’s amazing. And I love the work that you’re doing in Virunga, it’s great because with mountain gorillas and with all gorillas, really, they are critically endangered. And right now, the conservation efforts have been extremely helpful. And currently, I think they’re the only great ape in the world with an increasing population.

Princess Esméralda
Yes, it’s fantastic.

Kimberly White
So, you and your daughter climbed Kilimanjaro in 2019 to raise funds for an NGO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hero Women Rising. Can you tell us more about this experience and what led you to do this?

Princess Esméralda
Ah, it was my meeting with an extraordinary woman, and this woman is named Neema Namadamu, she’s from the DRC. She’s from Kivu, which is a province of the South, which is extremely dangerous for locals, but especially for women. The violence against women is terrible. And I met Neema, and she told me about her life. And let me just tell you in a few minutes about her life. She got polio when she was very young. I think she was two. And immediately, her father said, “If I have a daughter who has polio, she will never be able to marry,”- which is something very important in the community there. And so he left his wife. And Neema’s mother said, “I want to give a chance to my daughter to go to school.” And because they lived in a village, and there was no way they could find a way to get to school, which was quite far, far away. She decided, yes, she would take her daughter to school, and she took her on her back every day. I think it was about five or six kilometers every day to go to the school. Until Neema became an adolescent, it was difficult at that time for her mother to carry her. So she sent her in the valley down where she could easily go to school. And Neema said, “For the love of my mother, I have to continue to go to school.”

She probably was the first of her community to go all the way to university, to graduate from university. All the time, because she said I have to do something for my mother who really sacrificed so much for me. And then Neema said, “I want to do the same for the girls of my community.” And a few years later, she decided to create a program for the girls to keep girls in school. Because what happens also in many regions of the world, and there particularly, is that when the girls have their first menstruation, they miss school for a few days because they don’t have all the necessary tools. And then the parents say, “Oh, their results are not so good, we should stop. Why do we pay for school if the girls have such bad marks?” So Neema decided to go to school to teach the girls to show them what you can do if you have an education. And she has been extremely successful with her program to keep girls at school. And I said, “Okay, she inspired me so much, because she, with so many handicaps, not only physical but also due to the violence and the situation in her country. And she managed to achieve so many things.” So I said, “Okay, I will do something which is not comparable, but it’s also an effort. I will climb Kilimanjaro with my daughter to raise funds for her organization.” And that’s what we did. It was a wonderful experience, first of all, because I was with my daughter, and because it’s a very beautiful place. So yes, it’s something very special for me, this memory.

Kimberly White
Her story is inspiring. I know with advancing gender equality and empowering women, we can deliver those cross-sectoral long-term solutions to climate change. In fact, in 2019, Project Drawdown had listed in their solutions to climate change that educating girls is the sixth most important solution to mitigate the climate crisis. So the work she’s doing in the DRC is amazing.

Princess Esméralda
Yeah, absolutely. Because you educate girls as we just said, first of all, they continue being educated. So they don’t marry too early, they don’t have children too early, they learn about the environment, they become really interested, they have solutions on the ground, there are so many advantages to that.

Kimberly White
Absolutely, and women are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. I think the latest statistic was 80 percent of those people who have been displaced by the major weather events caused by climate change are women and girls. So it’s imperative that we not only focus our solutions on them, but we need to include them in the decision-making process as well.

Princess Esméralda
Absolutely, because as you say, they are very much impacted. Because first of all, they are among the poorest in society in the developing countries. And also because they are the ones...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Louis Kotzé, Research Professor at North-West University and Senior Professorial Fellow in Earth System Law at the University of Lincoln. Thank you for joining us today!

Louis Kotzé

Thank you for the invitation, Kimberly. I'm very excited to speak to you.

Kimberly White

So you're a Research Professor of Law at North-West University in South Africa, and you are a Senior Professional Fellow in Earth System Law at the University of Lincoln.  Can you tell us what earth system law is?

Louis Kotzé

Oh, yes. So earth system law is a new legal paradigm that we've been working on for the last couple of years. And in developing this new legal paradigm, we realized, and we put great emphasis on the fact that as a human social system, law is an essential element of governance. And it certainly serves a very useful purpose as a vehicle for shaping behavior to achieve certain desired ends. That is the classical role of law after all, and law also plays a critically important role in environmental governance or the more broadly conceived idea of earth system governance, certainly, insofar as it seeks to shape or regulate or constrain, or more broadly would govern, how humans interact with other earth system constituents, aspects, and earth system processes. But we think that because law is caught up within, how can one put it, the stifling confines of its outdated Holocene orientated assumptions and orientation. It's not necessarily seen to be compatible anymore with and responsive to an earth system approach to governance which means that it cannot meaningfully address the full scope of all the legal aspects of earth system governance. So basically, in a nutshell, environmental law, which is the legal discipline most obviously concerned with environmental impacts, does not take a systems approach. And we need to consider this, I think, in the context of the Anthropocene trope, which is also a main part of my body of work. And the legal implications of the Anthropocene trope are becoming increasingly clear, no less, because of this new geological terminology because that's what it is; it's a geological term. It casts no judgment on the desirability or otherwise of this new state of affairs. But it does invite profound normative questions, as Tim Stephens, our friend from the University of Sydney, says. And I think that these questions will ask of us to consider how and by us I specifically mean lawyers, but also other scientists and people interested in governance. These questions will ask us to consider how, and the extent to which, the Anthropocene as epistemology or trope is changing our perceptions of law as a regulatory institution, including our perception of law's content, its purpose, its objectives, and certainly also its design. These questions will require us to reflect on human agency and the role of law in governing human actions in the Anthropocene, including certainly the impacts of these actions on the earth system and on the many other earth system processes and aspects and the links that these also have continued human existence on earth. So, to me, at least, the Anthropocene in this sense, allows for a sort of opening up, as it were of prohibitive epistemic closures in the law and of the legal discourse more generally, and perhaps even more importantly, of the world order that the law operatively seeks to maintain, to a range of other understandings of cognitive frameworks for global environmental change. So the Anthropocene reveals the contexts to contemplate possible ways to mediate this change through the law. And as a result, I think there is pretty much general agreement that the Anthropocene will ask of us to critically revisit the many traditional or trite assumptions that we have internalized over so many years, certainly since 1972 since the Stockholm conference. 

The idea of earth system law is that the development of such a new legal paradigm will require considerable creative, certainly, out-of-the-box thinking alongside the imagery of this earth system metaphor. And this will not be a straightforward or easy task, we think. And lawyers cannot go this alone. So we would need to embrace and rely on the expertise and the insights and the creative thinking of a whole range of other disciplines. I'm thinking of earth system scientists, geologists, geographers, ethicists, to name but a few. And I think we should be motivated by the idea that little is more difficult than learning to think differently. And we would need, certainly as lawyers speaking for myself as an environmental lawyer, to try and think differently. Now, are we willing, and will we ultimately be able to upset and criticize and rethink and reconfigure our traditions, our beliefs and attitudes, when it comes to thinking about a different type of law or legal paradigm that we want to have, and that's a better fit for the purpose of the Anthropocene? Personally, I believe that we are, and I want to invite people to join us in exploring the new legal paradigm of earth system law. And I see certainly a lot of potential for people involved in the Common Home of Humanity initiative, also to participate in this grander project, Kimberly, thanks.

Kimberly White

Thank you. I think that's great. We actually had professor Will Steffen on one of our first episodes, and he's one of the top earth system scientists. And we were able to learn about more of the science. So it's really great to learn more about the law side of the earth system. 

Louis Kotzé

Absolutely. We certainly rely a lot on the work of Will Steffen. And also, certainly, his work on planetary boundaries with Johan Rockström. And in the next few weeks, a new research handbook on law, governance, and planetary boundaries will appear with Edward Elgar that was co-edited by myself and Duncan French, with contributions actually also from Johan Rockström, from Will Steffen, and several other people that are working in this area.

Kimberly White

Fantastic, looking forward to checking that out. And to go further into earth system law, you're actually one of the founders of the Earth System Law Task Force. Can you tell us more about this?

Louis Kotzé

Yes. So the task force is an extremely exciting endeavor, an opportunity to become involved with the work on earth system law. So it is part of the Earth System Governance Network that was founded by Professor Frank Biermann from Utrecht. The Earth System Governance Network is currently, it's a global research alliance, and it is the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change. Now, the Earth System Governance Research Alliance takes up the challenge of exploring political solutions, including also legal solutions, of course, because of the link between politics and law and social behavior, and model more effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biochemical systems of the planet or they more broadly see the earth system. So the Earth System Governance Project and its network set up the task force. There are other task forces as well dealing with other issues, and ours was created in 2017. And it focuses specifically on earth system law. The task force established an interdisciplinary community of scientists, mostly lawyers, but there are certainly also non-lawyers among us, tha...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Maria Antonia Tigre, Director of Latin America for the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment. Thank you for joining us today! 

Maria Antonia Tigre

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kimberly White

So Maria, can you tell us about the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment and the work you do there? 

Maria Antonia Tigre

Absolutely. So the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, the GNHRE, is basically what it sounds like. It's a global network of academics, researchers, policymakers, lawyers and community activists that are particularly interested in this intersection of human rights in the environment. It started in 2018 as the brainchild of Anna Grear, who's an academic with the simple idea to bring people together who are working at this intersection. And the network recognizes the intersection of these two domains that human rights impact the environment and environmental quality impacts human rights. And so it nurtures a group of people who wanted to find more effective solutions than what had been done up until now. And because our core team has dedicated members divided by geographic regions, our growing network is particularly diverse. I'm the Director for Latin America and have as a result, the responsibility to engage with members who are based or focus their work on that particular region. This is done through webinars, through blog posts and an exchange of academic scholarship. We have a dedicated virtual research repository that contains over 2000 sources for research, which is by far the most extensive dedicated research portal on human rights and the environment available. And we are constantly updating it so it reflects the most recent scholarship on the team and particularly through research from those different regions of the world that are not always as focused in academia. So we also have a blog that provides commentaries on recent legal innovations, such as court decisions that have recognized the right to a healthy environment in some particular way. And since 2020 was the year of zoom meetings and webinars, we have developed a series of webinars focused on human rights-based climate litigation, which was our biggest programming initiative so far. We had an introductory webinar that provided a broad overview of human rights-based climate litigation, and then subsequent webinars that each focused on a specific region. The webinars had a very interesting mix of advocates, scholars, and lawyers, some of which were actually litigating the claims that we were talking about, which was a really interesting perspective to look from. And we had the privilege to hear from, in our webinar on focus on Latin America, we heard from Soledad García Muñoz who is the first Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And we got from her the broad perspective on how to recognize climate change and develop climate litigation at the inter-American system. This broad network that we have has allowed us to get a worldwide conversation on climate litigation, it goes well beyond the discussions that we have seen so far, with the truly incredible quality of interventions of very thoughtful people trying to figure out how to protect human rights and environmental rights. We have several projects planned for 2021 that focus on advancing the development of this right and forge new conversations and relationships among our members.

