Panelist

Youth, women at center of climate change fight

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:07:14 +0000

Youth, women at center of climate change fight Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 12/04/2022 - 17:07

Christie Sounart

Julieta Martinez, founder of Tremandas

Hilda Flavia Nekabuye, who started the Uganda branch of Fridays for Future, a youth-led global climate strike movement

Sarah Jensen is co-founder of the �鶹ӰԺ chapter of the American Conservation Coalition (left), PhD student Emily Nocito (right)

Ewi Stephanie Lamma, second from the left, of Cameroon, Africa

As a child, climate activist Hilda Flavia Nekabuye’s family owned one of the biggest plantations in their village near Uganda’s Lake Victoria. But rising temperatures, rains and strong winds devastated the property and Nekabuye’s grandmother had to sell some of their land to feed her family.

“I remember I had to miss school for months because my parents couldn’t afford to pay my tuition fees,” she told an audience during a youth activism panel at the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit on Dec. 4. “I was kicked out of school because of the effects of climate change, but I’m not the only one: Every year, 4 million girls are kicked out of school because of the effects of climate change.

“They bear the biggest burden and they have to play a very big role in creating a future for their children, and the children after them and the other generations to come.”

Nekabuye — who started the Uganda branch of Fridays for Future, a youth-led global climate strike movement originally founded by Greta Thunberg — shared the same sentiment that the three other panelists, all young women, expressed: Women and youth are most burdened by climate change, but they are also key to solutions needed now.

"If you are aware of climate change and if you know what is happening, then you have the responsibility to do more. Use your voice to represent millions of voices that do not have a platform."

—Hilda Flavia Nekabuye

“Do not work alone. Never ever.”

For Julieta Martinez, a climate justice and gender equity youth activist from Santiago, Chile, education is a main driver for climate solutions.

“If you don't go to school, you don't get to college. If you don't go to college, you don't get a job, and if you don't get a job, you don't get money and you become dependent,” Martinez said, pointing to young South American girls who spend four to five hours a day walking for clean water.

As the founder of Tremandas, a global action dedicated to amplifying youth voices, the 19-year-old spoke on what helps her make big strides in her work: “Do not work alone. Never ever. We need each other.”

“The best thing we can do right now is find a common ground.”

—Julieta Martinez

CU �鶹ӰԺ students are working toward the same goals.

Graduate student Sarah Jensen is co-founder of the �鶹ӰԺ chapter of the American Conservation Coalition. She hopes to bring more climate discussion into college classrooms.

“When it comes to a debate, people always say, ‘We’re not picking sides.’ But I know I have classmates who want to debate,” Jensen said. “If faculty members knew we wanted to have those conversations and made time for that, that would really help.”

PhD student Emily Nocito wants to see more small-group discussions in classrooms to allay some of the pressure and fear that can arise in difficult climate conversations. Lively and useful debates can take place instead.

“Climate touches all of us,” Nocito said. “It’s one of the most tangible ways to make an impact on your world.”

“We need to act now”

Ewi Stephanie Lamma of Cameroon, Africa, works to empower children, youth and women in natural resource management. When she was four, her mother would work on farms for days at a time to provide for her and her baby sister.

“My mom had to focus on the earth to make sure we could survive,” Lamma said.

When communities like hers are affected by climate change, children and youth have to move elsewhere, and may become involved in dangerous situations like human trafficking, Lamma explained. She’s worked with young volunteers to plant thousands of trees in Cameroon, and also created the documentary African Voices for Africa’s Forests, which received recognition during the COP27 climate conference in November.

“If I have 100 sincere climate leaders brought up from the ages of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10, I believe that in the nearest future, Cameroon will have a balanced climate system,” Lamma said. “And I can’t wait to be part of that future.”

“When we take care of our environment, we actually are taking care of ourselves.”

Among all of the youth activists featured during the four-day conference, consensus was found in creating unity first to come up with solutions — then act quickly.

“Climate is an opportunity for us to come together. As young people, we share this urgency because it’s what we’re going to have to live in. Hopefully, this could be where we bridge that divide.”

—Sarah Jensen

Said environment educator and activist Monica Neupane via a Zoom call in Nepal: “The crisis is in front of us and we need to act now.”

