Najam Keynotes Karachi International Water Conference
On November 17, 2021, Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, delivered a keynote address at the Hisaar Foundation and Engro Foundation’s 5th annual Karachi International Water Conference on climate change and water in the Age of Adaptation.
In his remarks, Najam highlight that, because of the failures of the world’s richest and polluted countries, the harsh realities of climate change are now actively affecting the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries. He went on to argue that the Age of Mitigation has past and we are now in the midst of the Age of Adaptation, in which the world must adapt to the consequences of global climate change or risk catastrophe.
Najam also offered a pessimistic view of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) claiming that the climate community in industrial countries are solely focused on their own activities and have little to no interest in paying off the climate debt owed to the vulnerable countries suffering the worst effects of climate change now. He concluded by saying the future story of climate change will be written in the vocabulary of water and that “water is to climate adaptation is what energy was to climate mitigation.”
For more from the Karachi International Water Conference, visit the event’s website.
Adil Najam is a global public policy expert who also served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. He is the Inaugural Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and was the former Vice-Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research focuses on issues of global public policy, especially those related to global climate change, South Asia, Muslim countries, environment and development, and human development. Read more about Dean Najam on his faculty profile.