Kimberly White

That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to checking all of that out, especially the research repository. I think that sounds very interesting. So 2020 was a challenging year, with the pandemic and lock-downs and everything that went along with that. What are some of the highlights for human rights and the environment that stood out to you recently that we should know about? 

Maria Antonia Tigre

I think so. I think there have been several cases in Latin America that have advanced climate litigation through a human rights-based approach and also focused on the pandemic, specifically. I think what's interesting about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has truly sort of spread throughout all crevices of society. And, of course, it's primarily a health crisis with devastating consequences on the human right to life and the human right to health but the urgent and all encompassing nature of the pandemic’s effect has complicated other environmental and human rights challenges in unpredictable and unprecedented ways. And given the origin of the Coronavirus as a zoonotic disease, meaning that it was transmitted from animals to humans, the exploitation of wild species and deforestation becomes a central aspect in addressing the pandemic and preventing future ones. So I think the right to a healthy environment has really developed sort of, within that whole context is sort of a response to the pandemic as well. And in fact, I'm actually coordinating a working group at the Global Pandemic Network, which developed sort of as of response from a series of academics all over the world to the pandemic, with this idea of responding to what we're living and trying to understand it from a legal perspective and trying to find better responses to react to it and as we sort of move towards this next phase, but also preventing future ones. And this group that I'm coordinating focuses on how the right to a healthy environment and other sort of green rights have been infringed by the pandemic. And one of the aspects that we look at is precisely this increased and modified interface between people and wildlife, which leads to the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people. And from a legal perspective, we are asking how the right to a healthy environment as well as these other related rights, such as the right to water, the right to food, the rights of indigenous peoples, play a part in that discussion. So I think there's an increased call for this international recognition of the right to a healthy environment because of the pandemic.

Kimberly White

Yeah, unfortunately, it has been challenging, and you know, again, it is all interconnected. That brings me to my next question, and we can dive in a little bit further with COVID. So the climate crisis and the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic seemed to show us a connection between environmental degradation, health, and human rights. How would the Global Pact for the Environment bolster human rights while bringing about international accountability?

Maria Antonia Tigre

So I think a lot of the studies that we've seen from the pandemic and the underlying causes of it, they show that these causes are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change, including issues like land use change, agricultural expansion in wildlife trade and consumption. So the role of a deteriorating environment both as a cause and a consequence of the pandemic is very significant here because it raises, like I said, the demand for international recognition of a right to a healthy environment, and this recognition is crucial given the link between the rights of health and environmental protection, which was evidenced by the pandemic and the recognition at the international level would provide for increased accountability and ensure that environ...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Katherine Richardson, Professor in Biological Oceanography and leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the world's leading experts on climate change. Thank you so much for joining us today, Katherine.

Katherine Richardson

Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kimberly White

So you teach biological oceanography, and you're the leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen. You were also Chair of the Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy. Can you tell us more about these experiences and the focus of your current research?

Katherine Richardson

Yeah, well, first of all, you introduced me as being a biological oceanographer. And it's absolutely true. I got my PhD in biological oceanography, and universities are such that you then get professorships in whatever you have your PhD in. But although I still do research in biological oceanography, I really am much more, much more taken up with this idea of Earth System Science and have been contributing for the last 30 years or so to trying to understand the role of the ocean and the biological processes I look at in the ocean in a larger context than just the ocean. So I would say I'm more of an earth system expert on how do physics, biology, especially biology, chemistry, and people interact to make the conditions here on earth. So my experiences are very, I mean, I'm getting old, so I've had a lot of good experiences, and fortunately not very many bad experiences. The really rewarding experiences have been talking to people, either with different scientific backgrounds, or even with different kinds of policy backgrounds, and finding a common understanding and seeing where the interactions are between our fields, and our interests and how we can learn from looking at those interactions. So the focus of my current research is really understanding what causes differences in marine plankton ecosystems and how these differences may actually influence climate development on the planet as a whole. And I have a really, really exciting new project, which is what I really think is my first really truly Earth System Science project, in which we're taking sediment cores in the ocean sediments near Iceland and bringing them up and analyzing them for ancient DNA. So we can describe not just what fossilized organisms we find in the course, which people have been doing for years. But with the help of ancient DNA, we can describe whole ecosystems and what they looked like. We're then also doing it on land in lakes so we can describe the climate changes that happened that we can also see in our sediment cores. How the climate changes that happened were transported to land via the ocean? How did the nature change there, because of the climate change, and also because people were there? And then we have some social scientists involved as well, who are looking at how people responded to these changes in the nature around them, so the indirect effects of climate change on human populations. So I'm using a lot of time and energy and not to speak of money on this project, which I find very, very exciting.

Kimberly White

That is fascinating. I'm looking forward to learning more about that and following along with your research as it goes on. So human development has grown exponentially since the mid 20th century, and so much so that the state of the planet that can support contemporary human societies is now being destabilized. You are one of the renowned scientists that developed the planetary boundaries framework. Can you tell us more about this framework and how it can benefit sustainable development?

Katherine Richardson

Oh, yes, absolutely. We all know that in the Brundtland report in 1987, this was a great step forward because people began to think of sustainability as not only being economic sustainability but that there needed to be an environmental and a social component as well. Unfortunately, in 1987, they couldn't really define what the environmental component was all about. We can do that today. And interestingly enough, I think we pretty much had the seeds to do that even in ‘87 because, in 1972, we got a picture of the Earth from space. We've all seen that picture. I've been told it's the most downloaded picture from the net, and it shows the earth alone out in space, and it shows clearly that there's no umbilical cord. And what that means is that the earth's resources must be limited. And we use those resources; those resources are what makes us rich. And the fact that there's no umbilical cord tells us that, once we've used the resources that are here, we're simply not going to get any more. So when politicians say that we're not going to let human-caused global warming be more than two degrees in comparison to the pre-industrial time, then they have set a limit, they've said, okay, we this is the size of the garbage dump that we can use in the atmosphere. And you can take two degrees, and you can translate it to the size of how much can we put out. We know exactly who's used the first half of the garbage dump, and the whole political exercise is about who should get the rights to use the last half of that resource. But we all know, this isn't only about climate. It's also about biodiversity. It's also about an ozone hole. It's also about water use. It's also about the felling of forests and the use of land. It's about pollution, contaminants, it's about particles in the atmosphere. So what we try and do with planetary boundaries is to for all of these important processes in the earth system, like the biosphere, the living component, the climate, the water, and so on, try and examine, with scientific-based evidence, try and examine what would be the limit in terms of if we didn't want to push this biodiversity or water or whatever we did, we didn't want to push it so far globally, that we risk changing the overall conditions on Earth, what's the safe operating space? What's the limit for how far we can actually push these different processes in the earth system. I actually regret we call it planetary boundaries because people tend to equate it then with tipping points or thresholds. That's not what it's all about. It's more like blood pressure. If your blood pressure is over 120 over 80, that's no guarantee you're going to have a heart attack, but it does raise the risk. So we put it down. And that's what we're saying about the way that we're pushing some of these important processes in the earth system. In order to be able to and the importance for planetary boundaries in something like policy development and sustainable development is that it helps us recognize the biophysical constraints within which we have to get, for example, our food production or our energy production to fit. So we talk about transforming the global food system, for example, and planetary boundaries can tell us that we need to transform it in such a way that we produce nutrient-rich food for nine to 10 billion people without using any more land by reducing the amount of water that we put into it by reducing the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus, and so on. So it tells us we need a green revolution on essentially the same land area that we have today. Fortunately, lots of scenarios are making it look like this will be possible if we push all of the buttons that we have available. But my point is that the value of the planetary boundaries framework o...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Viriato Soromenho-Marques, Professor of Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, and European Ideas at the University of Lisbon. Thank you for joining us today! 

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Thank you, Kimberly, for having me on this podcast.

Kimberly White

So, you teach political philosophy, philosophy and nature, and European ideas at the University of Lisbon; you were also one of the authors of the Portuguese strategy for sustainable development. Can you tell us more about these experiences?

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Well, I think that probably the most important thing that I can tell you about my own experience is how I feel so overwhelmed looking back to the 70s, when I started to be deeply engaged with the environmental movement with NGOs, in Portugal, in Europe. I think that when I went back 40 years, almost 50 years, I am overwhelmed to see that we live now in a hotter, different planet. It's an amazing experience, and not in the positive sense, but it's overwhelming, as I said, because if we look to the state of our planet, not just in terms of climate change, but also in terms of biodiversity, and many other features of the environment, we understand that we are in a race, a race against time, a race between the problems that we are creating with our clumsy way of dwelling on this planet, and the severe difficulties that we are facing in order to solve the problems that we are creating. So what I have done until now, as a member of NGOs, as member of advisory bodies like the Portuguese Council on Environmental, the European Council on Environmental that reunites many organizations in different European countries, as a member of the high-level group on energy and climate change, on the way to COP 15. It was a group assembled around the President of the European Commission and also giving advice to some foundations like the Gulbenkian Foundation that recently awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity to Greta Thunberg. What I'm trying to do with my activities, basically, is to give a contribution, to try to cope with the problems that we are doing as a collective as humanity, because I think that we need public policies. But we need to overcome a very narrow understanding of what is at stake with the environment and climate crisis. If we think that this problem is a problem to be solved, just by governments and states and big corporations, I think we are wrong. Because at the root of this problem, we have the need for a profound shift transformation in our set of values in our vision of the world. And in order to do that, to perform that, I think that we need the contribution also of culture, of ethics, of religion. So we are all actors in this fight for the continuation of the survival of human civilization on earth. One of the insights that very soon, I tried to systematize in my writings was to define what is an environmental crisis? Let me clarify that. When I speak of climate change, I consider climate change, not as something that exists per se, but as a part, as a chapter as a dimension of environmental crisis. So looking at the environmental crisis, I think that we may identify five dimensions or five features, five characteristics that are completely unique. First, environmental crisis, with climate, of course, inside it is the only really planetary crisis there. There is no other thing with such scope. We may see that, for instance, climate change is basically or intensively felt on the extreme north and extreme south of our planet, in regions in which there is almost nobody living. So it's completely planetary; there are no sanctuaries. And secondly, it's an irreversibility and entropic crisis. We know that we have massive biodiversity extinction, and when a species disappears, it is forever. So it's irreversible. There is also a third dimension; it's the cumulative acceleration. We are indeed in a process of great deceleration, inside what is now called the Anthropocene. And what is happening, for instance, with the oceans, the ocean acidification is a good example of this speedy cumulative acceleration we are embarked on. And a fourth characteristic is there is a growing political and social unrest. We know that many conflicts now, inside countries and between countries, have also the mark, have also the sign of environmental crisis, probably the Arab Spring would never have happened without the climate change impact. And finally, something that probably will speak later in our conversation, we are creating a kind of what I call the ontological debt between generations. So we are transmitting to the coming generations to adapt, not in terms of money or capital, but adapt in terms of the harm we are doing, to the planet, to the software of the planet, to the biosphere, to the atmosphere, to the hydrosphere. So we are jeopardizing the planet. And so we are transmitting a kind of ontological debt to be paid by the coming generations.