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4 key ways to address the climate crisis now

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 21:39:23 +0000

4 key ways to address the climate crisis now Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 12/04/2022 - 14:39

Lisa Marshall

“We’ve heard from the activists. We know they’re being threatened. They’re being jailed for their work. They’re being deprived of their livelihoods. Now we need to move to action.”

—Therese Arnesen, UN Human Rights Officer

Closing Reception

Beth Osnes, associate professor of theater and dance and environmental science at CU �鶹ӰԺ, leads a performance of young people from fifth grade through college age. The performance included musical pieces focused on the impacts of climate change and what we must do to address it. Osnes injected comedy into the performances and included a piece on reducing food waste.

Day three of the Right Here Right Now Global Climate summit at CU �鶹ӰԺ was filled with discussions of concrete solutions and urgent calls for collective action to reduce the human toll of the climate crisis today and to fend off a catastrophic future.

To get there, panelists and speakers said the world must update its infrastructure, rethink its economy and consider Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science. And a new generation of climate defenders must better communicate the realities of the crisis in ways that strengthen the movement and foster political will.

“We’ve heard from the activists. We know they’re being threatened. They’re being jailed for their work. They’re being deprived of their livelihoods,” said U.N. Human Rights Officer Therese Arnesen after the close of the summit. “Now we need to move to action.”

Here’s a look at what that action might look like, according to participants who attended the third day of the summit:

Adapt to reality now to save lives

While the mitigation of future warming must remain a priority, the world is progressing slowly on this front, and countries must adapt to global climate realities now to save lives, said economist Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute, during a panel on Adaptation, Mitigation and Disaster Response.

Robinson noted that after a 2003 heat wave led to 15,000 deaths in France, the French government established an early warning system that now alerts elderly people and other vulnerable communities of oncoming heat waves and directs them to cooling stations. When another heat wave hit in 2019, 1,500 died, a fraction of the number who might have died had the warning system not been implemented.

Similarly in Nigeria, the government has invested in programs to assure that construction and agricultural workers, whose health is increasingly threatened due to climate change, have access to water and toilets on hot days.

“We must continue to focus on mitigation, but adaptation can work. It can save lives, and it’s not that complicated,” she said.

Expedite a global green energy infrastructure

Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Lab based in Golden, Colorado, joined Robinson on the panel.

Keller added that scientists and energy companies from the developed world could make a big difference in mitigating future warming if they would do more to help developing countries transition to a cleaner energy infrastructure, powered by solar and wind.

He noted that many countries, particularly in Africa, have no electricity at all yet, so providing funding and expertise now can enable them to skip powering their country with fossil fuels entirely, much like they skipped landline telephones and went directly to cell phones.

“We need to act now to prevent them from making the same mistakes that we have,” Keller said.

He stressed that the transition to green energy must be a just one, considering and financially supporting those at risk of losing their livelihood.

Rethink what rich means

Solutions for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change abound, and many are within reach, “But a crucial question we have to confront is: Who will pay?” noted economist Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Climate Policy Lab, during a panel on economics, pricing and policy.

Some panelists throughout the day suggested that in carbon offset systems, the price of carbon is already too low and should be raised.

Others pointed to the recent Loss and Damage fund established at the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference as a ray of hope, if implemented properly.

And many suggested that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank should be overhauled to make them more amenable to investing in green economies.

“If you think about these two institutions, they have become conservative and risk averse and in reality they should be the opposite,” said Robinson.

On a more fundamental level, it could be time for many to reimagine what it means to be rich.

“What if we saw it as having clean air and clean water,” said Canadian youth activist Tia Kennedy, during the summit’s closing panel on traditional knowledge.

Consider Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science

During that panel, Indigenous participants from Belize, Arizona, Canada, the United States and Panama highlighted a worldview in which values of reciprocity prevail, not only with one another but also between humans and the planet. The earth and animals are viewed not as a “natural resource” to be extracted from but as part of an interconnected web.

In thinking this way, simple solutions arise that can often trump sophisticated technical fixes, explained botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

She shared how her ancestors stayed warm in winter because they built a small fire and sat close to it.

