Meghan L. O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard University, leads the conversation on energy security. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2024 CFR Academic Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thanks again for being with us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Meghan O’Sullivan with us to discuss energy security. Dr. O’Sullivan is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. She’s served in multiple senior policymaking roles and has advised national security officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Between 2004 and 2007, Dr. O’Sullivan was special assistant to President George W. Bush, and was deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan during the last few years of her tenure. In 2013, she was the vice chair of All-Party Talks in Northern Ireland. And Dr. O’Sullivan is a member of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s foreign policy advisory board. And she serves on the board of directors at CFR. So, Meghan, thanks very much for being with us today. I thought we could begin by having you define energy security, and how the environment has changed over the years as you have worked on this issue, taught it, and made policy, in fact. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. Thank you, Irina. And thanks to you and all of your colleagues for inviting me to do this webinar. And I’m really looking forward to it. I spend a lot of time here at Harvard talking to my students about these issues, and I’m looking forward to talking to an even broader audience of students and professors. And it’s interesting. I’m glad to see we have a good group. When I saw the title of “Energy Security,” I thought, like, oh, well, that’s interesting, because usually we don’t talk just about energy security anymore. We talk about it in a broader context. And so what I thought I would do, just in response to your question, is to talk a little bit about how I’ve seen these concepts evolve. And it actually is reflective of the way that I have taught these issues. I’ve been teaching a class here at Harvard that was originally called “Energy and Geopolitics.” And it has evolved. That was back in 2007, I think, was the first time I taught it—maybe 2008. And over this period of time, it’s become probably unrecognizable to my 2008 students. In 2024 I’m teaching it, but it’s really much more about the energy transition and geopolitics. So, you know, there’s still a very big idea around the whole notion of energy and geopolitics. This whole idea that energy and the international system—kind of the distribution of power, alliances, the impetus for conflict or peace—that all of these things are often wrapped up in energy. And I think we can go through and be happy to talk about many historical examples. I can’t really say exactly where they begin, but certainly we start to really notice them in the historical record around the time that oil becomes a major driver of the global economy. But, of course, this was probably true long before that, where you have big changes in the energy system really influencing the state of relationships among states. And certainly the histories of World War I and World War II are full of examples of how commanders and leaders made decisions around oil—either strategic decisions or tactical decisions that ended up ultimately feeding into how wars played out. We think about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was so consequential to World War II, had a lot to do with the oil embargo that the United States had placed on Japan, and on the Japanese really thinking that they needed to neutralize the American force in Pearl Harbor before it made an effort to take over—they made an effort to take over the oil-rich areas in today’s Indonesia. So, that entanglement of energy and geopolitics has been with us a long time. And I would say fifteen years ago in highlighting what really is a history of international relations, that is about a fight for resources energy is a piece that I often was trying to expose as being a driver of international affairs. And I used a concept, and I still use a concept, which I think is really relevant today. And that is thinking about energy as a means in grand strategy, and energy is an ends in grand strategy. So if you think about energy as a means, is usually we think about producing countries—producing any form of energy, but maybe oil and gas in particular if we’re looking at the last decades. Countries that have this ability to produce large quantities of this energy have used this energy to try to advance non-energy interests. So, the most obvious example may be the 1973 embargo of the Arab members of OPEC. You know, using their prowess in the energy field to try to advance political objectives. And there are many, many examples of this around the world. We could look at Venezuela, how it used its oil wealth to try to buy the acquiescence of neighboring states and Caribbean states. There are many, many examples. But there’s also another frame to look at it and think about energy as a means of geopolitical ends, which is the flip side of this idea. That there are countries—and the United States is probably the best and most obvious example—that have historically used non-energy power—so economic, political, and military power—to try to ensure that they have sufficient energy. Their goal is to have energy—either to acquire the energy resources, if you think about some countries have looked at it that way, or to ensure that they have access to energy resources, which has been traditionally the view of the United States. And so there we get a lot into the Middle East and American strategy vis-à-vis that part of the world, where energy was a big part of the end goal. So, again, that was the frame that I had looking at this over a long period of time. Five years ago, I wrote a book called Windfall, which was really focused on how, when you get a big change in the energy system, you should expect a big change in geopolitics. And that book was specifically looking at the energy revolution that came from the fracking boom in the United States, and in some other parts of the world. And just the move of the United States from being a major draw on global energy resources to a major contributor toward it. And how that changed America’s role in the world, how that recreated a global atmosphere that on the whole was more conducive to America’s interests and the interests of its allies, and really moved the world into an age of energy abundance. So that has been a consistent focus. And energy security obviously fits right in there. I’m now spending more time—a lot more time, maybe all of my kind of intellectual time—or, not all of it. A good portion of it thinking about the energy transition, as both an ends and a means of foreign policy. And the energy transition I define really quite broadly. And to me, the energy transition and companies encompasses energy security and climate action, because the energy transition—some people think, oh, I’m just talking about substituting solar power for coal. And certainly, that’s a component of the energy transition. But when I conceptualize the energy transition, I am thinking about the huge societal movement to get to a net zero economy, to decarbonize the global economy. And all of the social, political, and in some cases even military, actions that different countries, and companies, and other actors are taking in their quest to get to net zero. And so while I think it, of course, matters a lot from the perspective of a human, the human race, a planetary matter. It matters if the world gets to net zero. The impact of the effort to get to net zero—regardless of whether that goal is reached—the impact of that has already started to really dramatically transform global politics and the basis of power in the international system. And here, I’m developing this idea—actually, working on a Foreign Affairs article on it with my friend and colleague Jason Bordoff—about the energy transition as both an ends and a means. But for the purposes of this call, I thought I’d just say a couple more things about the energy transition and geopolitics. And this is also reflected in three pieces that Jason Bordoff and I have written for Foreign Affairs over the last two years, which talk about the energy transition as a big driver of geopolitics, and geopolitics a big driver of the energy transition. So that first piece, I think of it as a cycle. And the first piece is how the energy transition is shaping geopolitics because, again, going back to this idea, this is an enormous change in how we generate, use, transport, store energy. We’re remaking the backbone of the global economy. Not just switching from coal to solar. Remaking the backbone of the global economy. And this has all kinds of implications for the way that our global system is organized, and political power, and diplomatic power, and otherwise. And there’s lots of examples of this. And I imagine that much of our conversation will be talking about this. One example is just looking at how China’s big investments in clean energy technologies are giving it a claim to geopolitical power. So that’s one way we see the energy transition shaping geopolitics. We could look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These are all things I’d love to talk about in greater detail if there’s interest. I wouldn’t argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was about the energy transition. I think it was about a lot of things, but primarily Putin’s kind of disillusionment and his fixation on Ukraine. But certainly there are real elements of how the energy transition played into that, played into the timing, and even empowered Vladimir Putin in this particular moment. And then we can look at the energy transition as a driver for trade routes and a whole variety of other things, depending on what energy sources end up being dominant. And finally, I would say there’s also this flip side. So we have the energy transition shaping geopolitics, but—and I think this is something we feel very acutely in the last year, year and a half, is how the geopolitical environment is actually shaping the energy transition. And again, lots and lots of good examples of this. The most obvious one, I think, is just the relationship between the United States and China. And this relationship, you know, going from one of some elements or dominant elements of cooperation to being the most highly competitive bilateral relationship in the world and the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world. So, looking at how that shift from cooperative to competitive has had an impact on a whole range of things, one of them is definitely the energy transition. And we could talk about a variety of ways in which that has played out. Some of it has been, I would say, detrimental in the sense that some of the international bodies, which are the obvious things to deal with global problems, are hamstrung a bit by an environment of geopolitical competition and great-power rivalry. On the other hand, I think the world is adjusting to the fact that this competitive relationship is the one that’s infusing competition into the global environment. And some of our efforts to pursue the energy transition have shifted to be more competitive. And the Inflation Reduction Act, that was partially in the reading people had for today, that’s evidence of a competitive approach to the energy transition rather than a cooperative one. There’s also, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That has had an impact. That geopolitical reality has had a big impact on the energy transition, which we could discuss. I think there are strong arguments that it expedited the transition, and also strong arguments that it has impeded the transition. So with that, I think I will stop there. Hopefully, I put enough on the table to define our topic in a fairly broad way. And I’m really looking forward to people’s thoughts and insights, and any questions they may have. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you, Meghan. That was terrific. Let’s go to all of you. (Gives queuing instructions.) So the first question we have we can take from King Fahd University, our international participants. O’SULLIVAN: Great. FASKIANOS: And you need to unmute yourself. Still muted. There we go. Please say your name— Q: So my name is Ahmed Hazmi. FASKIANOS: Good. Q: My name is Ahmed Hazmi. I am from King Fahd University. Before I ask the question, I have to let you know that we have multiple students with their own questions. So my question is, what are the recent effects of the energy crisis on the global efforts to move towards clean energy? That’s my question. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. It’s a great question. And I have some good memories of visiting King Fahd University. So nice to see you on the call and know there are several of you. This is obviously a central question and a really big question. And I can give you examples of how this geopolitical—this environment of geopolitical crises have moved the energy transition in both ways. As I mentioned very briefly, I think there’s are quite a strong argument to say that the crisis with Russia and the war in Ukraine has expedited the drive, and the commitment, and the ambition of Europeans in particular to try to get to net zero more quickly. So many of the already ambitious European goals have been made even more ambitious because the Europeans now not only have an environmental drive for meeting their energy—their climate goals, but now they have a very, very real kind of a national security, economic security argument as well. So you could—there’s, I think, a reasonable debate. You know, having more ambitious goals doesn’t necessarily mean that you meet them, but I think there’s a genuine and very authentic desire on the part of the Europeans to move more quickly. Now, that said, it can also be true that on the whole, if we take a global perspective, that if we just look at that one war, which has had ripple effects throughout the world, that it’s possible that that could slow down the energy transition in other parts of the world. And of course, if we look at the anticipated carbon emissions over time, going forward in the future, I don’t know what the numbers are for Europe but when I look at those numbers and I think of it from an American perspective, 88 percent of future carbon emissions are going to happen outside of the United States. So it’s absolutely essential that the rest of the world actually is bought into, sees value in, is then supported in an energy transition. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen. So Europe could end up being a carbon-free zone or a net zero zone, but if the rest of the world isn’t there—and I think in a lot of ways the war in Ukraine has by stoking inflation, creating a food crisis, raising the cost of energy, and really deepening the divide between the developed world and the developing world—all of these things, I think, work against the energy transition. And that’s just one conflict. So, the other geopolitical environment, I could do the net-net when it came to the U.S.-China relationship, or even the war in the Middle East is having an impact on all of this. I would say, just to wrap up, if you asked me on the whole how do I see it, I’m concerned that this deteriorating geopolitical environment is impeding our ability to get to net zero in some significant ways. It’s not the only obstacle. We need policy. We need new technologies. We need big investments. There’s all of that. But I think what’s often overlooked from the conversation about climate is the fact that the geopolitical environment is really an enabler of a successful transition as well. And right now, the geopolitical environment doesn’t look so good. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Michael Strmiska, who’s a professor of world history from SUNY-Orange in Middletown, New York: I’m concerned about how right-wing political movements worldwide are converting energy issues into identity politics. I refer to those who denounce green energy transition as a globalist plot and promote continuation of carbon fuel production and consumption as a badge of identity. The “drill, baby, drill” kind of rhetoric. How can those on the side of a green future combat this effort by the right wing to demonize green energy and environmentalism? O’SULLIVAN: Yeah. This is a great—it’s a great question and a great issue. And I hope that you are writing something on this because I think it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the whole energy transition landscape, but is one that can be very consequential. So I’ll just say one example of where I’ve seen this, and then your real question is, how do we combat it? I was just ten days ago, I guess, in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, which is a very large gathering of people working on national security issues. And being in Germany was an opportunity to talk to some German colleagues and friends about just, like, the political landscape, and just the general feeling among Germans about a variety of things, including the energy transition. And right now, there’s a movement on the part of the German government to require people to make certain investments in their home, which are costly—or people perceive them to be too costly. And this is in a context of a real weakening economy in the wake of the war against Ukraine and what many people often refer to, like, the deindustrialization of Germany in particular, because of such high energy prices in the wake of the efforts to get off of Russian gas. And so, there’s a sense among many Germans—not all—but a sense, like, that these requirements are just getting very expensive in an incredibly tough time. And it’s building political opposition to it. That is not just among the right wing. And I think that the question had to do with, like, the right wing and people kind of consciously taking these issues and trying to stoke right-wing ideological agendas. That is certainly happening as well. But I think it’s broader than that. I think it’s leading to—it’s contributing to the rise in populism, which I think we’re going to see most consequentially in Europe with the European Commission elections coming forward. In terms of what can be done, I mean this is where we get into the piece about energy security and how literally, like, three years ago if we titled a webinar “Energy Security,” nobody would show up because people thought, like, that’s a concept—that kind of puts you in the caveman category, right, or cavewoman category. Like, we don’t talk about energy transition. We just talk about—or, energy security. We talk about climate action. The reality is these two things are not opposite. They are absolutely two sides of the same coin. And so recognizing that energy security is—meeting energy security needs is part of almost, like, a prerequisite for a successful energy transition I think is a very different way of thinking about it than many have in the past. And I think that is part of what’s required. And the challenge is that, like, that is going to be hard to do and to keep the speed at which we need to go. And the real answer there is just more and more investment into clean energy because there’s the need to meet the energy needs, but to do so with a different kind of energy. And we’ve seen huge increases in investment into clean energy, but those investments are still far short of what is needed not only to meet additional energy demand but to start to displace the demand for coal and then, eventually, other sources of fossil fuels—or, other fossil fuels. FASKIANOS: Great. Next question from Benedetta Luccone If you can—there you go. And state your affiliation. Q: I am Benedetta Luccone, from Lewis University. And my question is, how can advances in renewable energy technology contribute to changing energy security, particularly in regions vulnerable to geopolitical instability or resource scarcity? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So, Irina, would you repeat for all of us? FASKIANOS: Maybe—yeah. If you could—you’re breaking up a little bit, Benedetta. Can you just repeat it again? Q: Yes. So how can advances in renewable energy technology contribute in changing energy security, particularly in regions vulnerable to geopolitical instability or resource scarcity? O’SULLIVAN: Sure. OK. How can renewable energy contribute to energy security, particularly in vulnerable areas? So I think there’s enormous capacity for this to prove true. A couple of things I would say about it. So, first, energy security is in its most traditional definition, it is simply having adequate supplies of energy to meet one’s economic needs and to satisfy certain levels of growth, and prosperity, and human welfare. Energy underpins almost everything that humans do on the planet. So energy security is having sufficient energy. And in some of these very vulnerable parts of the world that you talk about, one of the biggest constraints, in many cases the biggest constraint, on growth and human flourishing is the lack of energy. And so to the extent that we can have more energy meeting the energy needs of a wider swath of the globe, that is going to be beneficial. And if that—particularly if that energy is renewable. If it’s not renewable, then it brings with it a whole new set of problems related to the climate. But the basis of your question is how can renewable energy assist in these countries? And I think there’s a very real sense that if the world could meet the energy needs of these populations with renewable sources, that it would be very beneficial. A couple of—a couple of just nuances here, or smaller points from that very high-level point. I would say, you mentioned countries that were geopolitically vulnerable. And I think there’s probably a lot of different ways to define that. One of the things about renewable energy—it’s not true for every form. But if you’re thinking about really renewable energy—solar, wind, and a variety of other types of energy—a lot of that energy is produced where it’s consumed, for the most part. So that has the benefit of diminishing the requirement to be dependent on outsiders in the way that importation of natural gas through big pipelines has been an issue. That just trade and oil flowing through choke points, all of these things. If you’re producing the energy where you’re consuming it in your own country, then I think it does kind of enhance self-sufficiency and energy security. The downside, I would say, and then I’ll stop here—not the downside, but one of the things—or, a couple of things that we have to be cognizant of. And one is the fact—this is known to everybody on this call, probably—but renewable energy is still intermittent. There’s a variety of ways to address it. We’re much better at it than we were before. But it is still very hard to have renewable energy as, like, a baseload for industrial development. So, if you have a source of energy that comes in and out over the course of the day, either when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, it’s much harder to build a factory and expect that you’re going to get that kind of development. Sure, you can charge your cell phone, you can watch television, and there are—there are enhancements to the quality of life. But in terms of, like, the kinds of development that a lot of these countries want, we either need to make—continue to make big advances in battery storage, or we need backup, which tends to be natural gas and coal. Or we need new sources of green energy, like green hydrogen. So there’s still some technology that is required in order for the benefits to be realized in the way that many of us envision. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Genevieve Connell at Fordham IPED: Given that new technologies can be quite expensive to develop and distribute to emerging economies, what political strategies would it take to allow for developing countries to be able to sustain economic growth while adapting to energy transitions? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So, I think the answer to this question really gets into the whole question of climate finance and how to help ensure that countries around the world, not just wealthy Western countries, are able to benefit from clean energy technologies. And this, of course, has been an issue that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. And that attention is almost—I don’t know that it’s crescendoed. because I think it’s still building, but it certainly was one of the really big foci of COP-28 in Dubai, which I had the privilege of attending. So, really seeing the focus on getting that clean energy finance not just to different parts of the United States, or Europe, or even Japan, but how can—how can that money go and flow into countries that are developing? And here, the need is clear. The volume of investment that has to be found and facilitated is enormous. I’d say the last annual numbers we have for clean energy investment globally is about 1.1 trillion dollars. And the sense is that that has to grow to about 4 trillion dollars a year to kind of put the world on track. You know, 4 trillion dollars per year for decades, on track. And that the majority of that needs to go to the developing world. And so when the—when the person with a question mentioned the high cost of these renewable energy, I would say there’s been enormous advantages—or, not advantages—enormous strides made in bringing down the costs of many of these clean energy technologies. Some of them are cheaper depending on their location than certain kinds of fossil fuels. The challenge is in many developing countries there are other things that make it costly to develop these clean energy projects, political risk being one of them. So, again, you have money. You want to invest in clean energy. It tends to flow to Europe or the United States rather than to Africa. And there are reasons for that that people are trying to figure out how to minimize those risks, how to create new mechanisms of political insurance, how to have blended finance where you have a big loan, part of it is from a government or government public sector entity that kind of de-risks the rest of the loan for the private sector. And then the last thing I would say, which is really important and maybe it’ll come up, again, is just this whole idea that that finance ideally will flow to these countries to help them build the capacity to be part of the clean energy supply chain, rather than just give them finance so that they can buy solar panels from China or electrolyzers from the United States. You know, not just to buy products that are made elsewhere, but to create investments in places in the supply chain, which makes them part of the green energy transition in a way that their economies and their people can really benefit. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Wilson Wameyo. There you go. Q: Hello. Thank you for talking here. I wanted to ask some question—OK, I’m going to introduce myself— FASKIANOS: Wilson, can you identify yourself? Q: Yes, I’m Wilson. I come from—I come from Poland—Jagiellonian University in Poland, but I come from Kenya originally. My question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transitions? And how can we overcome it? FASKIANOS: Can you repeat it again? Because I think you broke up, Wilson. I don’t know, did you hear it, Meghan? O’SULLIVAN: No, I didn’t. FASKIANOS: OK. (Laughs.) Q: OK. My question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transition, and how can we overcome it? O’SULLIVAN: I’m sorry, Irina, were you able—do you think Wilson could put it in writing, just so that—because I wasn’t able to discern that. FASKIANOS: Right. We heard your name clearly. And then all of a sudden it muffled when you started asking your question. So I don’t know if you change positions, or— Q: Can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: OK. So my question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transition? And how can we overcome it? O’SULLIVAN: Yeah. OK. Thank you, Wilson. And thank you for persisting. This is a really great question. So, I think there’s a number of ways. As I referenced earlier but I’ll say a little bit more about, we have this global challenge. I think everyone appreciates it’s a global challenge. That this is not something that one country can solve, but is a challenge that needs to be met by many countries, adopting—and, in many cases, fundamentally changing their behavior. So when you have a global problem, the ideal way for dealing with it would be through global cooperation, because, again, we need multiple actors to bring about a solution. And I think that the COP, the Conference of the Party, mechanisms that have been in place for almost thirty years were reflective of that analysis. You know, basically we’ve got a global problem. We need a global solution. And we’re going to cooperate until we find one. And so over nearly thirty years, that has been—not the only approach, but that’s been a center point of the approach. Where that has worked the best I think is when we’ve seen the U.S. and China cooperating together. So probably the most consequential COP—I think we could debate this, but that’s not the point—I think one of the most consequential COPs was Paris—the Paris COP in 2015. And a large part of that success was that a big agreement between China and the U.S. on climate kind of greased the wheels for the rest of countries to come forward. So this was the COP in which countries decided that they would—almost all of them—would come forward with a nationally determined contribution. That they would assess their own economic situation, they would assess their own carbon emissions, they’d make goals, that ideally would be consistent with keeping global temperatures, at that that time, under two degrees. And they would present those ambitions to the global mechanisms. And the idea was that every few years or so the world would reevaluate these goals and make them more and more ambitious. And really, the fact that President Obama and President Xi got together in 2014 and came up with a bilateral agreement where both countries really advanced their ambitions, made them clear, made them public, set the stage for a lot of other countries coming forward and doing the same. So, you had meaningful U.S.-China cooperation, which helped catalyze greater global cooperation. And that U.S.-China deal in 2014 wasn’t just the product of Presidents Obama and Xi sitting down and talking. It was months of negotiation at multiple levels of government. So that’s an example of how cooperation can really be helpful. And if you look at a map of global emissions, the U.S. and China really stand out as the countries that are putting the most carbon emissions in the in the air. China more so than the United States, but the United States, historically probably a larger amount than China. So now that kind of cooperation is hard to imagine. I think our diplomats—you look at Secretary Kerry and others—continue to pursue it, continue to hope that persistent efforts to get climate cooperation between the U.S. and China have continued. And certainly that is a noble pursuit, and one that should continue. But the overall relationship is one that is so sour that it’s very hard to imagine that both countries are going to put aside all of the issues that they have on completely other issues—non-climate issues—and come up with some kind of joint strategy. In fact, the Biden administration, that was its approach for the first couple of years, was simply saying: we’re going to disagree about all these things. We’re going to argue about all these things. But we’re going to cooperate on climate because it matters to the whole world. And the Chinese approach was, well, we understand why you want to do that, but we also understand how important climate is to you. And why would we give you something without getting something in return? And, why would we divorce this issue from the rest of the relationship? So if you want to come to Beijing and talk about climate, we want to talk about Taiwan. So, there was this real block. There’s been some progress. Saw a little bit of a joint statement on methane, something about some progress over the last year or so. But in general, what has happened is that in the United States the real impetus for climate action has shifted away from thinking we’re going to get these big cooperative mechanisms to competitive approaches, like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is this very large piece of American legislation—the biggest action on the part of the United States ever taken in the climate space. And I can tell you, that that would have not happened in the absence of U.S.-China cooperation because members of Congress and of the political establishment are now so concerned about China having a competitive edge in a number of technologies that it decided, hey, it’s worth us putting hundreds of billions of dollars into American capacity to develop these technologies. And if China wasn’t on this planet, I don’t think we would have at all seen a consensus for such an enormous investment in climate, but really that investment was also in American competitiveness in the face of this very, very competitive bilateral relationship. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to a written question by Gavin Rolle, who is a senior international business major at Howard University: Could you talk more about how large multinational corporations play a part in the geopolitical implications of the energy transition? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So large multinational corporations—I mean, that could mean so many different things. So I’ll make a general point and then maybe put forward a few examples. I think there’s no question that corporations in the private sector are now a big part of what is perceived as the solution. They’re also, of course, if you think about corporations as oil and gas companies, they’re part of the problem. So I think there’s that dual component of it. First, let me just talk about part of the solution. So multinational corporations, we think about all kinds of things. But the ways in which they’re going to be central to a solution is manifold. So, one, I would say think about big global mining companies and the role that they have in trying to meet this really, really staggering growth in demand that is anticipated for critical minerals which are needed for clean energy technologies, particularly batteries and large, offshore and onshore wind. So on the one hand, those companies, some of them, might be state owned—or, are state owned, from China and other places. But a lot of them are big, multinational companies that have mining operations all over the world. And so suddenly the energy transition rests to some extent on these companies being able to produce a lot more critical minerals than it was anticipated in the past. On the solution side, think about corporations, the private sector more generally, I mentioned about the need for more climate finance. Most of that new climate finance is going to have to come from the private sector. And so, again, there the question is how to mobilize that finance. But it’s not going to come from governments. The gap is just too large to be met by governments alone. And then on the contribution side, I think shifting to oil and gas companies here, you do have companies that have the ability to make very big investments in new technologies. And so, what you do see is some companies investing heavily in carbon capture and storage technologies, trying to see if those technologies can—the costs of them can be brought down and the scale that they can be exercised at can be increased. There’s some controversy around those technologies, and the idea of oil and gas companies being the funders of it. But I think on the whole, if you look at any of the scenarios of what the global energy mix looks like in a net zero global economy, there’s a big element of carbon capture, right, that we really can’t get to those goals without having that technology play a bigger role than it is today. Now, in terms of multinational companies, on the downside there is—I would say there’s this intense focus on the role that these companies play in producing oil and gas, and the role that those energy sources play in creating carbon emissions. And that—I mean, those links are very well known to all. And here, I think what I would say—this is obviously a long and complex situation—but I think we need to look at the entire energy system and see the role of energy companies in the global energy system, and to think about their supply, and think about their investments, and moving those investments into more renewable energy areas, which some of them are doing. And we also need to think about demand. That as long as global demand for oil and natural gas are rising, as they are today, you have companies that are going to be interested in meeting those goals. And when the supply falls short of the demand, what also happens is that prices go up and you have politicians trying to get companies to produce more oil. So I think it needs to be tackled from both the supply side and from the demand side. And we rightly focus on supply, but we often overlook demand. So I think whenever we’re thinking about that, we should keep both in mind. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Benjamin Schmitt, who has a raised hand. Q: Hi. Benjamin Schmitt. I’m an affiliate at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard Ukraine Research Institute. One of the questions I have is, there’s been a—first of all, Meghan, thank you for doing the, quote/unquote, caveman energy security discussion today, because it’s really been lost, as you said, in some of the good—very good discussion over the energy transition. What I want to ask about is the extent to which physical energy infrastructure attacks that we’ve seen across Northern Europe in particular, but more broadly, whether it be Nord Stream, or Baltic Connector, or some of the telecommunications cables, including that in the Red Sea that we’ve seen. How does this impact the thinking of the global energy transition? Because when I was at COP-28, I tried to talk to folks as much as possible about the need to have physical infrastructure as a part of an energy security strategy. But it’s oftentimes overlooked as a key element of this, because if you don’t have energy security of the physical infrastructure, you might end up with energy poverty. And that would reduce the support for electorates to support the energy transition, which we obviously need. So want your thoughts on that. And thanks, again, for doing this great event. O’SULLIVAN: Thank you very much. And it’s always great to meet a colleague over a webinar of another institution. So nice to meet you. And I hope I’ll get to benefit from your work. You know, I think you’re hitting on an extremely important point. And it is one that I do think is very much underweighted in the conversation around climate. And that is the security of energy infrastructure. And, of course, we had some of those—some of those failures of energy infrastructure here in the United States a couple of years ago, that really made people nervous, woke people up to the importance of pipelines and energy security infrastructure. But seemingly not as much attention sustained over a long period of time. There’s no question that this is going to be part of the vulnerability of an energy transition. So it’s not just a fact today. You mentioned Nord Stream and some other pieces of infrastructure in place now which have been or were vulnerable. But this vulnerability is going to intensify dramatically as the energy transition progresses. And, again, just make more vulnerabilities with energy transition around things like electric grids, and other transmission modes, and storage. So one of the big things about the energy transition is that in a successful energy transition world, so much of what we do on a daily basis will be electrified. So I think now 20 percent of global economic activity is electrified. That number will be more like 50 percent. And so at first you think of all the additional infrastructure that is going to be needed to support the electrification, not just of the transport sector but of many, many other places. And that that electricity is going to need to be almost fully decarbonized, which is a big step up. I think, now it’s about—globally, about 38 percent of the energy flowing through to electricity is of a decarbonize nature. So you’re going to have a lot more infrastructure that is going to be sustaining a much greater proportion of global economic activity. And with that is going to come all kinds of vulnerabilities. Now, some of the vulnerabilities will be, as we’ve just been discussing, kind of like attacks, cyberattacks, physical attacks, like we saw on Nord Stream. But some of them will come from other sources. So if you think about climate change and look at just how climate change has affected the generation of clean energy in the last few years, whether it’s in France, where a very hot summer made it hard to cool the nuclear reactors of France, or in Brazil where droughts have made hydropower very hard to sustain. But then we think about increasing vicious weather systems and the impact that that’s going to have on energy infrastructure. So you have kind of manmade threats, but you also will have climate change—all of these things making this infrastructure more vulnerable. And then finally, I’d just point out, if you look at the government’s assessment of kind of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, one of the areas where I’ve had friends and colleagues who are in government kind of point out to me—this is public information, but public information that they feel nobody has focused on—is just how concerned the U.S. government is about the Chinese penetration of energy infrastructure in the United States, and presumably other parts of the world. Which is just a dormant capacity, but the sense is that if the United States and China were to get into any kind of conflict, that there’s actually a latent Chinese capacity to do some significant damage to our energy infrastructure. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from John Francis, who’s at the University of Utah: Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, do you think that lasting impact on Europe will be an increased and sustained commitment to renewable energy? O’SULLIVAN: Great question. I touched on it a little bit at the beginning. Since it’s asking for my opinion, I’ll give my opinion. And as I said, I think there are some reasons why this is a good source of debate. In fact, I had this as a debate in my class not too long ago, a few weeks ago. I do think, on the whole, if you’re just talking about Europe—and I understand the question was directed towards Europe—on the whole, I do think that this is probably going to lead—not probably. I think we’re already seeing it, and I believe it will continue, which is this enhanced commitment to energy transition. So keep in mind that Europe was already there. Europe was already the most advanced in terms of reining in its carbon emissions to any other region in the world. So it already had that commitment. And this goes back to the whole caveman question. And it generally was not focusing so much on energy security, because it saw Russia as a reliable supplier over the course of decades. And so there was a desire to transition away from natural gas and fossil fuels, but there wasn’t seen to be a national security imperative at all. And that has changed. And I think that has really meant that you’re going to have this intense, intense commitment to it. Some people have asked me—I think this question was prefaced with “regardless of the outcome in Ukraine.” Some people have asked, well what happens if, when Putin is no longer in power in Russia? Are the Europeans going to go back to importing Russian natural gas? And my answer there would be, I don’t really see that happening even remotely to the scale of European dependence before the war. Even in the face of a different kind of Russia. I think the effort that the Europeans are taking to move away from Russian natural gas is not going to be easily reversed, even in the face of a different kind of government in Russia—which I’m quite skeptical about happening in the short term in any case. So I think we could certainly imagine a future in which Europe is importing more Russian gas than it’s importing now—and it still is importing Russian gas, a lot of it liquefied natural gas. But I don’t see it reverting back to the volumes in which the Europeans were importing Russian natural gas before the war. I see more of this commitment to meeting energy needs through renewable energy. What I see is really slowing it down, to some extent, is what we talked about earlier, which is the rise of populism and that, again, if energy security becomes a rallying factor for European politics, I think it could influence some of the initiative and energy and resources that exists to go into it. But I don’t think the political commitment is going to disappear. FASKIANOS: Great. I’d like to go to Ken Bernier at Central New Mexico Community College, with a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you, Irina and Dr. O’Sullivan. I am with Central New Mexico Community College, in the political science department. I had a relatively simple question, and it’s a follow on to Nord Stream. I’ve read Seymour Hersh’s article and I’m trying to figure out, was this an attempt to convert Europe to green energy quicker or was it an attempt to stymie Russia’s influence on providing natural gas and reaping the benefits of all that money? Thank you. O’SULLIVAN: So I haven’t read Seymour Hersh’s article, so I’m at a disadvantage. And when somebody says, I’m asking a relatively simple question, I always think, Ken, hmm, that’s not going to be simple. So it’s hard. I haven’t read the article. And to be honest, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty around the motives and the particular actors, and who ordered it, and all of that. So I think it’s a little bit hard to answer your question in a very specific sense. I think what was happening—if you look at the graph of how Europe was getting off of Russian energy before the explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines, it was moving pretty rapidly away from Russian natural gas. And the flows through the Nord Stream pipelines had diminished greatly but were still substantial in some way. I suppose—again, I could speculate on the motives of potentially various actors, but I think that the trend line away from Russian energy was very, very clear. And if we keep in mind—we kind of go back to—the IEA had this report that came out. I think it came out in March 2022. And it basically was an assessment. This is the International Energy Agency in Paris. It had this assessment of what does Europe need to do to get off of Russian energy by the end of the year? I think that was their timeframe. And they had ten steps. And these were really hard steps. They had to do with curbing European demand for Russian energy, or energy generally. Had to do with diversifying supply. Had to do with reigniting politically controversial nuclear power plants. Had to do with building new LNG capacity. All of these things, to get away from Russia natural gas. And I looked at that plan and I thought, like, well, that’s great. It’s good that there’s a path forward. But I was deeply skeptical that it would be able to be achieved. And I think for the most part the Europeans outperformed even their own expectations. And I think that would have happened regardless of whether that pipeline had been destroyed or not. So I don’t know that that particular act had a fundamental effect on the direction of Europe weaning itself away from Russian gas. FASKIANOS: So thank you, Meghan. I’m going to take—there are lots of written questions and raised hands, and I’m sorry that we can’t get to them all. But I wanted to take the opportunity. If you could just give us a little bit—we have professors and students on the call. You’ve worked in—you’ve worked in the government. You’re now heading up the Belfer Center. And just talk a little bit about your career choices and encouraging students, what you would like to say to students and professors who are teaching students, what you would like to leave with them about career opportunities. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. So, first of all, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you all, and wish we had more time to go through your questions and hear from you. I’ve been at Harvard now for about sixteen years. And before that, as Irina mentioned when she was introducing me, I served in the U.S. government. And I served at the State Department. And I served at the Pentagon, and overseas. And most of my time at the White House. And I sort of feel like there are different stages in life and different delights out of different career paths. And I think that many of the professors on this call will share with me the real sense of privilege to be able to teach young people, and inspire young people, and to learn from young people. It’s a great thing to be in an environment that is filled with people with lots of energy to change the world. But being in government was a certain kind of extraordinary privilege as well. And in many respects, the ability to combine both of those things I feel has been a true professional gift, but one that that many people are able to create because there’s a real synthesis between thinking deeply about things and then deciding that you’re going to take the deep thought that you have had the opportunity to indulge in and try to turn it into action. And to me, that’s just been one of the greatest satisfactions of my career, is to have an idea and work with others in a government setting to try to put it into action. Of course, there are other settings where you can put ideas into action—the private sector, that world of philanthropy. There’s lots of places to do that. In government, the beauty and challenge of it is, one, you can never do it on your own. So it’s inherently a collaborative effort. And two, the government can be very hard to maneuver, very hard to get an aircraft carrier to shift course. But when it does, it’s so powerful and your impact is magnified. So, I would say that if you’re interested in public service it is still a very noble career. And it is one that I think you’ll find enlists every part of you. You’ve got to be smart, but you also have to know how to cajole people and convince people. You have to be persuasive. You have to have a certain amount of stamina. You have to be able to look at the long term, but also not lose track of the details. So, if you like to challenge yourself and you’d like to wake up and never ask yourself the question, what am I doing, then I definitely would consider a career in public service. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much, Meghan. That was terrific. Again, Meghan O’Sullivan. If you haven’t read her book, Windfall, you should, as well as go back to those articles that she mentioned coauthoring with Jason Bordoff in Foreign Affairs. We have already sent out—shared at least one with you, but you should go back and look at those. And thank you for serving on our board. We look forward to seeing how you’re shaping the Belfer Center as the new leader of it. To all of you, thank you for your questions and written questions. I’m sorry, if we could not get to you. We will just have to have another webinar on this topic. The next one will be on Wednesday, March 6, at 1:00 p.m. with David Scheffer, who is a senior fellow at CFR. And he’ll talk about complex humanitarian emergencies. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_academic on X, and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So, again, thank you all, and thank you, Meghan O’Sullivan. O’SULLIVAN: Thank you. (END)

Panelists discuss private capital’s role in leading the clean energy transition and what it takes to establish a redeployment of steady capital investing in decarbonization. 