Kimberly White

Now, that's really interesting and diving back further into some of these challenges of the environmental crisis that we're currently in; in the book Security at a Crossroad-New Tools for New Challenges, you highlight the seven categories of human security. Can you elaborate on these? And in your view, what are some of the challenges climate change poses to human security?

Viriato Soromenho-Marques

Yeah, with pleasure. Well, when we speak normally about security, we think immediately in terms of strategy in terms of military security, military balance. That's our own conception. It's an old one. In the past 200 years ago, 100 years ago, it was logical to think in that way, today it is completely not just out of fashion, but completely wrong. Indeed, we had in 1994, the United Nations Development Programme in a report that was published that year ‘94, advanced with a more comprehensive concept of human security, trying to look to security, also, and basically, from the perspective of the individual, of the person of ourselves. So what do we as citizens of our countries, as citizens of the world, what are, for us, the main dimensions and features of security? And the seven categories that you mentioned are part of that vision of transforming the paradigm of security. They are basically the following. So economic security, that's completely important in a world that has grown to have more jobless people on account of the pandemic situation. Economic Security is also a key dimension, food security, health security, other two very important dimensions and environmental security. Well, I would say that environmental security is heretical because it entails also those that I mentioned, personal security to be as an individual, to feel safe no matter your race, your sexual orientation, your net level of material wealth, community security, to live in a safe community and political security. I think those seven dimensions, as I mentioned in the chapter you mentioned, are, in my opinion, very connected with the big contribution of one probably the most famous of the most important American presidents ever. I mean, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that in the famous speech of the State of the Union, 1941, spoke about the need to have, at a global level, not just at the level of the United States, at global level, four freedoms. Those four freedoms, as probably many of our listeners know by heart, are freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, in the words of Roosevelt, freedom of every person to wor...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Ana Barreira, lawyer and Director and founding member of the International Institute for Law and the Environment (IIDMA). Thank you for joining us today!

Ana Barreira

Hello, how are you? Thank you.

Kimberly White

So you're the director and founding member of the International Institute for Law and the Environment. Can you tell us more about IIDMA and the work you do there?

Ana Barreira

Yes, of course. IIDMA was founded in 1996, it is already 24 years ago, with the purpose of contributing to sustainable development and environmental protection through the study, analysis, development, implementation, and enforcement of the law. Because the law is fundamental for organizing societies and those years in 1996, there was already a lot of environmental law. And we were focusing those years on environmental law. Since then, we have been working in many different areas, not only in sectors of the environment as water protection, marine protection, biodiversity, or climate change and energy transition but also on horizontal matters as governance. And we have worked a lot on party participation in the implementation of the Aarhus Convention, which is a convention on access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. It is known as an environmental democracy convention. But these years, now we have new science, and in 2009, the scientific community developed the framework for planetary boundaries. And if you realize all the work we have been doing, through law; we have been tackling all the planetary boundaries, or most of them because we have this science framework that we need the law to keep our activities and our lives within the planetary boundaries. And law helps a lot. And the work we have been doing in the last, I would say six years, has been concentrating a lot on climate change and energy transition, particularly in energy transition. What we saw is that the energy system, particularly the electricity generation system, was based mainly in Spain and in many European union member states on coal. And coal is one of the most polluting sources of energy from a climate change point of view; it generates a lot of co2. We started to implement this transition in Spain, advocating for the closure of coal power plants, we were using the rule of law tools, we were advocating, we were attending ADMs of energy companies, and we were discussing with energy companies. We were having conversations with authorities. We produced some studies on the impacts on health from the emissions of coal power plants, showing the externalities of the emissions of coal power plants and its cost on health. Like having data on premature deaths produced by this pollution, and all the economic impact that has like, for example, how many hospitalizations were necessary because of those emissions and how many lost working days happened in Spain. And also, we used our litigation. We started to go to court, to show and to challenge some of the permits granted to coal power plants. We saw that those permits were not in line with the legal framework we have at the European Union level. What has happened is that because of the work we have been developing in these last six years, at the end of June, more than half of the capacity of coal installed in Spain has closed and the rest of the capacity installed in Spain, it's going to close very soon. So we are having outcomes, positive outcomes, to reduce CO2 emissions from Spain through our work through using the tools that the rule of law offers to citizens.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting. I'd be keen to see the studies you have there because I know globally, air pollution from burning fossil fuels costs almost $3 trillion every year. And the premature deaths associated with that, the last time I checked, were 4 million premature deaths a year. And kudos to you and the team at IIDMA! That is quite an impressive feat. 

Ana Barreira

In addition, in IIDMA, we are now following the process of all the European Green Deal. But in Spain, as part of this program we have on energy transition and climate change, in Spain, we still don't have a climate change law. There are many European Union countries that have their own climate change law, and even some other countries, for example, in Latin America, they are producing their own climate change laws. But in Spain, during COP21, in Paris, our president committed to start working on a climate change law, that was in 2015, but still, we don't have one. Now, there is a bill being discussed in the Spanish parliament; it is the climate change and energy transition law. And we have been advocating for a stronger law because it has some deficits in its governance; for example, a good climate change act has to be accompanied with a climate change committee, which is a scientific body, following the example of the IPCC. So many climate change laws, they have their own scientific body, which normally it's called climate change committee, for example, in the UK, in France, or in Denmark, including now, the EU where it is being discussed or it is under discussion, the future EU climate law, the European Parliament has added the need in its first reading of the need of having this kind of body. The Spanish law doesn’t contain that, so we have been advocating for that.   

Kimberly White

So nature, the environment, and the earth system are, by definition, systemic and interdependent. The magnitude and immediacy of the looming climate catastrophe show the need to design and implement a global public policy, creating instruments and institutions that enable collective action. How can recognizing the earth system as a common heritage of humankind better articulate our responsibility to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological systems? 

Ana Barreira

I think this is fundamental. Because as it has been said, in other of these podcasts series, the earth system is not legally recognized yet. And we need first, that recognition. And the best way is to be recognized as a common heritage of humankind, an intangible common heritage of humankind, and how this can articulate our responsibility to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological system. If we have that recognition, that will help to integrate the planetary boundaries system within the international legal system. We have a very well developed international legal framework for the protection of the environment, but it's framed in a very siloed manner; there is no interconnectivity. And as you are asking, we need to protect the integrity of the earth's ecological systems, and we are not doing that through the law. Because we have a lag, we don't have this definition at the International Law level of the earth system. So if it is considered as a common heritage of humankind, this is going to allow the international community to start joining the dots of all the legal frameworks we have, because we have a Convention on Biological Diversity, that until now, there has been not much cooperation with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We have another convention, they are called the Rio conventions on the certification, so they have been working in a silo manner. So we need to do an integration of all the, and I'm just citing some of the multilateral environmental agreements we...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Klaus Bosselmann, Director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Auckland. Thank you for joining us today!

Klaus Bosselmann  

Thank you.

Kimberly White

So you've been the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law since it began in 1999. Could you tell us more about NZCEL and your work there? 

Klaus Bosselmann

Yes, the New Zealand Center for Environmental Law has its working model, working for sustainability. It's an interdisciplinary Institute involving scientists, political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, all united in the pursuit of making sustainability a reality in the legal system. And what that means, of course, first of all, sustainability needs to be clearly defined. And that has shaped my work in the 1990s, as somebody who has joined the Rio Earth Summit where sustainable development was first negotiated. And in essence, what we do at the NZCEL is, we are finding practical ways how to implement sustainability at the various levels of law, domestically, internationally, and so forth. And we have done it, I think, quite successfully. So, let's just give you an example regarding New Zealand. New Zealand was the first country back in 1991 to incorporate the concept of sustainability into its leading environmental law called the Resource Management Act. And what it means there is that rephrasing someone, the purpose of this description of this act is to allow any sorts of activities within society and within an economic system, as long as the fundamental integrity of ecological systems are not affected. And this is a nice capture of what sustainability really means. It means the duty of states to protect and preserve the integrity of earth ecological systems. That was for the first time incorporated into the Rio Declaration, 1992. And so ever since we have been working on this, and we have done this, once internationally in the form of being a founding research center, that formed the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, which is really the global umbrella organization for all environmental law scholars and environmental law research centers. So that has been a very gratifying experience. We're working obviously, with research centers around the world, all in pursuit of basically transforming our current system of rather fragmented environment law. So that's what we are doing.

Kimberly White

That's really interesting. And New Zealand has been at the forefront, 

leading globally with climate law and what you guys are doing, that's fantastic. You’re the Co-Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Common Home of Humanity. Now, one of the main innovations that CHH has brought for public and academic discussion was conceptualizing one global common without borders, the earth system. As a professor and expert in international environmental law, how do you see the concrete legal solution that goes beyond the soft law declarations?

Klaus Bosselmann

Yeah, the notion of a global common without borders is a real challenge to the existing system of international law. We are more familiar with global commons in plural, acknowledging areas outside national jurisdictions such as oceans, Antarctica, the atmosphere. The notion of global commons harbors a certain duty, a degree of moral duty in terms of stewardship or guardianship. It has further been expressed in the notion of common heritage of humankind, which acknowledges a shared responsibility for areas that are subject to common heritage. So there is a certain familiarity with the notion of global commons. And as such, it can be incrementally implemented in international law. Now, when it comes to singular, global common without borders, this is the real challenge. And, of course, it's a reflection of earth as a whole and a physical reality, a spiritual reality, and yet, the law has largely been ignorant of this phenomenon called earth or mother earth. The closest thing that lawyers tend to accept as a description of reality can probably be described as the earth condominium, right? The idea that sovereign states, they own little apartments in a huge condominium that they all share just a situation that we have you rent an apartment, or you even own an apartment. But you also have to take care of the overall house that, you know, your apartment only forms part off. And this image tells us that by virtue of being interested in protecting your own apartment dash country, you need to have followed the logic of wanting also a healthy apartment next door. And furthermore, the functioning of the entire building that your apartment sits in. So this stipulates the need or sort of articulates very nicely what states by virtue of being part in this complex system called planet earth are up to and what their responsibilities really are, they need to go past responsibilities that you have as neighbors, right sort of one state to the others, we need to have common responsibilities for the global common is this notion is, is articulating this. So this is the new challenge, and of course, has been expressed in some ways, some way or other, not necessarily in soft law declarations per se, but in a number of international documents. And of course, the discussion continues, and it is very exciting to see some developments in that area. 

Kimberly White

Absolutely. So what exactly does this mean in terms of the history of international law?