Meanwhile, “they observed that the settlers built a really big fire in a big house and sat far away from the fire.” That story still resonates with her today.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, and “250th generation” farmer shared this story, a fitting way to bring the summit to a close:

“We only receive 6 to 10 inches of annual rainfall every year at Hopi. That’s it, but we’re able to raise things like melon, squash, beans (and) corn. When I was at Cornell University, they told me I needed 33 inches of annual rainfall to raise corn, and I said, ‘Man, you guys have got some weak corn here.’ Do you know what makes it come up? It’s our faith, and it’s our belief system that makes that corn come up. It’s not a commodity, folks. It’s life.”

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3 ways to hold government, industry accountable for addressing climate change

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 21:27:08 +0000

3 ways to hold government, industry accountable for addressing climate change Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/03/2022 - 14:27

Lisa Marshall

“The actions we need to take may not be profitable in the short run but if we don't take those actions, human civilization itself is threatened."

—Gillian Marcelle, CEO and founder of Resilience Capital Ventures, LLC

To hold governments and industry accountable for protecting human rights threatened by climate change, youth, women and front-line communities must mobilize. Economists and investors must rethink what success looks like.

And, as a last resort, litigation must be used, according to speakers at the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit at CU �鶹ӰԺ Saturday.

After an at-times emotional first day of the summit Friday, in which panelists from around the globe made the undeniable case that climate change is a humanitarian crisis, speakers on Day 2 focused on accountability, called for action and suggested that a human rights framing is precisely what’s needed to spark action.

“We are living in an exciting time,” said panelist David Boyd, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, in the session “The Obligations of Governments Arising from the Human Rights Impacts of Climate Change.” “By harnessing the power of human rights and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, we can see a path forward where governments will begin to actually take action.”

Mobilizing from the ground up

In multiple sessions, panelists pointed out that it has been women, Indigenous people and activists from developing countries or the Global South who have pushed forth some of the most critical advancements in fighting climate change. That includes the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to, preferably 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels and the recent establishment at COP 27 of a “loss and damage” fund for nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

In a rousing speech before a packed house, many of them CU �鶹ӰԺ students donning orange caps reading “Divest,” former President of Ireland Mary Robinson called for a new women-led global climate justice movement, a feminine version of the male-led “moonshot” of the 1960s, to hold the duty-bearers, including government and industry, to task for protecting the planet.

“They said putting a man on the moon was impossible but it was achieved in eight years,” she said.

During the morning panel with Boyd, moderator Nick Clark, of Al Jazeera, called on governments to protect defenders of human rights and the environment, noting that four environmental activists are murdered every week and their killers often go unpunished.

He pointed to the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, better known as the Escazú Agreement, as the first human rights treaty in the world to include a provision to protect activists.

Meanwhile, panelist Janine Coye-Felson, of Belize, challenged those with financial resources to support such defenders around the globe.

“That is the big challenge: How exactly can we mobilize when what we have to mobilize is so limited in terms of resources?” Coye-Felson asked.

In a panel on the role of education, representatives from youth-focused organizations stressed the need for teachers to include the human impacts along with the science in their lessons on climate change, in order to inspire a new generation of climate activists.

“People can’t see the human face from these graphs,” said Ili Nadiah Dzulfakar, panelist and chair and program director of the climate justice and feminist organization Klima Action Malaysia (KAMY), led by young people to mobilize a climate emergency declaration in Malaysia. “You can’t see the death.”

Panelist Jono Anzalone, executive director of The Climate Initiative (TCI), a nonpartisan organization that aims to inspire, educate and empower 10 million youth around climate action by 2025, stressed that just getting climate change education into the curriculum is a challenge. While 84% of educators want to teach climate science, only 43% do.

“How do we close that gap?” Anzalone asked.

Think beyond profit

In an afternoon session, “The Responsibility of Business and Industry to Respect Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change,” several panelists suggested that in order for industry to be able to fully respond to the climate change crisis, the global economy, including investors, must rethink the “Milton Friedman mindset” that success is inextricably tied to short-term profit.

“The actions we need to take may not be profitable in the short run but if we don’t take those actions, human civilization itself is threatened,” said Gillian Marcelle, CEO and founder of Resilience Capital Ventures, LLC.

Investors and corporations should also look to benefits outside of profit, including social good and consider the unseen costs, such as environmental degradation.

Other panelists added that profits from transitioning to a renewable economy will come but it will take time so society must shift its timeline for gauging economic success.

And, as economies transition to renewables, they must ensure that the transition is just, enabling countries in the Global South to continue to develop and workers in the Global North to feel they won’t lose their financial security.

