{"id":20814,"date":"2016-01-30T21:59:54","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T02:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=20814"},"modified":"2021-02-04T09:14:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T14:14:05","slug":"najam-in-herald-on-the-limits-of-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2016\/01\/30\/najam-in-herald-on-the-limits-of-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Najam in Herald<\/i> on the Limits of Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"resilience,<\/a><\/p>\n

The poor and the most vulnerable populations in the world are being hit the\u00a0hardest by climate change, writes Dr. Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Invited to write an OpEd commenting on of the ‘pictures of the year’ in Pakistan’s largest newsmagazine, Herald<\/em><\/a> (January 2016, annual issue), Najam highlighted the toll climate change is now taking on poor communities, including in Pakistan which has been hit be a series of climate related disasters.<\/p>\n

Reviewing the\u00a0string of natural disasters that hit Pakistan in 2015, Dean Najam argued that “In the age of climate change disasters will become more frequent, not less.\u00a0But it is not climate change that kills people, makes them homeless, steals their livelihoods. It is not earthquakes. It is not heatwaves. It is certainly not nature\u2019s \u2018will\u2019. Nor can it be the \u2018will\u2019 of a benevolent and merciful God. It is, instead, Man\u2019s neglect.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Earlier in the OpEd, Najam writes:<\/p>\n

\u00a0[2015] was also another year of resilience.\u00a0<\/span>What else could it have been?<\/p>\n

Once all the death and destruction has been counted, all the tears accounted for, all the \u2018Breaking News\u2019 broken; once the moment of disaster has passed, aid workers have departed, TV cameras shut down, attention diverted; all that is then left, is resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n

…\u00a0Resilience is how the poor cope with disasters. But resilience cannot be the coping strategy of a nation. In Pakistan, that is exactly what it has become. \u00a0We resign to disasters because (a) they are inevitable, and (b) we are resilient.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Newsflash, 2015: Wrong on both counts!<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Najam concludes by suggesting that “in the race between climate change and the resilience of our poor that now seems inevitable, development is our best, maybe our only, bet. To not invest in development will be to erode our resilience. To invest in it is to conserve it for when it will truly be tested.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The full OpEd<\/a> can be read here: ‘Resilience, Shazilience!’<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Prior to his current position, Dean Adil Najam was the Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He was also a co-author for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); work for which the scientific panel was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the public understanding of climate change science. In 2008 he was invited by the United Nations Secretary General to serve on the UN Committee on Development (CDP).\u00a0<\/span>Learn more about him here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adil Najam writes OpEd on how climate change is testing the resilience of the already most vulnerable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1562,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8410],"tags":[9287,8680,1720,509,9104,8630,1697,9001],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1562"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20814"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20843,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20814\/revisions\/20843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}