Klaus Bosselmann

Yes, this is the heart of the matter is that international law is, of course, a legal construct, defining the relationships between sovereign states. So the assumption is that somehow the 189 or so current existing sovereign states can sort out all matters through this vehicle called, quote, international law. And this means they're using a notion of state sovereignty that has a certain history. In fact, it was created under the Westphalian peace treaty from 1648 and served the main purpose that states in Europe at the time ought to recognize each other's sovereignty in order to respect each other so that the citizens of one given country can be protected by their own government without fearing the threat of being attacked by people from a neighboring country. So historically, the concept of state sovereignty was all meant to provide a certain peace order, and that's all very well, even though, as you all know, hasn't very well functioned in practice, but nevertheless, the principle of state sovereignty has its absolute legitimacy. However, what do you do in a situation when these sovereign states discover a problem that cannot be dealt with with a pure notion of a sovereign state? This is a phenomenon that we all share the natural environment. The environment does not know any national boundaries. And in fact, we are talking about one global environment or the earth system. And this is what the idea of state sovereignty is not geared for is not invented for. We today speak of the sovereignty paradox, and this describes a situation that we are finding ourselves with a legal construct that is largely outdated because it does not inherently cater for shared responsibilities and, you know, enforceable responsibility of a sovereign state towards the global environment, yet, the well-being of each state and their citizens of course, it utterly depends on the so-called fun...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Richard Ponzio, Director of the Just Security 2020 Program and a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center. Previously, Richard directed the Global Governance Program at The Hague Institute for Global Justice, where he served as Director for the Albright-Gambari Commission on Global Security, Justice, and Governance.

Thank you for joining us today, Richard! 

Richard Ponzio

Thank you, Kimberly.

Kimberly White

Can you tell us more about your role at Stimson and what you're working on?

Richard Ponzio

I am a Senior Fellow and Director of the Just Security 2020 program. The program is focused on UN and broader global governance, innovation, strengthening, making the international system more inclusive, voices of civil society, of course, but non-state actors working with governments, and of course, international organizations like the United Nations to address the 21st-century challenges. From climate change to rising violence in parts of the world to, of course, the pandemic, which is on everybody's mind today.

Kimberly White

Very interesting! And speaking of the pandemic, we're currently going through a global health crisis, a climate crisis, and a biodiversity crisis. Can these become the common ground that we need to find new multilateral solutions, such as the Global Pact for the Environment, to our shared problems?

Richard Ponzio

If these issues don't, I don't know what will, in terms of rethinking our multilateral system, how the 193 member states come together. But as I said in my introduction, we're looking very much at solutions. But also capabilities, ideas, networks coming from non-state actors, global civil society is a terminology often used in this context. But it means a lot of things social media, social movements, actually. And religious organizations, to academics, think tanks, like the institution I'm a part of, but all the way down to the grassroots and community level organizing, at the same time, either part of civil society or working in its own right. The private sector, the business community, incredibly rich with talent, technical ingenuity, financial resources, of course, but you know, we look to them for leadership as well and working with governments and international organizations, which I presume we'll be talking a bit about because that's what my own research, scholarly work has focused on for years. And these two or three intertwined crises that you mentioned, the climate crisis biodiversity, and of course, the health crisis was really prominently featured in the COVID-19 pandemic that we're all experiencing. 

You know, never has there been such a maelstrom of forces that have forced the international community to rethink how we're organizing ourselves, how we're looking at these issues. Through global fora, such as the United Nations, the World Bank is very much on the frontlines of these issues. Major informal groupings of states such as the G20, they all have a contribution to make. But I think as a starting point, you refer to the Global Pact for the Environment. I think it's critical that as the Global Pact, in its early days of being discussed and negotiated, it really makes the point that, hey, we have all of these international agreements out there; there's principles associated with many of them. What are some of the common threads, common foundational principles between the major conventions on climate change on biodiversity, but again, hundreds of other agreements that deal with the global environment. I think if we have more coherence, and a sense of vision and a roadmap through this new instrument, called a Global Pact for the Environment, this will really, I think, build on the solidarity that we're seeing worldwide as a result of the global pandemic. And then we channel the sense of a common global identity, global citizenship, to then work on common global problem solving. And that's at the heart, again, of what the Global Pact for the Environment and its particular concerns with issues such as the biodiversity and climate crisis, I think they're just critical. And as we see today, health issues are intimately related to environmental concerns. And it's so important that we then look in an interdisciplinary fashion to address these problems simultaneously. But it's going to require a rethink both of our institutional framework and instruments that take our normative framework from previous years and upgrade them. And that's, in a sense, what the Global Pact for the Environment is all about.

Kimberly White

So essentially, at this point, we need all hands on deck.

Richard Ponzio

Absolutely. Hundred percent. And that's why it's great to see whether it's the annual meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and all the work that's gone into the massive 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Using technologies to have online consultations, it's really pushed the frontiers on how inclusive these UN policymaking processes can be. And the same thing needs to happen now for the Global Pact for the Environment. The ideas cannot come from within a small UN Secretariat or within the private sector alone; it's really got to be voices from different parts of humanity.

Kimberly White

Absolutely. As an expert in politics, governance, and international relations, what do you see as the biggest challenges of establishing this Global Pact for the Environment?

Richard Ponzio

The biggest challenge is not understanding and diagnosing the problems related to a whole host of environmental challenges. Not just climate, the big one, or, you know, if we let science guide us, we're going to get the vaccine, as we've been seeing in recent weeks, and fighting the pandemic. We even, I think, have a lot of tools in the toolbox for conflict resolution and pushing back against violent extremism, at the heart of all these issues. You mentioned my background and issues of governance and politics, especially at the global level. It's the fear that we are eroding and ripping apart the very foundations of the international system of governance that was created in the aftermath of a major cataclysmic World War, the second world war in the early 1940s. And so, this past year has been monumental, not just because of the pandemic, but the 75th anniversary, a chance to review and reflect on the UN system. But what we're seeing at the same time is rising nationalism, an exclusive form of nationalism that really works against the core principles, the spirit of global cooperation on any issue, including, I think, the environmental themes that we'll be talking about today. And unless we realize how corrosive, how negative and deleterious it is to these institutions, their basic functioning, the signals that members of the Secretariat that starting with the Secretary-General of the United Nations get when they hear lack of cooperation. You've heard a term called vaccine nationalism arise.

Even with the hope that is provided by solving the pandemic, now there's going to be questions about  which countries and who within those countries will get access to the vaccine first, and that there needs to be a treatment of an issue of such critical magnitude at the global level. Li...

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White  

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Prue Taylor, Deputy Director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law. Prue is also a member of the IUCN Commission of Environmental Law and its Ethics Specialist Group. She was awarded the outstanding achievement award from the IUCN in recognition of her contribution as a world pioneer on law, ethics, and climate change. Thank you for joining us today! 

Prue Taylor  

You're very welcome, Kimberly.

Kimberly White

So climate change doesn't recognize borders; it spans our globe reaching the most remote corners, affecting all of us. It's happening now, and it's happening everywhere. And it's happening at an alarming rate. Can you tell us about some of the adverse effects of climate change you're seeing in New Zealand?

Prue Taylor

Absolutely, I can, because they're happening on a daily basis. And they're happening here in New Zealand in ways that are increasingly dramatic. And there is a growing acceptance that the impacts of climate change that we're seeing here in New Zealand are, in fact, associated with, you know, changes to global atmospheric temperatures. So what we're seeing in New Zealand, temperature increases, which are manifesting in more extreme drought events. So these drought events are longer than more severe, and they're more frequent. And that's really impacting us as a nation because we're essentially still an agricultural nation. But also, our large urban areas are really starting to suffer. And Auckland City, which is our biggest urban area in New Zealand, is, as we speak, in the middle of a really serious water crisis. So there are a lot of water restrictions for us and the city right now. On the flip side of the coin, we're seeing a lot of extreme rainfall events; when the rain comes, it really comes. And that is exacerbating the flooding risk for New Zealand. New Zealand, as a country that is very, very prone to floods anyway, it's one of the significant natural hazards that we have. And climate change is accelerating and exacerbating those flooding events and risks. We're also seeing more frequent storms and much more storm damage. We're a long, narrow country in the middle of the massive Pacific Ocean. So we're seeing a lot of coastal damage. In terms of the ocean, which is very close to my heart, we're seeing increasing numbers of ocean heatwaves. So that is really where areas of the ocean are warming up very, very significantly around New Zealand. So we see some parts of the ocean around New Zealand with very elevated ocean temperatures between around four to five degrees Celsius higher than they would normally be. And that's really, really a dramatic climate change impact. But probably the climate change impact that has really galvanized New Zealanders recently has been wildfires. Now wildfires is not something that New Zealand has really experienced very much in the past, unlike, of course, Australia. But very recently, we've had a number of wildfires impacting urban areas, not just our forestry sector, but also our urban areas. And that's really started to focus the attention of New Zealanders on climate change impacts. And all of this has to be seen in a context which is quite unique to New Zealand. And that is that we're in the middle of the massive Pacific Ocean, which means that to some degree, ocean function does protect us from some of the most dramatic impacts of climate change. In other words, the Pacific Ocean has been seen traditionally as a moderating element that would kind of insulate us somewhat from the impacts of increased global atmospheric temperature change. So it seems as though we're not as insulated and protected by the Pacific Ocean as we had thought we might be.

Kimberly White

That's interesting. We've seen wildfires in California, and you know, we see some significant flooding in Florida from climate change. One of the most interesting videos I think we've seen is from Miami. During the king tide a few years ago, there was a lot of flooding, and they filmed an octopus in a parking garage. 

Prue Taylor

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes when you see those, you get those images of something dramatically out of place. They shock your consciousness, don't they?

Kimberly White

Definitely. I think that was a wake-up call for a lot of people down in Miami for sure. As a professor and expert in international environmental law, do you think we need a new legal innovation to address the global climate and biodiversity crises?

Prue Taylor

Yes, I mean, if we open our eyes, and we look at the situation that we're currently in with, you know, massive decline and our ecological systems and, you know, the sorts of climate change impacts that I've just talked about. When we look at where we're at and what we're experiencing, what natural systems, what's happening to natural systems; How could we not acknowledge that we need some fundamental, fundamental change to our law and governance systems? I mean, to deny that we need change is to deny reality. And answering this question of governance absolutely, we need fundamental change. And, you know, I've been working in this area for 30 years, and I can honestly say, I feel that we are going backward. Okay, we've made some incremental improvements in some areas. And, you know, we have those incremental improvements in some areas. If we focus on those, we could say, well, we've achieved something. Something better than if we had had no international law and governance in this area. But frankly, when you look at it at an, you know, a level of accumulated impacts, and pace and scale, when really all we've been doing in the last 30 years, is an accelerated version of a really 1970s pollution control kind of approach, where we just look at continuing business as usual, but finding ways to mitigate or reduce harm, and I call this the do less harm approach. But what happens is, over time and scale, that less harm accumulates and accelerates and in combination with other harms and degradation to connected ecological systems. Everything is driving downwards. Everything is spiraling downwards. And the other fundamental or another fundamental failure of our existing law and governance framework, which really calls out for change, is the barrier that's inherent in the system. Where nation-states grudgingly negotiate what they're prepared to do or what they're not prepared to do through or from the perspective of national self-interest. There is no sense of collective responsibility for the benefit of everyone that needs to qualify how we exercise national self-interest. So this kind of grudging, incremental, piecemeal negotiation of ecological crises, as they suddenly become apparent in isolation from other ecological crises, is imperiling our existence and imperiling the earth system, so we have to change.