At COP28 in Dubai, negotiators once again focus on increasing climate finance as the world struggles to manage rising temperatures, historic natural disasters, and environmental depletion. Panelists explore innovative finance-based solutions to protect and take account of the economic value of natural capital to advance the goals of the Paris agreement and other key international efforts.

Chevron Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth discusses the current state of energy, including the role of fossil fuels and the energy transition to renewable and low-carbon sources, and how geopolitical crises affect global energy security. The CEO Speaker Series is a unique forum for leading global CEOs to share their insights on issues at the center of commerce and foreign policy, and to discuss the changing role of business globally.

Elizabeth Willetts, planetary health policy director at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, leads the conversation on the health risks of climate change. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s discussion of the Fall 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic if you would like to share these materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, a CFR takes no institutional positions or matters of policy. We are delighted to have Liz Willetts with us to discuss health risks of climate change. Dr. Willetts is the planetary health policy director at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. She has more than twenty years’ experience mobilizing knowledge and engagement on biodiversity, climate change pollution, food systems, and community health for marginalized populations. Previously, Dr. Willetts was a longstanding member of the policy reporting team at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and a writer and editor for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and The Lancet. She’s authored and led multiple interagency science policy briefs on climate change for the World Health Organization and authored a regional policy guide on “Operationalizing the Environmental-Health Nexus” for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. And she wrote a working policy paper for CFR, for our Global Health Program, entitled “Managing the Health Risks of Climate Change,” which we shared as part of your background reading for this call. She’s also a clinician and served long-term roles in resource-poor primary care medical clinics, in Micronesia, the United States, and Central America. So, Liz, thanks for being with us. I can think of nobody better to lead this conversation than you. If you could begin by talking about the relationship between climate change and health and provide an overview of the major health risks of climate change. WILLETTS: Sure. And thank you so much, Irina, and to CFR for inviting me here to this panel. I wanted to open just simply stating I am daunted by the topic, as I think anyone would and should be, as well as the incredible expertise on the attendance list here. Wanted to briefly mention, I see experts in science, policy, law, diplomacy, anthropology, other socioeconomic fields, as well as higher education. And wanted to emphasize that my expertise and focus is on the space between. So the science to policy and the policy to practice, and how we mobilize ideas and people in new ways, how we analyze the policy architecture in which we have to work, apply knowledge, and make decisions. And so, the views that I am attempting to bring to this conversation and this community of practice are from a transdisciplinary perspective. So thank you very much for tuning in. Andy Haines and I were asked to write a paper for the CFR on climate change and health security, as Irina mentioned, and specifically on the norms and frameworks used to consider both of these individually and in combination. So from this, there were several key questions related to what Irina just posed in terms of the health risks of climate change. First is, what is a health risk in terms of global health security as we know it? Does climate change create health risks recognized under frameworks for health security? And to whom do these norms and frameworks and climate change and health security serve? And, for that reason, is it possible to address the health security risks of climate change based on who is served by the definition of health security? Are we considering the health risks of climate change across the full spectrum of international climate law? Now, at this time and 2022 to 2023, that includes health risks and impacts across three pillars: mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. Finally, what is the policy architecture for managing health risks of climate change at the global scale? We set upon writing this paper to consider all of these questions. And for those of you who have begun to look at managing the health risks of climate change, what we find is we’re really working through several theories of change at the same time. We’re attempting to find multiple dimensions for transformational change in climate change and health, but we’re also looking to mobilize behavior change to address global, and expanding, and interrelated crises related to the environment and impacts of anthropogenic activity. So I want to just to frame the picture a bit with these attempts at collective action at change. And the first we have, in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It aimed for collective action by charging countries with individual emission reduction goals. That had limited success. So 2015 with the Paris Agreement we made a new commitment to a new type of collective action to commit countries to a global temperature goal. That has also had mixed success—limited success. And so now we’re seeing other theories of change for how we shift our behavior, our consumption, our production, and our action to address climate change. And that includes through rights-based approaches, looking at, you know, creating a moral shift, and creating accountability for individuals and for states in terms of tools for litigation and agenda setting. At the same time, we’re trying to look through health agendas and find instruments to guide action on climate change. So this spectrum of tools is being used at the same time and is becoming more and more urgent, and is very much related to the health risks of climate change and how we can address them. So I had also a couple of examples I wanted to bring to frame the problem as I see it, as one of mobilizing ideas and people in these science to policy, policy to practice spaces. We have loads of statistics on the health risks of climate change in terms of the emergencies we see, what’s happening in terms of droughts and floods, the bursting of dams, the air pollution, which in the United States has now come over like an umbrella across the country in terms of the wildfires we’re seeing in Canada. Then also, in other countries, the new outbreaks of infectious disease, dengue and malaria, and a whole host of other conditions that are higher priorities in other countries. There are tons of statistics. The news shows us new examples of these every day. So the statistics I wanted to show here are related to the policy architecture that we’re working with to get a little bit more of a framing for how we’re addressing the health risks. So 198 countries participate in the UNFCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global decision-making body for climate action. And the majority of those countries committed in 1994 to this space when the convention entered into force. Sixteen years after that, countries agreed to advance implementation by establishing a reporting mechanism on adaptation. And that was a means of galvanizing collective action and sharing of best practices for addressing the impacts of climate change. National adaptation plans emerged in 2010. In 2022 in an assessment only thirty-eight of 198 countries had national adaptation plans. And only fifteen of those national adaptation plans were—actually had in place a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess if the plans were effective at protecting communities, habitat, infrastructure, and ultimately health and the social determinants of health at the individual and population level. This is one tool, but a big one. And I think these numbers show us that we’re not managing the health risks of climate change well, and/or we could say the framework to do it under the UNFCCC is not achieving the goal. In the interim, in the last years, health national adaptation plans, different NAPs—HNAPs, have emerged under ministries of health. This is the attempt of the health sector—ministry of health sector—to create a comprehensive framework for managing the health risks of climate change at the national scale. As of now, approximately seventy countries have some form of a health national adaptation plan developed or in development. So that’s 35 percent of countries. That’s still not getting the job done. And that is not under the UNFCCC. That is under the global health and health institutional framework agenda. Another key statistic that I just want to bring out as an indicator that we haven’t really gotten this right, and that our health risks are significant and increasing, is this. Less than ten years ago, around 2005, a new term—indeed, a new emotion emerged to reflect, in English, the stress of our inability to address the impacts of anthropogenic activity on the global environment. In other words, the stress of encroaching planetary boundaries, that term is solastalgia. It’s the distress of a changing natural environment while being in that environment. Essentially, we have changed our emotional spectrum and our language because we have not figured out how to manage the health risks of climate change. And this really is a true indicator of whether or not we’re managing the health risks of climate change well or sufficiently. So here comes a question is, are we addressing these under the UNFCCC climate regime? Are we addressing them under the global health agenda? Can we do it under both? In brief summary, climate change creates health risks that are emergent, immediate, chronic, and slow onset, and that affect the state of health of individuals and for communities, as well as the social determinants of individuals and communities. This is a tremendous risk. This is a global health security risk. So to go back to one of the framing questions for the paper we did to CFR, I can’t get to all of them in the time I have here but perhaps in the Q&A, I want to highlight a couple. And so let’s go back to the question of, what is a health risk in terms of global health security as we know it? If we look at the definitions, norms, and frameworks for the field and institutions of global health security, “health risks,” put it in quotes, “are communicable. Health emergencies aren’t interoperable. They are focused on addressing communicable risks.” Climate change is not considered a health risk or a health emergency under the definitions, norms, and frameworks for global health security. Similarly, we don’t actually know what a pandemic is. We operate as if a pandemic, which is a health emergency in global scale, is merely communicable. Yet, global environmental changes have health incidences that are worldwide, multidimensional health hazards are hitting most countries, 99 percent of the global population breathes air pollution. The UN special rapporteur on the environment calls the realities of chemical exposure a silent pandemic, because there’s this universal exposure to over five thousand chemicals, including the ones that reprogram our physiology and are heritable across generations. These are not considered pandemics. Planetary health and encroaching planetary boundaries do not fall under the definition or framing of pandemic, or the institutions aimed to address pandemics. And that includes climate change. So a concluding question there is, will we achieve global health security if we do not have the right scope for the definitions, norms, and frameworks, and if we do not include climate change in it? Major institutional structures that we looked at have not approached this gap. The International Health Regulations, the scope of the Global Fund, although in part they’re looking at that, Centers for Disease Control, the Global Health Security Index, USAID maintain a robust paradigm of global health security that does not include climate change. In the new negotiations for a pandemic instrument under the WHO, some call it the pandemic accord, there are brief provisions on multilateral environmental agreements for climate and for biodiversity. But over many, many months and rounds of negotiations, these provisions have not developed or advanced. It’s unclear whether they’re going to move forward if the pandemic accord moves forward. So this is a brief highlight to indicate our architectures are still operating in very significant silos. And I would just conclude by saying it’s—in terms of climate change and health, it’s not enough to frame and create arguments for health co-benefits of climate action. We need to change the definition, the norms, and frameworks that make up the policy architecture in which we work, move, mobilize, and act. And there’s a tremendous amount to do. So over to you Irina, to see if we got that first question. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: (Laughs.) Thank you so much, Liz. That was a fantastic overview for all of us. And now we’re going to turn to our group. (Gives queuing instructions.) So with that, I am going to take the first question from Pam Chasek. She has raised her hand. Q: Hi, can you hear me? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Hi, Liz. Pam Chasek. For the purpose of this, Manhattan College, but also executive editor of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. One of the big things that we find, both at the domestic and the international level, is this notion of protecting one’s turf and the siloization of policies. And we see that definitely with this intersection of health and the environment, or specifically climate change, where the two sides don’t talk to each other as well as they should. And that integration of health concerns into the UNFCCC, as well as bringing climate change to the WHO. But the same thing happens at the national level with regard to ministries. And so I’m wondering if you have any recommendations for how we can cross those silos in this case and also these recommendations may go elsewhere. Thanks. WILLETTS: Shall I take that one, Irina, or? FASKIANOS: Yes. Let’s—I like going one by one, so that we— WILLETTS: So, before I answer anything, I would like to say that Pam has been a mentor of mine. And so when I said I might be a little humbled and intimidated by the guest list, I would say you’re—a true expert has asked a question here. Thanks for attending, Pam. This question of the national-level integration is really the crux of the problem, because we can’t move implementation, you cannot fulfill a multilateral environmental agreement, unless you have robust implementation. And that’s going to depend on integrating at the national level. And I’ll also answer—in addition to this question, I’m going to answer one I saw on the chat related to—let me see if it’s here—can nations differentiate between natural and climate change occurrences in their actions? And so if—first of all, in terms of resources, many countries don’t have the personnel, the human capacity, the financial capacity to think about these things in silos. They have to get together. And so addressing climate change, environmental issues, and health issues all at the same time makes financial sense. It’s really a matter of how do we shift those mandates? How do we get budget lines that cross ministries of environment and ministries of health. If ministries of health are developing health national adaptation plans but don’t have a budget line to act on them, they’re not going to move forward. And so there has to be a bigger shift at looking at the architectures at the national level, like Pam pointed out, and how the ministry of finance is going to mobilize them. And there are other ministries that are involved too. Food systems are the core of many environmental health problems. If the ministry of agriculture is not involved there, if there’s not a health component to the mandate of ministry of agriculture or if there’s not a climate component, we’re not going to address these intersecting problems. But the increasing issue here is national problems, national environmental health risks, are being reflected also at the planetary boundary level. So fulfilling a multilateral environmental agreement should help address planetary boundaries on climate change, should also help affect interrelated changes at the national level. It’s a tall task. It involves a lot of capacity building, looking at language, looking at the capacity of health. Can health move beyond the scope of infectious disease at the national level? Can the environment move beyond singular foci? It’s a huge capacity problem. And I think it’s a true area to invest more time and money. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And the question that you pulled from the Q&A box was written by Nicole Ambar De Santos, who’s an undergraduate student at the Washington University in St. Louis. So I’m going to take the next question, a raised hand from Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome at Brooklyn College. Q: Good afternoon. Well, this is a subject that every part of the world is concerned about. I spent the last year in Nigeria. And there’s a National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies. And climate change is one of the thematic areas that they are looking at to advise the Nigerian government on policy that should be made. You know, I agree with you that the norms, and architecture, and framework should change. And that the responses right now are not—they’re woefully inadequate. But who’s going to lead the change? And then also, whom should we hold accountable when inadequate, and really ineffective policies are made? Even the very small baby steps that have been made are often walked back when it comes to committing resources to do the work. So how really can the idea that this change is not only necessary, it’s imperative—how is it going to get through all our thick skulls on this, because it’s very frustrating. There are all kinds of—there are many devastating climate change-induced catastrophes. Floods, you know, fires, and all that. And they kill huge numbers of people. The pandemic is still with us, you know, although it’s now controlled a bit, and there will be more in the future. So how do we really take this seriously and who leads the change? WILLETTS: Thank you so much for the question. And I think I hear the urgency and importance in your voice, and the interest in solving this problem. How are we going to do it? And I would say, my first thought when you say, who is going to lead? I would say, as someone who’s multiple decades into life, the energy and momentum of youth around the world, including their presence at events such as the UN General Assembly, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Global Youth Biodiversity Network—massive momentum from youth who are not only motivated by, for example, solastalgia and eco-emotions, but they come equipped with information, and data, and tremendous energy to affect change at every scale of government. It is overwhelming. It is bewildering. It is impressive. And I think the more we can identify and equip those youth leaders, the more we are going to affect—inspire ourselves and fight for that change. This collective action issue, as I mentioned, 1997 the Kyoto Protocol, 2015 the Paris Agreement, they’re not working very well. But now we’ve got this enormous campaign of youth energy. Let’s see what they can do to help us figure this out. You asked another question. And I wanted—I’m trying to remember what it was related to motivating action, but it made me want to raise the—kind of recall the human right to the environment, which was adopted under the UN General Assembly last year. Oh, accountability. You mentioned accountability. So if we’re trying to get accountability for individuals, for stakeholders, and to create a framework for accountability for states and businesses, taking a greater look at the UN human right to—or, everyone’s human right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment, a rights-based approach that comes with a framework of principles, is a really good start. Because it shows what stakeholder—what information stakeholders should come to the table with to address these issues. It also shows what obligations states have to provide that information so that we’re making better consumption and production decisions, that we make better consumer decisions, that we hold businesses accountable to an agreed framework. That’s at state level. It could be kind of mobilized into the city level. It’s agreed at the global level. Rights-based approaches are a real—considered to be a real tool and the necessary part of our theory of change. So that needs to be part of. And then in terms of leadership and costs, I think businesses are already paying attention to these details. And the infrastructure industry is already looking at rules and whether it maps out to cost ten years later. If they are only putting in $100,000 to make sure they meet the metric related to an airport resilience standard, but they can see ten years down the road the cost is going to be a million, they’re investing, you know, $200,000 to 300,000 (dollars) now to prevent the other $700,000 of costs they’re expecting in the future. How can we make those case studies more obvious? Maybe that’s part of the toolset. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take a written question from Jeffrey Sturchio, who is visiting scholar for the Institute of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins. How can COP28 take best advantage of a planned day on climate and health? Or will this just be a day devoted to talk, with no subsequent actions on climate and health? WILLETTS: This is a great question. I’m really glad that you asked this, Jeffrey. And I think I will answer it by saying what it should not do. What it should not do this Health Day is be merely a publicity. A publicity is useful at a traditional academic business conference. A publicity is not optimizing the potential of an intergovernmental negotiation. The UNFCCC and COP28 is an intergovernmental negotiation. It’s not a normal conference. So anything related to health and Health Day should recognize this is climate law. This is the circus of international environmental law. How do you impact that? How do you impact the stakeholders and the attendees there? If the outcomes and conversations of Health Day don’t have a lot to do with international environmental law and the decisions negotiators need to make this year, it will not maximize its impact. The more we can connect health conversations and commitments to the actual negotiations on the agenda, the greater likelihood there’s going to be impact, the greater likelihood they will be heard by the influencers in the room, and the greater likelihood that going into 2024 we’re shifting the conversation, because we’re marrying the conversation. The outcome of a health day may or may not be a formal commitment at the global level. If it takes the nature of being an agreed commitment at the global level, to an institution, to a forum, to the UN, it may have greater impact than if countries’ ministers of any sector commit to their own efforts back home, which will only translate to political commitments that have short timeframes. So a commitment to a greater forum, to parts of the UNFCCC, if there’s recognition of that commitment within the COP28 outcome then what you’re doing is you’re entering the law space and you’re creating a synergy there. And that that would be my thinking on that. FASKIANOS: Terrific. Thank you. I’m going to go next to Fordham University’s International Political Economy and Development program. Please identify yourself, and there you go. You’re unmuted. Q: Thank you. I’m Genevieve, again, in the IPED program at Fordham. Thank you for being with us today, Dr. Willetts. So my question is when we look at the negative effects of climate change on human health we often see asymmetries in the severity of who is affected because not all voices get an equal say at the table. So what suggestions do you have for policymakers in better mitigating risk for indigenous and/or marginalized groups? WILLETTS: That’s almost a technical question, in some ways. I could answer that in a science direction and a policy direction and kind of in a human catalyst direction, and my first thought is to think about science. So I worked with WHO to develop the WHO review of IPCC evidence last year, essentially looking and reading the AR6 as a clinician and then translating it into a public health document that could be interpreted in the categories—the normal categories for public health and in terms of medical diagnoses, trying to understand it in terms of global burden of disease. So to answer your question how do we create better parity to address the risks, one way to do that is to really mobilize science from the communities that are being affected. That is a gap in the current IPCC. If you look at where most of the research comes from or who’s performing the research or the health conditions assessed we’re not as broad as we need to be. We’re not looking at necessarily the most marginalized and then we’re not translating the science for the most marginalized into policy action. Someone else in this Q&A has touched on nutrition so I just want to use this as an example. If you look at the IPCC projections for climate mortality they have—they have three conditions that are the risks—are the greatest risks for mortality. One of them is childhood malnutrition. That is a condition that low-income countries and countries in vulnerable states are going to face much more than higher income countries. Malnutrition, top three for climate mortality. So food systems are critical. And, yet, if you look at how food systems and food policy has been addressed under the UNFCCC it’s not looking to address the kinds of impacts on food systems that could be very meaningful, especially for Global South and low-income countries where they’re going to be really hit hard by this. Food systems need a thread of consideration for mitigation, the cause—30 percent of emissions, 8 percent of which are from food loss and waste. Adaptation, looking at these health impacts; malnutrition, how to deal with that; how to deal with the malnutrition and chronic disease implications of mass migration; how to deal with loss and damage in food systems, the fact that economic and noneconomic losses greatly center on changes and disruptions to the agricultural sector; this is not being done to any significant level. And if we really want to address some of the greatest health impacts for marginalized communities including—I believe you mentioned indigenous communities—this needs to be a better focus. And you also expressed your question as not only the subject, like, dealing with the problem but getting the voices to the table. I think there have been strides in the last years to build stakeholder voices in these spaces and I look forward to seeing what COP28 will bring to the table, especially since there’s more literature coming forward that’s recognized in health journals and other places, that’s bringing indigenous scholarship to the table. So I look forward to seeing more and more of that and how Health Day may highlight that, and I hope it does. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. I’m going to go next to Brisa Oliveira de Avila. If you could accept the unmute and identify yourself that would be great. Q: Hello, everyone. Yes. So my name is Brisa. I am in the master’s program with the School of International Affairs at Penn State. And I was wondering what are your thoughts. We’ve been seeing, you know, recently with these heat waves and such how this impacts, of course, all of us in the day-to-day life and I’ve been seeing a lot of movement around how this impacts particularly workers, right—either workers from, you know, obvious—agricultural and stuff like that who were directly impacted by heat but also, you know, us who work maybe in offices and such. How do you feel that it adds to the policy the fact that this impacts private businesses, private stakeholders who are maybe the forces hiring all these people and they’re responsible for them and, you know, if they have—you can consider or not that this is a work environment-related accident, right, in the workforce or, you know, how long can we wait possibly for them to start putting up policies privately, let’s say, and how that affects, you know, in the more broad sense of the global health because, you know, maybe we’re going to have to start locally to then reach a global level in this. And not only work, but, you know, every other private institution that is already getting a toll because of this climate change. WILLETTS: Thank you for the question. I think it’s eye opening for me just because I don’t spend a lot of time on the occupational policies. But it’s really an interesting area because—I think you said you were from Penn State. So the workforce issues in Pennsylvania may be very, very different than what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, agricultural or physical labor workers who deal with environmental conditions on a daily basis. But if there are drastic changes to the ability of the workforce to engage and support the economy, as you said, worldwide that’s a really important topic to start talking about but also to start using in the tool belt and how do we do that. I think I’ll defer the rest of the question just because I don’t have the statistics and literature on that. But how do we think about the workforce and use statistics related to the economic impact of employees to affect change, it’s a good question and how can the health sector, since I come from a planetary health, public health, global health background—how can the health sector get behind that. It’s a good question. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I’m going to take the next question from Esmirna Mateo, who’s an undergrad student at the City College of New York, who has a few questions based on your response to the question about who can make the change. And Esmirna comments: It sounds like the weight or leading for a change burdens the youth. What can seniors who have worked years in government and have connections do? The youth care because it will affect them in their future so why can’t those who already have power access to make change also be advocates? WILLETTS: It’s a really interesting social question and I’ve seen it before. A couple of things come to mind. One is this idea of burdening youth and certainly that is an issue. Intergenerational equity, the idea that future generations are inhibited or harmed by activities of today and kind of business operations of today, pollution of today, is a big deal. So at the same time that we’re seeing especially among youth this eco-anxiety, solastalgia, new environmental psychology field. We’re also seeing tremendous energy and interest in action and engagement and creating change. So we have these two things, really, coming at the same time. How do we create bridges there? I would say if they’re—if you’re an influencer, if you have an impactful post in science policy law, community development, any of these places, create an opportunity to bring in sharp, ambitious youth to be part of that. It’s a struggle to have a burden that you cannot address. So if we are burdening youth then perhaps the first response is give the voice and the opportunity for action to youth to kind of contribute to handling this—these issues at every scale. This is a—I come with a transdisciplinary view. There are tremendous gaps between disciplines. If finding new ways for change is of interest and within the scope and opportunity of yourself or other people what kinds of disciplinary bridges can be made and that’s a second place I would advocate for real impact—real impactful change as starting points. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going next to Clemente Abrokwaa with a raised hand. Q: Hi. Thank you so much for this wonderful talk on this important topic. I have two questions. One is actually not a question; I’m just wondering about that. But the first one is looking at when the topic is important and looking at the conditions in Africa the health sector is in shambles. They don’t have—even in some countries, you know, the hospitals don’t have even beds and medication is a problem. So I’m just wondering, how serious this—the climate health—you know, change in health, how seriously it can be taken, you know, in Africa by African leaders when, you know, the immediate need is for people to get medication or the basic needs of health. My second question is actually not a question but if you could elaborate on the—and you mentioned the pandemic accord, just what it is just for me. Yeah. Thanks. WILLETTS: Thank you for the question and I couldn’t agree more. I think environmental health risks take back seats to other issues, especially issues that might be more emergent or immediate or for which we have real treatments and expertise to deal with. That being said, I think the—you know, many health systems in those situations with low resources, lack of beds, can’t deal with a pandemic either. So if our definition of global health security is only focused on pandemics, which we can’t deal with well, and isn’t scoped to consider other environmental health risks it’s almost shooting ourselves in the foot to really understanding what we’re dealing with or how we’re trying to spend money. How can countries and health systems that don’t have a lot of resources even begin to grapple with the idea of climate change? Perhaps there are different ways to look at it even if there aren’t immediate resources to deal with the health problems such as cost. Some systems may deal with really obvious problems such as droughts impacting the actual infrastructure of health centers. Some may deal with destruction of buildings and things like this. Some may deal with limitations to employees showing up to work related to XYZ other reasons. But is there a way to create more cost analysis of five-, ten-, fifteen-year scenarios and a scoping of the burden of disease related to the environment that makes sense and is useful to those types of health systems. There’s tremendous opportunity to look at global burden of disease of climate change—global burden of disease of any encroaching planetary boundary but of climate change and then to also look at the