“Working people around the world have to feel like they're not going to be left behind,” said Monte Tarbox, executive director of the National Electrical Benefit Fund, which provides pension benefits to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “So that they have buy-in and back the political initiatives that are needed for this and we don't end up in the situation we’ve been in politically in the United States in the last five, six years.”

Litigate as a last resort

Should citizens sue their governments to force them to do something about climate change?

Many panelists viewed this as a last resort but noted that it has been done, and it can be done again.

For instance, in 2015, in the case of the Urgenda Foundation vs. the State of the Netherlands, the plaintiffs prevailed in their effort to require their government to do more.

The court in the Hague ordered the Dutch state to limit Greenhouse Gas emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by the end of 2020. The success inspired several other countries to use legal conventions on human rights and climate change to bring cases to demand reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

“It’s a case that’s had a really transformative effect on the way that people litigate climate change against governments,” said panelist Tessa Kahn, in the session “Climate Justice Activism: Litigation and Other Strategies to Hold Governments Accountable in the Context of Climate Change.” “I still don’t think we’ve hit the limit of what can be learned from the decisions that were issued in that case, and how they can inform legal strategies in other countries.”

In a separate panel, Naderev ‘Yeb’ Sano, executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, stressed that economics and law aside, human empathy will be key to achieving real progress: “Litigation can only go so far. The battle will be won or lost in the chambers of people’s hearts.”

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90 countries represented in first day of global climate summit focused on human rights

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:02:48 +0000

90 countries represented in first day of global climate summit focused on human rights Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/02/2022 - 13:02

Lisa Marshall

“This is the time in history where humanity has to understand that we own the power that will change the world. For so long we have been looking to political will to make change and where has that gotten us? We have to stand up and hold each other’s hands and create the difference we so badly need.”

—Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, youth activist, Uganda

10% of population are responsible for 50% of world’s fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50% contribute only 10%

216 million people will migrate within their own country by 2050 – World Bank

Day 2: Obligations

Nearly 4,000 people from 90 countries convened at CU �鶹ӰԺ, either virtually or in-person Friday, for a day-long, candid exploration of something speakers contend isn’t talked about enough: how climate change impacts people’s lives right now.

“A lot of times, we talk about climate change as an issue that will affect future generations, but the reality is, for many communities climate change is already here …and has been for a long time,” said New Zealand-based Indigenous and disability rights activist Kera Sherwood O’Regan during the panel “Understanding Climate Change as a Matter of Human Rights.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis kicked off the three-day Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit with a stark reminder that no corner of the globe is immune to the impacts of a rapidly warming planet.

Less than one year ago, he noted, just miles from his podium, �鶹ӰԺ County suffered the most destructive fire in the history of the state, a rare wintertime blaze that burned more than 1,000 homes, including those of many CU faculty and staff.

“There’s no denying that climate change is also a humanitarian crisis,” Polis said.

Marshall Islands to Uganda

Throughout the day, speakers from distant corners of the globe shared what that humanitarian crisis has looked like for their communities.

For the young women of South and Central America, crushing drought has forced northward migration, which often comes with danger, including sexual assault, explained Astrid Puentes Riańo, a lawyer and human rights advocate from Colombia who joined the first panel.

She noted that in 2018, a staggering 82% of crops were lost in Honduras, prompting caravans of people, many of them women, to head north.

“It is not the same to be a wealthy man or woman here in �鶹ӰԺ impacted by climate change as it is for a 14-year-old Indigenous girl migrating all the way from Central America,” Riańo said. “If she is lucky, she will get to the U.S. alive.”

During an emotional keynote speech, with images of her great grandfather and other elders displayed behind her, Indigenous rights activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier described how youth suicide rates among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic are soaring, in part due to the rapid vanishing of ice (long used for hunting, transportation and housing) and a cultural cornerstone for the Inuit people.

“The ice is our life force,” she said.

During an afternoon session titled “The Experiences of those whose Human Rights are Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Change,” youth activist and poet Selina Leem, from the Marshall Islands, spoke of a growing up in a place, just 2 meters above sea level, where global warming could literally mean the submergence of her homeland.

“We are not accepting of the idea of permanently relocating from our country. It is where it is and that is where we deserve it to be,” Leem said.