Kimberly White

Absolutely. And with the pandemic, we see how interconnected everything is. These aren't standalone issues.

Prue Taylor

Yep, absolutely right. They're not standalone issues. But I think they, you know; COVID really demonstrates the magnitude of what's going on and the pace of what's happening. And therefore the scope of change that's required. 

Kimberly White

So how can the kno...

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Hindou Ibrahim, Founder and President of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad. Hindou is also the Co-Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change and a UN SDG Advocate. Thank you for joining us today! 

Hindou Ibrahim

It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Kimberly White

You have been a steadfast champion for human rights and sustainable development. What was the inspiration behind your lifelong dedication to bettering our planet?

Hindou Ibrahim

Yeah, I mean, I'm so excited to be championing the Sustainable Development Goals because, for me, they are talking about our life. So when we talk from the objective one who is fighting poverty, or to five with the gender, or 13 with climate change, all the 17 of them take us in the partnership. They're talking about how we can improve our life, how we can improve our society, and how we can make it better than now by respecting people in climate. So for me, it is obvious because, from the communities that I come from, we always take all the problems and all the crises together to resolve all of them. So that's why I am so excited to be championing the sustainable development goals for my peoples and for all Indigenous peoples, and at the end of the day, for the planet in general.

Kimberly White

That's wonderful. So we're seeing how climate change is impacting every corner of our planet in many ways. Can you share with us how climate change is affecting your country and your region?

Hindou Ibrahim

So I am coming from the Sahel regions and coming from Chad, who has a very different landscape. We have a hundred percent desert in the north. And we have savannah in the Sahel in the middle. And then we have the tropical forests in the Congo basin in the south. So when you live in the three different ecosystems in a landlock and when your life depends on the ecosystem, you know exactly the impact of climate change. You do not read it in the book or watch it on the TV; you live it. I give you an example of how we are really impacted. We got the research from my organization from 1999 to now, and the chart is already on plus 1.5-degree increase. And why we see that every day, our dry season becomes much longer. With a very, very long sun and heavy sun that's coming up to 50 degrees Celsius. When you go to the desert, it's about 54 degrees Celsius. And that impacts our environment and impacts the rain because the rain season also changed, it's become much shorter and coming with the heavy rain that can flood all the places. For example, this year, where we have all the Sahel under flood. You have even in the townspeople take the canoe to go from one neighborhood to another one. And four months before it was the heat, and the very dry heat where the crops cannot grow. And it will end up with food insecurity because when you don't have regular rain, it cannot penetrate the soil, it cannot leave the vegetation to regenerate. And that impacts the food insecurity of the communities. And at the end of the day, the environmental impact, it's going to change the social life of the people. It creates conflict among the communities that are fighting to get access to the shrinking resources. And one of the examples I give it's around Lake Chad. Lake Chad is the fifth biggest freshwater that we have. Around this lake in 1960, it was 25000 kilometers square of this freshwater shared between Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. Now the lake is shrinking to 2000 kilometers square of freshwater. So you have 90% of the water just evaporated because of the heat. And suddenly, there are more than 50 million people whose living is dependent on this fragile ecosystem. They are farmers, they are fishermen and pastoralists from my community. So what do those people have to do?  Because they depend on the end of the month's salaries, they depend on the rain. They depend on the ecosystem of this area of lake. So they just fight among themselves to get access to those resources. Some of them become internally displaced; others become refugees. And most of them, especially the youth, become a migrant, cross-border, and then maybe cross the oceans. So the climate is impacting all the single steps of our life in development.

Kimberly White

One of the most powerful change agents overlooked throughout society is women. Studies have shown that women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. According to the United Nations, 21.5 million people are displaced annually by weather hazards worsened by climate change. Out of those displaced, women account for 80%. How are women critical in the fight against the climate crisis?

Hindou Ibrahim

Sure, I mean women are at the front line of the climate change impact. Because when the weather changes, maybe it is just the weather for ordinary people, but for the people who depend on these resources, it is for them, life changing. And especially the woman, because in our communities, women are the ones who are responsible for feeding the communities. So they are the ones who, of course, collect the water, the food, but also traditional medicine. So during the rainy season, we collect all the fruits and all the vegetables that we do have, then dry them up to use them during the dry season, for the entire season. But there is not enough for everyone. So they found themselves fighting just to get access to those resources, who call it food, it is the livelihood for us. 

On the other hand, when there is a dry season, and there are not enough resources, the man responds by going away. So when they leave the places, they leave the woman and the children behind who have to fight for the daily best in order to cope and adapt to find the food for their families. So they are really the most vulnerable. And of course, they cannot maybe migrate a long path. And when there is a crisis that comes, like around Lake Chad, when there is the shrinking of the resources, it's also helping the terrorist groups settle there like Boko Haram. And then the violence starts in those places. And the women and children have to take their children and leave the place. In the end, they become internally displaced or a migrant in their own homeland from one region to another one, and then they become the most vulnerable again. It is not the issue that they are climate refugees or whatever. But they are really internal migrants, they are internal refugees in their own home countries, not because of the economic reason, but because of the environment that's degraded and they cannot get any access as they used to, to get food and medicine for their children and ensure the generations.

Kimberly White

That really shows how interconnected everything is- the environment, social issues, and security. 

Hindou Ibrahim

Yes, of course, I mean, that's why for us, we cannot talk on all this crisis in silo. Because when we talk about insecurity, talk about the rebellion groups or terrorist groups that take the opportunity. They take the opportunity because they found the people who are already poor. And then they increase this poverty everyday with climate change, and they take the opportunities to distill what they have done. And if a person does not have dignity in these c...

Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Professor Kim Sang-Hyup, Founder of the Coalition for Our Common Future, President of the Jeju Research Institute, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Green Growth at KAIST. Thank you for joining us today! So, you were appointed as the Blue House Future Vision Secretary in 2008 and contributed to Korea’s historic low carbon green growth vision. Later in 2011, you became the Senior Secretary to the President for Green Growth. Please tell us more about these experiences.

Professor Kim Sang-Hyup
Yeah, well, to make a long story short, the low carbon green growth was a new paradigm of Korea. And the idea is very simple. It is about combating climate change very aggressively and ambitiously and also transforming the challenges by climate change into new opportunities. We thought we could have double-digit trillion opportunities by achieving low carbon green growth worldwide, not to mention Korea. And it was announced in the year 2008, in celebration of Korea’s national independence day, that was in August. But only a month later, if you remember it, the Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. And then, the global financial crisis began all around the world. So only a month later, after the proclamation of low carbon green growth of Korea, many people said Korea would be the fastest sinking ship, even before it started the new national vision. However, the President of Korea at the time, Mr. Lee Myung Bak, thought differently. We fought that with the New Deal projects. It was about a $50 billion scale stimulus package, but that was to prepare the future low carbon infrastructure. It was about creating a resilient water infrastructure. It was about creating green energy infrastructure and transport structures. By exercising that large scale stimulus package in the name of the Green New Deal, we created more than 700,000 jobs. And also, it created a great enhancement of green technology competitiveness. But what was really important, by exercising that Green New Deal measure, we set up a target for the first time throughout the Korean industrial history, a target to cut greenhouse emissions that was minus 4 percent cut by the year 2020. And throughout the Green New Deal, Korea could reduce the emission growth rate from 10 percent, that was in 2010. In 2012, it went down to almost zero. That was a remarkable achievement. And besides that, we also tried to institutionalize Green Growth not to be hindered by the political regime change. So we laid out very important legal frameworks. A basic act for low carbon green growth, an act for green buildings, an act for smart grid, and more than anything else, we made a legal framework for emission trading scheme. That was the first of its kind in Asia that was later on followed by China. And also, we try to institutionalize our Green Growth efforts. That’s how we came up with the new international organization, the Global Green Growth Institute, that was initiated by Korea and many countries of like-minded groups.

We could also host the GCF headquarters, one of the very important new architecture of the UN. GCF stands for Green Climate Fund. We competed with Germany and Switzerland, but I believe we hosted the headquarters of GCF. So we institutionalized and we internationalized Green Growth during the period of my service at the Blue House. But politics always matter after the political regime change. The succeeding government didn’t seem to like the Green Growth very much. So it didn’t continue well. And the emission growth rate began to go up. That’s not a happy story. But I will tell you later, but we have a Green New Deal, again, facing the pandemic crisis. So I do think we still have hope. Yeah, that’s how I remember our efforts in the term that I worked for the public community in Korea.

Kimberly White
Well, that’s really impressive. I think a lot of us can relate to the regime change when environmental efforts aren’t necessarily always supported. And we must have that political will to recognize climate change and take action because it’s affecting all of us. So it’s essential without a doubt. You are also the Founder of the Coalition for our Common Future. Can you tell us more about this initiative?

Professor Kim Sang-Hyup
Yeah. Thank you very much for asking that question. You know, Our Common Future itself is the title of the very famous report, which is the Brundtland report on sustainability that was back in 1987, more than 40 years ago. So Our Common Future is a widely known subject to many people in the world. But the Coalition of Our Common Future reflects the idea that our efforts should be interconnected all around the world. That should be connected. That’s why I picked the name coalition, solidarity, whatever you may say. So we need more cooperation around the world. That’s the meaning of the social entity for Our Common Future. And there are two important signature projects, or you can call it lighthouse projects. One is the Green Big Bang projects. The idea is to have green energy, green mobility, and green technology work together in a very interoperable way and to move faster and bigger. That’s for creating a new industrial ecosystem in a low carbon manner. The other important project is the project for the young generation; we call it Voice from the Young. Because I believe young generations are the real stakeholders in this era. We are trying to empower young generations and give them chances to be real stakeholders, and hopefully, decision makers. And Climate Scouts is one of the projects reflecting that spread. We are nurturing university students and supporting young students to help younger people, elementary school students through the learning relay process. That’s one of the projects the Coalition for Our Common Future is doing. And I think that is exactly in line with the initiative of the Common Home of Humanity.

Kimberly White
I love what you’re doing, and I think we see the youth really speaking up these days. So it’s great that you’re working with them and working with them on climate and empowering them for those future decisions. That’s fantastic. So how would the proposal from the Common Home of Humanity help achieve these goals and contribute to the realization of a sustainable future?

Professor Kim Sang-Hyup
Well, you know, when somebody breaks into your home, then he should be, he should get some penalty. Is that right?

Kimberly White
Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Professor Kim Sang-Hyup
Yeah, yeah, if somebody breaks into your home, then he will be heavily penalized. But yeah, I actually think that the earth system is our home. And the idea is really appealing. The diplomatic negotiations on climate change began in 1995, in the name of the Conference of Parties, that was held in Berlin, Germany. And I attended the Conference of Parties, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in Denmark in 2009, since then I have never missed the Annual Conference of Parties on Climate Change.

