Pardee Fellow at UN Climate Change Conference in Poland

Pardee Center Visiting Fellow Pablo Suarez contributed to the climate change deliberations at the Unitied Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Poznan, Poland in early December.

At a session on climate risk insurance on December 8, Dr. Suarez was part of a panel with representatives of reinsurance giants SwissRe and Partner Re, the World Food Program, Columbia University, and country delegates from Switzerland and Bangladesh, discussing the rapidly growing developments for integrating risk sharing instruments into the climate adaptation efforts of the UN framework convention. The webcast is available here. 

During his remarks, Dr. Suarez described Oxfam America’s experience designing a microinsurance pilot for Ethiopian farmers to emphasize the complexities and urgency of addressing the risk management needs of the most vulnerable.

During another session on "Early Warning Early Action", which featured the secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), as well as members of other humanitarian organizations and academic institutions, Dr. Suarez made a presentation on the innovative use of climate predictions for risk management. The occasion was used to launch an IFRC document on integrating of climate science into humanitarian decisions, to which Dr. Suarez contributed substantially.

Additionally, Dr. Suarez presented at a session organized by the European Commission on the scaling up of community-level adaptation to climate change through audiovisual tools, and chaired a session organized by development organizations on the relationships between adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

Dr. Suarez is the Associate Program Director of Programmes for the Red Cross/Red Center Climate Center and a Visiting Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.