CGS Event Series: Climate Change. The Age of Adaptation, Dr. Adil Najam

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Taken from Center for Global Studies web listing for talk:

"Dr. Najam will examine climate change impacts, particularly on developing countries of the Global South who have had the least to do with causing the climate crisis but now find themselves at the forefront of its impacts.

Because the world has been unwilling and unable to respond to the threat of global climate change in time with appropriate measures of mitigation, we are now condemned to live in the “Age of Adaptation.” Adaptation, after all, is essentially the failure of mitigation. This does not mean that the need to mitigate has gone away – the less we mitigate today, the more we will have to adapt to the impacts of climate change tomorrow. This does, however, mean that dealing with the impacts and consequences of climate change is no longer a ‘future’ challenge. It is a pressing and immediate challenge – most so in high vulnerability countries of the Global South, such as Pakistan, which are economically impoverished and climatically imperiled. The talk will explore (a) how we came upon the Age of Adaptation; (b) what it means to live in the Age of Adaptation; and (c) what specific challenges does the Age of Adaptation pose for developing countries in the Global South, particularly in relation to water, food, and security.

Dr. Adil Najam is inaugural Dean Emeritus at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Professor of International Relations and of Earth and Environment. He served as the founding Dean of the Pardee School (2014-2022), and was awarded Dean Emeritus status by Boston University in 2022, while continuing as Professor at the Pardee School. He also serves as the President of WWF International.

Najam served as Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan and as the Director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. Prof. Najam has taught at MIT and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College in 2022-23 and was named the first De Janosi Fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria for 2023-24. He is also the Mahathir Mohamad Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) where he leads research on Islam and Environment.

His research and teaching focuses on issues of global public policy, especially those related to global climate change, South Asia, Muslim countries, environment and conservation, and human development.”

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