Kimberly White
That’s impressive.

Professor Kim Sang-Hyup
Yeah, yeah. But during those 25 long years of diplomacy on climate change, yeah, we have a Paris Agreement on climate change. That is really a remarkable thing. But to my sorrow, with that agreement, our global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing. This year is an exception due to the coronavirus, maybe about 6 or 7 percent minus. And it’s not because we made the right political choic...

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Janene Yazzie, Co-Convenor of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group on Sustainable Development. Thank you for joining us, Janene. Please tell us more about your work as Co-Convenor of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group on Sustainable Development of the UN High-Level Political Forum on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals?

Janene Yazzie  

Yes, the International Indian Treaty Council and Tebtebba Foundation really organized themselves to get involved with the beginning of the discussions around the Sustainable Development Goals. And our colleagues Galena and Roberto Borrero were really at the forefront of ensuring in the negotiations around the development of the SDGs that Indigenous peoples were included. And because of that work and the recognition of the shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals was a shift meant to increase participation of stakeholders and other civil society organizations. It became very apparent for our organizations and our two colleagues that we had to be participating in the development of the metrics and the development of the processes for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. And so because of them, Indigenous peoples are mentioned throughout different aspects of the goals and the metrics that were created to measure progress towards implementation. The Tebtebba Foundation and International Indian Treaty Council became recognized as the co-conveners of the Indigenous Peoples Major Groups. We're one of nine civil society organizations and major groups that are recognized and that engaged with the high level political forum on the SDGs. And through that work, we ensure the participation of Indigenous representatives from all of the seven social-cultural regions recognized by the UN. And we facilitate their participation in expert group meetings in high-level discussions during the HLPF as well as all of the other side events that happened with other mechanisms. And in this manner, we ensure that the countries that do submit voluntary national reports. Countries that are developing processes and mechanisms nationally to address the goals outlined in the 2030 agenda are also being held accountable to the Indigenous peoples that reside within their territories. And it's been a lot of slow work for a while.

 I think it's taken a while for this mechanism to find its footing and for the high level political forum to really be structured and organized in a way to make it meaningful. And it's been an uphill battle to increase and advocate for meaningful participation in the actual decision making processes of the high level political forum. But just in the past three years that I've been involved in learning about the history and the development of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group and our involvement with the SDGs, we're seeing a great shift of the streams of work, of the way that the SDGs are being picked up more and more by different countries, and even how the work all of the streams of work are being collaborated across the different UN mechanisms. So it's an exciting time. Obviously, with COVID-19, it made our issues much more difficult to get addressed. One of the things we've learned as being co-convenors of the Indigenous Peoples Major Group is that so many of our Indigenous peoples and the communities they come from lack access to critical community infrastructure, especially internet and cell service. And so with the COVID-19 pandemic, we faced some extraordinary barriers and challenges to keeping momentum behind increasing meaningful participation in the high level political forum and in the expert group meetings on the different Sustainable Development Goals.

So we've been working very hard to get resources, financial or otherwise, to some of our most vulnerable communities. To somehow support them getting hooked up to the internet, or to service that can allow them to continue the work that we've been doing collectively across our different regions. And it's through that collaboration that we really find our strength as Indigenous peoples, you know, like all of our communities are on the frontlines of the impacts of climate change, of environmental degradation, of unsustainable development, and development schemes that are harmful to our ecosystem functions and to the continuance of our traditional lifeways. And so by serving as co-convener, we really serve as like the facilitators of organizing our movement and advocating collectively for our rights in these spaces.

Kimberly White

Well, you're doing such important work- it's fantastic. And like you said, Indigenous peoples are on the frontlines of climate change. We're seeing it impact all corners of our planet. Can you tell us how climate change is affecting the Navajo Nation and what you see in your community?

Janene Yazzie

Absolutely. This has really been the core of my work. I've always been a social justice advocate, I think, you know, being Indigenous and born into this world, it's kind of a path that is already laid for you. Because all our communities are always dealing with layers of challenges and layers of systemic oppression that very much inform our lived experience. And so when in 2011, when I was faced with having to make several career choices, I was volunteering at the United Nations permanent forum on Indigenous issues and came across a report. It was a climate risk assessment report. And it was done as a collaboration between a number of scientists, and I was specifically looking at the risk that we're going to be faced by the Navajo nation in the southwest United States due to the impacts of climate change. And reading that report really scared me. I was a new mother. I was a young professional at this crossroads of sorts. And the report really laid out and connected a lot of the things that  I knew and have experienced in my communities, like the loss of water sources, the increased desertification, the loss of vegetation, and then how these cumulative impacts we're increasing the concentration of environmental toxins that have been accumulated over generations of extractive industry, operations in our communities. And in my communities, in particular, we've been struggling with a legacy of uranium mining and the impacts of the 1979 Church Rock, uranium mill tailings spill. And so seeing this report and seeing the predictions that by 2017, there would be a dramatic shift because of the lack of availability of water. And that those people who were continuing a lot of our traditional lifeways of sheep herding, livestock rearing, food, maintaining our traditional food systems, would find a lot of those activities were where it would be no longer viable, just because of the impacts of increased desertification due to climate change in our territories. And so that was like a wake up call and really brought me back home. And I was so sure that when I came back home that everyone would be talking about these issues. Everyone would be, you know, trying to build solutions around how to create more effective mitigation and adaptation solutions. And that wasn't the case when we moved back. My nation was deeply involved in a long, what's been a very long battle for securing our nation's water rights. And so we came back with the intention of addressing climate change impacts and issues, but landing in the intersection of working in the nexus of water, energy, and food systems. And focusing particularly on helping to bring this data and bring thes...

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Karl Burkart, Co-Founder and Managing Director of One Earth. Thank you for joining us today, Karl.

Karl Burkart   

Thanks. It's great to be here talking to you.

Kimberly White

Can you tell us more about One Earth and the focus of your work there?

Karl Burkart

Yeah, I'm the managing director of One Earth, and we are a philanthropic initiative, particularly focused on the science policy interface for the three Rio conventions. And we are running correspondingly roughly three major scientific models that we support with leading scientists around the world contributing to those three models. The first big one is the climate energy transition model, which was published last year in a very dense 500-page book called achieving the Paris Climate Agreement goals. It was authored by 17 leading climate energy scientists and is now being widely cited. And that was really to look at how we can stay below the 1.5 c threshold of global temperature rise? The second one, the second model, is called the Global Safety Net, which was just published on Friday and Science Advances. That was a two and a half year plus effort, a very large spatial analysis—the first global scale analysis of biologically important land. And one of the component products coming out of it is, you could say, a set of recommended area-based targets for the upcoming UN Biodiversity Convention. So that's the second Rio convention. It shows the different types of land that can contribute to ecosystem services and biodiversity by country. The third one, which we're just starting in partnership with the University of Minnesota and other scientists will be involved in, is a global food security model. The third model will contribute to looking at how we feed 10 billion people sustainably on the planet.

Kimberly White

So, today we seem to have gone from climate deniers to an attitude of it's already too late. Do you think we have the science and technology available today to form the solutions to stabilize the climate and keep warming at 1.5 degrees?

Karl Burkart

Yes, I, I love this question. Because the answer is absolutely, yes, we have the technology. And it's not just the technology solved, and sort of we need to now go into production. It's like we have the technology. It's as Obama would have said shovel ready, you know, we have it sitting on the shelves. And in the climate model in the energy transition model we supported, according to that model, we need to go from about 20% renewable energy today to about 56%, globally, which varies by region by 2030. 

So as you know, this is relatively straightforward. We know exactly how to do it. And it's using technologies that are now battle-tested for ten or more years and are scaling quickly and becoming cheaper by the minute. So really, it's not the technology that's missing for the energy transition; it's the dollars. And in the climate model, we have,  well, the back of the envelope summary budget required for this. The transition I just mentioned is about 1.3 trillion a year roughly. And that's less than one third what the governments spend today subsidizing fossil fuels, which are causing global warming. So, for less than a third of what we're paying to destroy the planet, we could transition the energy with technology, create tons of jobs, be great for the economy. It would increase energy security as well. And it would reduce the health risks associated with fossil fuels and climate change. So it's win-win isn't the right word. It's like win-win-win-win-win. It's like five wins if we did that, and yeah, it's just a matter of real political will at this point in moving the dollars.

Kimberly White

So governments have been creating commitments and new targets to combat climate change, while at the same time, as you just said, propping up the fossil fuel industry with trillions of dollars in subsidies, adding to the climate crisis. Do you think the COVID-19 economic recovery efforts are an opportunity to shift away from business as usual and toward cleaner, greener energy?

Karl Burkart

Yeah, I would say it's not just yes definitely. And not just on the energy side, but also the nature based solutions side. I'm seeing a lot coming from governments, especially the EU, who have been a big leader in this, and they've announced several Commissions on sort of a green recovery.  So I think that it did, COVID did two things. One thing it did, which, of course, has positive-negative, it slammed the brakes on the global economy. It was like you're driving in your car, and a kid runs in front of you, and you have to slam on your brakes in a full stop. And that happens. So it's sort of like all these conversations that were happening, and there was going to be a climate convention, there's going to be a biodiversity convention, there's going to be a big UN summit, all these things, just everything went on hold. And the results are kind of coming in now. We'll see what happens, anywhere from 9 % to 17% reduction in carbon emissions this year. We have to wait, obviously, for the post mortem, but we think it'll probably be somewhere in the middle, like maybe 12-13% of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which is actually more than what we needed to do in terms of being on the 1.5 c track. So slamming on the brakes got us on the 1.5 c course. Now, the question is, are we going to just slam on the gas pedal? And I mean, that literally, right? Because we also have to make our transportation system much cleaner. But yeah, and I think that that slamming on the brakes gave us this pause. And a lot of people to kind of get started getting their ducks in a row, starting to look at recovery packages that could then be targeted towards sustainable and green infrastructure, energy and nature based solutions. The other thing that I saw with COVID is that just the awareness of nature, you know, how important nature is. Nature has always been hard to sell as a serious issue because somehow, climate change just sounded more technical. It was very technical and serious, and many technical and serious people started 20 years ago working on the climate convention. 

For some reason, the biodiversity convention was left really playing second fiddle in another room.  And you had your sort of hippie organizations fighting for nature, but was like the sort of technical serious people didn't really get it. And I think COVID made a lot of people realize what happens when you start to unravel the natural infrastructure that is providing the ecosystem services that the entire planet requires to exist. You know, when you lose that, you start pulling out these threads and unraveling and unleashing things like zoonotic diseases, which are diseases transferred from animals. We also know that loss of biodiversity and loss of nature increase vector-borne diseases carried by insects. So nature is our shield that keeps humanity in a safe operating space. So I think that's been a big awareness also. That was timely because both the climate convention and the biodiversity convention got pushed a year. I mean, the biodiversity convention will be next spring, and the climate convention will be next fall. So it's kind of given us, internationally, given us a breathing space to think about this. So I think that's a positive.  