Beside her on stage, youth activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye described how droughts and floods, and the resulting lack of harvest, forced her family of farmers to sell portions of their land and pull her out of school when they couldn’t pay the fees.

“Meals reduced from five a day to two to one until we just had to wait for water from the stream and then the stream started drying up. We asked why the gods were punishing us,” Flavia Nakabuye said.

Even well-intentioned “solutions” to climate change can also inflict harm, said panelist Mattias Ãhrén, who comes from an Indigenous reindeer-herding community in northern Sweden, where sprawling wind farms have begun to gobble up vital pastureland.

“Yes, climate change is terrible, but sometimes the fight against it is even worse,” Ãhrén said.

With candid stories about the devastating impact of climate change came stories of progress.

Panelists noted that at last month’s United Nations Climate Conference, COP27, in Egypt, participating countries reached a historic decision to establish a “loss and damage fund” to support nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

This summer, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right. And a record 300 representatives from Indigenous communities attended COP27, noted Sherwood O’Regan. (Notably, 600 representatives from the fossil fuel industry were also there).

“Loss and damage getting across the line at COP27 is absolutely massive,” Sherwood O’Regan said, stressing that the initiative was brought forth by Indigenous and other front-line communities impacted by climate change. “It is critical that we give credit where it is due. They have not been given space by developed nations, it has happened because people have banged down the doors of those negotiation rooms.”

When asked by NPR journalist and panel moderator Lakshmi Singh to name their No. 1 ask in the battle to save the planet from climate change, the answer from afternoon panelists was universal: representation.

“The power to make decisions has to be shifted from those who might have the means to those who are actually affected,” said Ãhrén.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 19:24:48 +0000

Robin Wall Kimmerer Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/18/2022 - 12:24

United States

Expertise:
Climate Change & Environment

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Traditional Knowledge and Climate Solutions

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the Earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.

Wall Kimmerer tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of environmental biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs that draw on both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. She was named a MacArthur fellow this year.

As a writer and a scientist, Kimmerer’s interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in botany from the University of Wisconsin, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

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Cristina Coc

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 15:40:07 +0000

Cristina Coc Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/18/2022 - 08:40

Belize (Q’eqchi’)

Expertise:
Human Rights

Program Director
Julian Cho Society

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Traditional Knowledge and Climate Solutions

Sunday, December 4, 2022

The Julian Cho Society (JCS), founded by Cristina Coc, is dedicated to the conservation of the environments and rights of Indigenous peoples of southern Belize. Coc is program director, and an organizer and co‐spokesperson for the Maya Leaders Alliance. As a Maya woman, she brings a wealth of knowledge of these communities, fluency in Q’eqchi’, and experience mobilizing local residents.

When the government of Belize granted unrestricted logging concessions to a multinational company in the mid‐1990s, the Maya built a social movement that fought back. They also sued the government for Indigenous rights to their lands. In 2004, the Inter‐American Commission for Human Rights ruled that the Maya had full Indigenous rights to the lands of southern Belize, but concrete changes have been slow.

In 2007, two Maya villages, Conejo and Santa Cruz, brought a claim against the government for its failure to recognize and protect the customary land rights of the Maya people. After a trial, the Supreme Court of Belize accepted the villages’ argument that Maya property rights, like other forms of property, are protected by the Belize Constitution and international human rights law.

Recently, Coc and other Maya leaders have worked with lawyers from the Indigenous People’s Law & Policy Institute at the University of Arizona to test the lawsuit, negotiate with the government and build capacity among local Maya.

Coc is a young woman, but in this work, she has accumulated vast experience. She has felt the cold reality of discrimination. She has negotiated complicated and contentious issues at the highest level. Most important, she has gained the respect of the Q’eqchi’ and Mopan villagers of Toledo.

The Julian Cho Society (JCS), founded by Cristina Coc, is dedicated to the conservation of the environments and rights of Indigenous peoples of southern Belize.

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Constance Okollet

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 16:54:12 +0000

Constance Okollet Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/11/2022 - 09:54

Uganda

Expertise:
Human Rights

Chairperson
Osukuru United Women's Network (OWN)

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Adaptation, Mitigation, Disaster Response: How should governments, acting individually and through international cooperation, address the impact of climate change for the most vulnerable, whose voices are often unheard?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Constance Okollet is the chair of the Osukuru United Women’s Network (OWN) in the Tororo district of eastern Uganda, and is a self-described peasant farmer and mother of seven. As the chair for OWN, she leads a consortium of about 1,200 small women’s groups working on education, community health and nutrition.