national burden of disease due to climate change. We’re not doing that, and I think the IPCC review did a tremendous amount of work—a thousand pages, so many researchers, so many volunteer expert reviewers, so many journal articles. But still it’s skewed. We don’t yet have a good regional breakdown, a good national breakdown of the kinds of risks that are going to be faced and that could be extremely useful tool to mobilize and invest in. And then the other question I would just pose in there is, you know, one of the real risks of climate change, as with various environmental natural hazards, is migration and then how does that play into stability. Political leaders, national leaders, governments, are—will need to think about stability of government and political circumstances in the face of climate change. The numbers for projections for migration are astounding, and the other thing that isn’t mapped out related to that is where are people going to go. So one environmental health risk, one natural hazard, could mobilize entire communities, entire subregions, to another subregion, kind of transferring a bit of instability and risks to another place and the health burden that comes with that. And we—I think these are undeveloped topics, and as a clinician and public health professional the main thing that gets ignored is not the emergencies, the kind of physical traumas, the injuries, diseases that need antibiotics, and things like that. The things that are ignored are what happens if all the schools are destroyed just like they happened in Pakistan? What are those kids going to do? What is that going to affect for their cognition, their cognitive development, their emotional development, the cohesiveness of their families? What is it going to mean for their risk of chronic disease? Typically, if there’s malnutrition in the first two years of life, so under nutrition, that might lead to stunting or wasting or just severe malnutrition, the risk of developing diabetes and metabolic diseases is far greater for that population. So if you have whole communities migrating related to environmental threats there’s a huge health problem that may be addressed with kind of emergency humanitarian operations in the first months or year. But then there are sequential health issues. So social determinant of health issues, chronic disease issues that are not going to be addressed in our current framework and for which wherever this mass migrating population goes to that health system is not going to be ready for that, and there are all sorts of details that are coming out in the literature probably under assessed but the rates of domestic violence tend to go up. What does that mean for women’s health care? What does that mean for reproductive health? What does that mean for pediatric health? All sorts of really interesting questions. So it gets very complex very fast and I would say we’re just at the kind of a smidge of development of understanding health beyond a few diseases and looking at it as a spectrum in terms of the state of health and then barely even touching the social determinants that are going to come after that. That’s going to be expensive, it’s going to have issues for stability, and as you can tell there’s so much to talk about in this issue. So I really thank you for that question. Quickly, the pandemic accord—out of the COVID-19 pandemic the mad rush to figure out how to deal with health emergencies, how to deal with pandemics because the rollout of response and production of vaccines and identification of all sorts of metrics related to surveillance was quite slow and poor and not cohesive and not equitable across countries. And so the attempt was to create a new instrument, a new kind of health law, if you will, to govern the operations of response related to pandemics under the interpretation that they’re a communicable disease. So this is a really interesting big-picture topic because we don’t have a clear answer on the origins of COVID-19. Huge focus on zoonoses and that’s related to land use change, biodiversity loss, climate change, and all sorts of other environmental drivers. So if that’s the case and a pandemic of infectious disease has caused such a problem and our response to that is to make a treaty that addresses just this we haven’t really addressed the full scope of health risks that could come from various environmental changes and the—so inherently the—you know, health experts are trying to figure out how to create a better operating framework and to consider some drivers although climate change is only a very limited piece of that right now. It’s supposed to conclude in the next year but there’s a lot of debates on how effective it can be and whether it will conclude on time. FASKIANOS: Great. I think that was Sheri Fink’s question, an adjunct associate professor in the School of Public Health at Tulane University. And we have a similar question from—or in the same vein from Marybeth MacPhee, a professor of public health at Roger Williams University: If national global approach is to addressing climate change and health, what is the potential for taking regional approaches, particularly for adaptation? That level seems to make more sense for systems problems and WHO has a regional architecture in place. WILLETTS: I think the interest in regional approaches is strong. I think it has not been developed sufficiently on the environment or the health side, and specifically if we’re looking at planetary health risks it has not been developed to consider kind of integrated environmental health risks and the spectrum of risks. But it’s important politically. Regional approaches can address transboundary issues so any kind of air pollution coming from agricultural methods, dust that goes across different borders, floods that go across different borders, coastal issues that go across. So many different problems actually need a regional approach that it needs to be developed more and politically that can be very advantageous for kind of a sharing best practices platform so that national governments can see how to take better action collectively and efficiently and then also for governments to create kind of a collective position when we’re trying to create global agreements and advance global discussions such as under the UNFCCC in one direction or another. Having a regional approach can be impactful if we can get there. In terms of health, some of the structures for development and—economics and development, structures for kind of environment sustainable development are more advanced than some of the health structures and some of the health structures are more focused on really narrow areas. The whole one health approach has been adopted as a term in a number of circles including global circles, national circles, looking at regional circles. But, again, it won’t be able to address the full spectrum of challenges and currently doesn’t address climate change unless it really expands to a broader scope of environmentally comprehensive one health and—or even to take forward some planetary health ideas. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. All right. We’re going to go next to the raised hand from Melissa Valeria Bisner, and please identify yourself, Melissa. Q: Hello. Melissa Bisner here. FASKIANOS: And what university? Q: Fairleigh Dickinson University. FASKIANOS: Great. Q: I have a question, though. Does global warming have something to do with climate change? Because I think it does because, you know, like, the—I think, like, the weather is constantly going, you know, like, up and down. Like, it’d be warm the one minute and then it’d be cold the next. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. WILLETTS: Thanks, Melissa. Yes, absolutely it does. They are connected. FASKIANOS: OK. Let’s go next to—I’m looking at all the—we only have a few minutes left so where should we go? OK. From Ava Eszenyi at Indiana University. The United States is a complex capitalist market that will always favor profit. How can we combat corporate lobbying that prevents climate change and regulation? WILLETTS: Well, this is a PhD topic. I would use a positive example that will be interesting to watch and I recommend watching it for the results. This year the UNFCCC has made a requirement that any attendee to COP28 disclose, essentially, whether or not it has—that that person is representing a corporate interest, specifically the fossil fuel industry. This is fairly significant because in the past up to—I think someone actually calculated this specific number—660 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry had attended UNFCCC climate COPs in the past. So your question is about how do we make change and how do we face the real numbers and power of lobbyists from industry and I think the UNFCCC this year is attempting to try to do that by making it more visible because, essentially, for those who have never been to the UNFCCC it’s just a big arena, almost like a big group of tents with a lot of people wearing badges with their name on them and you don’t necessarily know where someone is representing. Or they may be affiliated in a different way than their badge—their delegation indicates. So this is a really interesting development. There is a lot of industry voice at UN environment meetings. It’s not just the fossil fuel industry. The food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, all of these companies have real kind of weight in the game in terms of decisions that are made to change rules or frameworks or commitments or obligations. So, you know, according to the SDGs a big focus was on partnerships, multi-stakeholder partnerships—SDG 17. This perspective that change cannot come unless everyone’s at the table is present. But how can that be shaped to make sure that there’s balance and parity? I think in the health sector this is quite interesting because there are some health players who’ve been involved in quite a few UN environmental meetings but the health professionals themselves such as clinical researchers, the folks on the front line, have not and so now we’re in this new stage of bringing those voices in to help balance out the other voice of kind of a market-based approach. How can we do that more? How can we make it more visible and how can we make sure that attendance of these decision making spaces such as global negotiations has a balanced multi-stakeholder presence? I think it’s a great question and keep an eye on it. We’ll see what kinds of reports or media articles come out of that visibility of who’s who and who’s there. FASKIANOS: Well, unfortunately, we are out of time. We have lots of questions, written questions, and raised hands. I’m sorry that we can’t get to you all. But, Dr. Liz Willetts, this has been a fantastic hour. Thank you for sharing your analysis, information, insight. We really appreciate it and we look forward to following your work at Harvard. Thanks to all of you for being part of this conversation. As a reminder, the next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, October 4, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Tamar Gutner, associate professor of international affairs at American University’s School of International Service, will talk about the international financial architecture. In the meantime I encourage you to learn more about CFR’s paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_Academic on X and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, thank you for being with us today and thank you to Dr. Willetts. WILLETTS: Thank you so much for having me and for listening to my views. I really am humbled by this attendance list here today. Thank you. (END)