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Paulo Magalhães, Founder and President of the Common Home of Humanity. Thank you for joining us today, Paolo.

Paulo Magalhães

Thank you. Thank you so much for your invitation, so kind. Thank you.

Kimberly White 

So Paulo, can you tell us what inspired you and your organization to launch this global call for a legal framework?

Paulo Magalhães

The main idea, the starting point was when I saw a legal dysfunction one incapacity for law to explain the law, and this happened in 2002, when the oil tanker that crashed near the border between Portugal and Spain, in the north of Portugal, and the crash was on Spanish waters. And the first reaction of the Spanish authorities was to push the boat for Portuguese waters, they tried to push, and after our army sent the boats, and the reality was that there were several boats on the water in the middle of the oil spill and the oil went to both sides. This is when this reality of having one line that is abstract, that is a legal obstruction that divides the sea. The sea, we cannot divide the sea; we cannot, we can divide the space of the sea, but we cannot divide the water; we cannot divide the system; we cannot divide the quality of the water or the fishes. So this is really one incapacity of law to explain the reality of this planet, of this interconnected planet, for so when we do lose the connection between the abstraction and the legal figuration and the reality of the planet, we have to look for solutions. This is what you need a new legal abstraction that is able to represent the interconnections of the planet.

Kimberly White  

So, we have had agreements to address the climate crisis such as the Kyoto Protocol, and of course, the Paris Climate accord. However, we're still struggling to move the needle. The annual emissions gap report from the UN environment released last year found that global greenhouse gas emissions must fall by more than 7% each year over the next decade if we're to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. And we recently learned that we have failed to achieve any of the global biodiversity targets set a decade ago. What do you believe has prevented us from moving forward and finding the solution?

Paulo Magalhães

One of the main mistakes is to consider and our mental inability to address the global, you understand? To accept, we can say but to accept and to view that the things are all interconnected. The question is the same problem that I talked about before about the absence of one legal abstraction that is able to represent the interconnects, the interdependence of this planet is the same reason or is the structural reason for not achieving any results, in my view, on the climate emergency, or biodiversity. The question is, when climate for the first time entered the UN discussions in the 80s, the first question that was raised was 'what is climate from a legal point of view.' Climate, as you can imagine, is something absolutely different for international law because climate is not a territory, it is a system; it is more than a system, it is a well-functioning system. It is a pattern of stability of the function of the system that is predictable that we can have seasons, well-defined seasons, and all the years, the same pattern repeats and repeats again. And we have an envelope of temperatures that stay inside these limits of temperature. Climate is for so it's a well-function, a well functioning Earth System. It is a way of functioning of the system that is favorable for humans and other species. And this model, operating model of the system is intangible, it is a software. It's not a territory; it is not the hardware, it is the software.

The great question is that from a legal point of view, we still look at the planet as we did in the 18th century, in the 17th century, in the 16th century, or more. The question is we are still looking at this planet only as a territory, divided between states, where the leftovers of the territories are the global commons. And this is not true. This is not absolutely true. What makes this planet different from all the planets that we know is the system. All the planets have a territory, bigger or smaller than Earth, all the planets have a territory. What the other planets do not have, and we have here on this planet, is the system that supports life. The system, the Earth System in a well-function way or function, is our main heritage. It is our main and most valuable thing that we have on Earth because it supports life and supports us. And for the law, this system does not exist, does not exist because it's intangible, because you cannot divide it, because we cannot appropriate it, we cannot properly privatize these things. And if we can divide the space of the sea, as we have made on the territorial waters, we can divide the space, but we cannot divide the system that operates inside the water of the oceans; we cannot divide the system that operates on the airspace, we can divide space, we cannot divide the system. Okay. And this is the great difference. Because we do not accept that we have a global common without borders, we do not manage climate as a global common. This is the great quest. 

And when climate entered in the UN negotiations in the 80s, the first proposal from Malta was to propose to recognize a stable climate as a common heritage of mankind. The question was in 1992, in the Rio summit, the decision was to consider climate change as a common concern of humankind. And this makes all the difference. This is the main reason why we still do not have any results in tackling, tackling climate change, because, with this decision, we decide that climate is not a common good, we decide that climate is an issue, an issue like any issue, and from a legal point of view, no one knows what is a concern from a legal point of view, in terms of flights and in terms of duties. And the main question, because we do not accept that climate is a system that exists in the real world and not an issue, we do not accept that it is a global common and we do not manage it as a global common. And the great question is again, because we do not recognize the stable climate as a global public good, all the benefits that maintain and produce a stable climate do not exist for the law, and for so do not exist for the economy.

For example, the question of Amazon, I call it the paradox of Amazon. Everyone knows that the forest of Amazon is one of the key ecosystems on the planet that maintain and produce a stable climate. This forest has the highest value for humanity. A great question is this value that everyone feels this value, everyone knows about this value, but this value is not visible for the economy. Why? Because when we talk about the value of Amazon, we are talking about the intangible work that these ecosystems and other ecosystems around the world make on the function on the model of operating of the Earth System, on the intangible work of nature, on the chemical changes that the forest made on the air, on the water, on the soil. And these chemical changes, this intangible work does not exist because the common does not exist. From a legal point of view, this work is made in a global legal gap; the global does not exist. Law considers the global commons are only the leftovers of the territories. Sorry, sorry. This planet is more than a territory. No jurist in the world, no legal expert in the world can say that that is not true. The truth is that this planet is more than a territory, and natur...

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by Dr. Izabella Teixeira, Co-Chair of the United Nations Environment Programme's International Resource Panel and former Minister for the Environment of Brazil. Thank you for joining us today, Izabella.

Dr. Izabella Teixeira   

Thank you for inviting me to join you. Okay, my pleasure.

Kimberly White

So, you have dedicated your life to protecting nature, what was the driving force for this passion?

Dr. Izabella Teixeira   

It's a hard question because I have been working the last 35 years considering environmental issues, not only in Brazil but also at the global level. I'm a biologist, and I learned how fascinating life is, the diversity of life is. And I was born in the last century, in the 60s, and it was a moment in the world that the 70s and 80s and 90s that we are preparing how you live in this century, in the new century. So environmental issues were emerging as strategic global issues, and I was really fascinated to have the opportunity to join not only to move forward considering the developing issues in my country, and how can bring development together with environmental preservation and conservation, but more also how we can have an inclusive approach, consider the diversity of societies and those in my country also, and also the inequality, social equality used to bring things together since my early years. So I think that environmental agenda and sustainability agenda it was during my career that the decisions emerge, and also you're able to join, consider the global multilateral agreements, and also the global summits, etc., etc., but always trying to manage better the national realities in Brazil and, how we can bring people together. So it's, for me, it's beyond the science, beyond the politics, means that we can be together, and this fascinated me. I love the diversity of the planet, and not only the biological ones, okay? And this, the possibilities to discover, to rediscover the world, and to be closer to other people. This is something that still today makes sense for me to move forward. So how to be part of the world in a way that you can contribute to better quality of life and improve the relationship between humankind and nature; as a biologist makes sense for me.

Kimberly White

Absolutely. And you are from one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. So I imagine that definitely had an influence on your career decisions to protect nature.

Dr. Izabella Teixeira   

Yes, fantastic, because I started working in 1984 after my graduation, and also I was fully dedicated to scientific research. And I was provoked to join an environmentalist in Brazil that was charged to create the new institutional arrangements, institutional governance in Brazil to manage environmental issues, not the natural resource issues on your biology as in the traditional way that they used to be approached. And it was a big challenge. And this man changed my life. And his name was Paulo Nogueira Neto, a famous conservationist around the world. And also, I was absolutely introduced to this political world; the environmental politics, indeed, how the multilateral assessment will bring us together. The big challenges that we will face and we still face today consider climate change the global issue like by diverse conservation and also how a country like Brazil is a high biodiversity assets not only in Amazonia, but in the Amazon forest, but also tropical forests like Atlantic Forest, and also the diversity of biomes, how we can bring this together, how you can use this in a better way to promote the development that you need.

Kimberly White

Well, you've certainly had a very impressive career. And I know that you achieved an incredible 84% reduction in deforestation of the Amazon, the lowest historical deforestation rate. It has been called the largest ever global contribution for emissions reduction. Can you tell me more about this?

Dr. Izabella Teixeira   

Yes, when I checked the numbers today. And I look back to the past, just remember my professional career, when we in Brazil were fully engaged to tackle deforestation in Amazonia. And we established the first national program to go against deforestation, and you learn a lot with this process. I was part of the environmental enforcement team in the Brazilian institution that we call IBAMA, an environmental institution. And I was part of this staff that went into Amazonia to tackle deforestation. And it was very nice because it was not only the environmental constituency but also the science- it came together. And so you bring together deforestation and also fires. The need to develop the scientific knowledge, the need to have an alliance, and I was charged to negotiate the first memorandum of understanding between Brazil and the United States and learn more how we manage and tackle forest fires, how we can move on considering this agenda. And along my career, I had the opportunity to manage important international programs like the National Environmental Program together, the first one with the World Bank, and also the famous PPG7. 

So, when I was minister, you have this experience in Brazil, you know that Brazil we have been improving our knowledge in the last 20 years, exactly how to manage better the enforcement, environmental enforcement in Brazil, not only in Amazonia. And, unfortunately, deforestation in Amazonia is around 95% based on illegality, this environmental crime you have a powerful legal framework in Brazil to tackle these problems. And indeed to have the full capacity, a scientific one, but also institutional ones to bring institutions, public institutions, together and to go against deforestation, to go against environmental crime. 

And Brazil, in 2009, 2010, we launched our first national climate change policy that supports us to address better the outcomes. So what I'd like to highlight is that I have the huge opportunity to connect innovative public policy like biodiversity conservation, it is the most important protected areas program in the world, around six million hectares, under biodiversity conservation protection in the Amazon region. Together, this is part of a legacy. And also, we promoted the second and third phases and to address better with civil society, new innovative governance models, such a way that you can bring things together. 

So, it's not only going against the illegalities; we use these outcomes to promote innovative public policy on climate change and biodiversity conservation and also to address solutions considered global sustainability when Brazil host the Rio+20 conference 2012 and also in Brazil develop innovative public policy like genetic resource access, the Nagoya protocol, etc. etc., make sense to be bringing things together. We cannot have a fragmented approach to address global issues. We need to understand how to connect and how to bring new narratives, develop a narrative, an economic and social one that makes sense for environmental conservation. So, I'm very honored to host, not only to work hard, that I did, but also to host the legacy from other partners that were fully engaged to address in our recent, the last 35 years of environmental history, in Brazil, how we learn as society, learn as a public institution, we learn as an environmental government, also international cooperation, how you can join, how we can be together to tackle the il...

Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by María Espinosa, President of the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly. She also served as the Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Coordinating Minister of Human Heritage, and Minister of National Defense. Ms. Espinosa is the first ambassador of the Common Home of Humanity. Thank you for joining us. 

Ms. Espinosa, you have been a real trailblazer throughout your career; you were the first woman to become the Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations. And you were the first female Latin American to become president of the UN General Assembly, and only the fourth woman to hold that position in the 75-year history of the United Nations. Tell us, what was it about the proposal from the Common Home of Humanity that stood out to you and made you decide to become their first Ambassador?

María Espinosa

Well, it's been such a privilege to be requested by the Common Home of Humanity to become their first ambassador, or goodwill ambassador, I would call it. Because I think that they are looking at the earth system, the planet as a holistic container of relationships, and I am convinced that one of the core redefinitions that we need currently is to think about a new pact between society and planet Earth. And we need a new social contract among humans to establish not only harmony in our relationships between our humankind, but in our relationships with our planet, because unfortunately, we have taken nature and its cycles for granted. And the rights of nature meaning nature, not as an object that we can use, endless affecting and harming its cycles, it's right to regenerate and to leave simply now, so I saw in the Common Home of Humanity proposal, this holistic view, the systemic view of planet Earth, but also at the possibility of advocating for a new social contract between humans and nature.

Kimberly White

We would love to learn about what inspired you. Your educational background began in linguistics and then Amazonian studies, and you actually spent some time in the Amazon with some of those local communities. Can you tell us more about that and the impact it had on your career?

María Espinosa

Well, I think that my first contact with the Amazon region was a life changer, quite honestly. And that was at the very beginning of my career. I was offered a position to assess the bilingual education systems in the Amazon region in Ecuador, and a general assessment of the Amazon at the time. That was, well, a long time ago, around '87 or so. In my experience and work experience work was more in the highlands. I was fascinated by ethnolinguistics and the connection between language and culture, but more in the highlands and that opportunity that led me to the Amazon completely changed my entire passion for the Amazon, for the connection between Amazonian Indigenous peoples and their environment, I understood very quickly that language was only a vehicle means of communication but what was fascinating to me was to discover these very close connections between Indigenous peoples’ lifestyles and cultures and wisdom and knowledge through language but regarding the natural environment, in so many Indigenous, Amazonian Indigenous languages, you have, for example, so many different words to mean green. And Westerners as we say green and it's green, know they identify dark green, light green, different types of forests using different nomenclatures for green, a very fascinating taxonomies for traditional medicine for agriculture. It was an eye-opener. I was fascinated by that. And I was so much then connected and attracted to, to this relationship between culture and nature and the policymaking in that's what changed very much the path of my career from linguistics to ecology to geography into these master's degree on Amazonian studies that was perfect at the time and as I spent several years working in the Amazon, working with Indigenous peoples, in small projects, to improve their income to connect, Indigenous peoples to more economic opportunities to improve the quality of their education, and the access of young Indigenous women and men, to our universities, etc., etc. And that was at the end of the 80s. I also joined forces with Indigenous organizations of the Amazon in their struggle for their territorial rights, which is a big thing. And it was, I would say, quite a successful struggle because a big part of the Amazon, especially in Ecuador, belongs to Indigenous peoples. They do have collective rights to their territories. So I was also in a way in a very modest way, but part of that struggle I worked with Indigenous women a lot in their economic and political empowerment. I work with Indigenous women in preparation. That was also a long time ago, but to prepare their participation and involvement with the Beijing conference 25 years ago, so it's been a love story with the Amazon with the Amazonian Indigenous peoples in Amazonian Indigenous organizations. 

Kimberly White

And Indigenous peoples play a very important role in combating the climate crisis; approximately a quarter of the world's land surface, which is home to some very important carbon sinks, is owned or managed by Indigenous peoples. Do you think that the proposal from the Common Home of Humanity can help to support Indigenous peoples and the protection of their lands?

María Espinosa

I think that you're bringing a very critical issue to the conversation, which is climate change, and how it is that our human societies are responding to this critical challenge. And I wouldn't even call it a challenge anymore. It's a climate crisis, what we are facing. So it's a whole of society responsibility, but of course, above all of our leaders. In every report that you read, even the pre-COVID reports, on implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals on implementation of the Paris Agreement, we see that there is a huge emissions gap and by the way, there is a report called the emissions gap report saying that we are not doing our homework properly. So if we continue with the same trend,  the climate crisis is going to wipe out our economies, our future, our ecosystem services, everything. So it's going to create a massive movement of people, massive migration, climate refugees. And not by the hundreds, but by the millions, if things continue as they are. And we were speaking about the Amazon, yes. The Amazon is a huge carbon sink. And unfortunately, we are seeing frightening devastation. Destruction of the Amazon basin and this does not only affect climate change, speeds up climate change, but really that kind of depletion and destruction really has an impact in the lifestyles and livelihoods of local communities and Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. So the situation is not very promising, but we shouldn't lose hope. You know, I'm a stubborn optimist. I still believe in the power of cooperation, of solidarity, of a strong multilateral system, of the role of the United Nations, of the possibility of really building this new social pact, which is the global pact of the environment, which is a very, very promising project.

Kimberly White

So the Global Pact for the environment, which you just mentioned, was proposed and discussed for the first time during your term as UN General Assembly President. Why is this initiative so important? And what do you think the global pact needs to address?

María Espinosa

A global pact for the environment, it should...

Hello and Welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we are joined by renowned climate change expert and earth system scientist Will Steffen. Will is an Emeritus Professor with the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University. He also serves as a Councillor with the Climate Council of Australia and as Co-Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Common Home of Humanity. Thank you for joining us today.

Will Steffen

My pleasure.

Kimberly White

So Will, what does it mean to be an Earth System scientist? What are you currently focusing on?

Will Steffen

Well, an earth system scientist is someone who studies our home planet but studies that as a single, integrated system. And that's a relatively new area of science because the natural sciences, in general, likes to look at pieces of a system, pull them out and study them in great detail. Whether it's pieces of an ecosystem or part of the climate system, you might be studying what's happening to the ice sheets or what's happening to oceans circulation and so on. And so that's the way natural scientist has worked for, for decades and centuries. But in fact, a new area of science called complex system science has been developing, trying to put the pieces back together and understand how systems work as complete systems. And they have things like emergent properties, things that you can't understand just by looking at the pieces of the system in isolation. So now we're applying this sort of thinking to the earth as a whole. And we call it the Earth system because, in fact, it has properties that are characteristic of the earth as a whole. And it has processes which change these properties. Now, in a practical sense, that means that as we look at the earth system today, it's changing very rapidly. It's moving away from an 11,700 year, very stable state, which we call the Holocene or the geologists call the Holocene, and it's moving away from that at a very rapid rate because of human pressures. So we're trying to understand what is it that is driving these enormous changes. And there are many interesting ideas here. One of the most important ones, though, are tipping points, which are parts of the system. When you push them, they appear to be resistant to change; when you push them just a little bit too far, they can flip or move into another, another state. And some of these are linked to form what we call tipping cascades. So this really is, if you like, is the engine that's driving changes to the earth system. So we need to understand low, gradual changes. But we also really need to understand how these tipping points may lead to more rapid change and changes that will be very, very hard to reverse. So just again, in summary, what Earth system scientists try to do is we're trying to understand our planet as a single complex system, one that has its own property. At the planetary scale, and one which is being pushed very hard by human activities. So basically, that's what we're trying to do.

Kimberly White

That is very impressive- sounds like a fascinating field of study to be in. I know that there are some in the scientific community that have stated we have entered the Anthropocene due to the building pressures from humankind and you mentioned tipping cascade points. Can you elaborate further on this? 

Will Steffen

Yeah, I can give a common analogy in everyday life is if, say someone goes out on a lake with a kayak and is paddling around, you can jiggle that kayak a little bit, then it returns in its upright, you can paddle alone. But if you tip it too far, it flips all the way over, and you're underwater, and you've got a scramble to get back to the surface. And that's a tipping point, almost literally, you've tipped it past the point of no return, and the kayak flips. So that's a very simple analogy toward parts of the earth system, which simulate similar behavior. A good example of that might be the sea ice that is floating over the Arctic Ocean. So how does that  work? Well, in the Northern Hemisphere, summertime, there's a lot of sunlight over the Arctic Ocean. But if it's covered with ice, that white ice reflects the sunlight, affects virtually all of it and helps keep it cool. But as the earth is warming that summertime sea ice is shrinking, it doesn't cover as much of the Arctic Ocean. So as it shrinks, it uncovers darker ocean water that absorbs more sunlight, obviously than the ice does. And it adds to the regional warming over the North Pole. And of course, as the North Pole warms more, the ice shrinks more. And as the ice shrinks more, it warms more. So you see what we call a feedback loop. So a lot of these tipping elements have these feedback loops. And the point here, what's the tipping point? The point is once the ice shrinks far enough, you cannot stop the process. In other words, that feedback loop will take it all the way to an ice-free Arctic, no matter what we as humans do. So that's a good easy to understand example of what a tipping point actually is. There are other ones associated with ice, too. If you look at the Greenland ice sheet, that's that big massive mound of ice that sits on top of the island of Greenland, that's starting to melt, and it's melting at an increasing rate. And one of the important processes there is that as it melts, it gets lower. And as it gets lower, it moves into a warmer climate, which makes it melt more, and then it moves even lower. And you can see again, you have an internal feedback that this is going to cause the ice sheet to diminish very rapidly no matter what we do. I'll give you one more example of an individual, a tipping point one that isn't associated with ice. And that's the Amazon rainforest. That's that big rain forest, beautiful forest in the Amazon basin, the biggest tropical forest on the planet, but that is now being threatened by two interacting processes. One is direct human deforestation. And that's obviously involved with politics. It's involved with globalization, big investment companies investing in deforestation and conversion to soya or beef, or so on. And what that does is it reduces the recycling of water in that system. So basically, as the name indicates, it's a rain forest. So it needs a lot of rain to be a healthy forest. This rain comes from two sources. One is evaporation from the forest itself; it's got its own recycling system. So roughly half its rainfall actually is generated by the forest itself. The other half comes in from the Atlantic Ocean, so it's moist climate weather systems rather than come in and drop rainfall. So it's about 50/50. So as we deforest, more of that  tropical forest, we are reducing the amount of internal recycling of water via the evaporation from the forest. At the same time, the Atlantic circulation is changing because of climate change. And that's reducing the rainfall coming in from the ocean. So the Amazon forest is hitting a double whammy. So it's going to hit a point where it doesn't get enough rain, it starts burning more often, that reduces the internal cycling even more. And it becomes a self-reinforcing feedback again, this idea of a feedback that will convert the forest or most of it into what we call a Savanna, a sort of woodland grassland, much drier system. So there are three examples of what tipping points are, what internal feedbacks are. Now, the word cascade comes in here too. And that's because a lot of these individual tipping points or tipping elements are actually linked. And the ones I mentioned are actually a good example of that. Because as you lose more Arctic sea ice, it causes regional warming, regional warming i...