Constance Okollet is the chair of the Osukuru United Women’s Network (OWN) in the Tororo district of eastern Uganda, and is a self-described peasant farmer and mother of seven.

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Kishore Rao

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 16:26:50 +0000

Kishore Rao Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/11/2022 - 09:26

United States

Expertise:
Business & Industry
Climate Change & Environment

Global Consulting Sustainability and Climate Leader
Deloitte

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Economics, Pricing, Policy: How do governments and various stakeholders pay and otherwise take action to develop climate policy solutions in a manner that is equitable?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Kishore Rao is Deloitte’s global consulting sustainability and climate leader, focused on government and public sector clients. He works with leaders and professionals across the globe, helping governments and public services agencies develop and translate policy into practical action on such issues as climate action, sustainability, social inclusion and good governance. Rao also leads Deloitte’s business relationship with global international affairs and development organizations.

For over 25 years, Rao has been helping global governments to devise and implement strategies that enhance sustainability, drive climate action, promote digitalization, build competitiveness, promote trade and investment, and build infrastructure. He also supports global companies ranging from real estate and energy to technology to build business models to enter and expand in global markets. More recently, his work has focused on environmental, societal and governance issues.

Over his career, Rao has held leadership positions with major consulting companies engaged in global expansion, economic development and social impact. He has lived and worked in over 70 countries and serves on the boards of globally focused nonprofits that advocate for international engagement and social impact.

Kishore Rao is Deloitte’s global consulting sustainability and climate leader, focused on government and public sector clients.

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Elham Youssefian

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:35:56 +0000

Elham Youssefian Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/10/2022 - 17:35

Iran & United States

Expertise:
Human Rights
Law & Policy

Humanitarian Action and DRR Advisor
International Disability Alliance (IDA)

Day 1: Impacts

Panel:
The Experiences of Those Whose Human Rights are Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Change

Friday, December 2, 2022

Elham Youssefian joined the International Disability Alliance (IDA) Secretariat in November 2019 as the inclusive humanitarian action and DRR advisor. She leads and coordinates the implementation of IDA’s strategy to promote and support the effective enforcement of inclusive humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction. She ensures strategic leadership, coordination, provision of technical expertise and advice to optimize the impact of IDA’s work in this area.

Youssefian has a PhD in international law from the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, and a master’s in human rights law from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also has diverse experience in protection and human rights, with a focus on issues related to human trafficking, refugees, domestic violence and discrimination against people with disabilities.

Elham Youssefian joined the International Disability Alliance (IDA) Secretariat in November 2019 as the inclusive humanitarian action and DRR advisor.

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Marieke Faber

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:38:23 +0000

Marieke Faber Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/01/2022 - 10:38

United States

Expertise:
Law & Policy

Partner
NautaDutilh

Day 2: Obligations

Panel:
Climate Justice Activism: Litigation and other strategies to hold governments accountable in the context of climate change

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Marieke Faber is a partner at law firm NautaDutilh. She leads its Dutch Dispute Resolution and ESG Practice in New York.

On a pro bono basis, Faber was part of the team representing the Urgenda Foundation against the Netherlands before the Dutch Supreme Court. In this landmark ruling, the Netherlands was ordered to reduce emissions by 25% by 2020. She assists corporate and financial institutions navigating environmental, social and governance challenges, with a focus on climate change-related advice and litigation. She advises on climate strategy, climate targets, Scope 3 emission issues and EU regulatory developments (e.g., the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive). Faber is based in New York, where she facilitates an inter-EU/US dialogue on ESG-related developments among peers and industry experts.

Faber frequently speaks and publishes on the topic of climate change-related legal developments. Recent speaking engagements include the IBA Annual Litigation Forum on Climate Litigation and the New York State Bar Association annual meeting.

In 2020, Faber received a Resilience Award at the Dutch legal awards for setting up a platform providing small-business owners with pro bono legal assistance related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Faber holds an LLB and LLM from the University of Utrecht and a master’s in management from London Business School.

Marieke Faber is a partner at law firm NautaDutilh.

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