Margaret Peters 0:00

All right, thanks everybody for coming today to our book talk here, sorry my dog almost just knocked my plate off my desk. We are very excited. Welcome to this Burkle center series. We are very excited to have Josh Busby here. He is a professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Oxford. In 2021 through 2023 he was a senior advisor for climate at the US Department of Defense. So he really knows what he's talking about, and he is the author in many, numerous peer reviewed papers on climate change and security. And you know, had a career before he started looking at climate change as well. And today he's going to talk about his most recent book, which is States and Nature: the effect of climate change on security. And so we are very excited to have you here, and I will let Joshua take it away.

Joshua Busby 1:03

Well, thanks for having me delighted to be with you all. Today, I'm going to share some slides and talk about my book. One second, alright. So the title of my book is states in nature, the effects of climate change on security, based on my book of the same name came out 2022 what I'd like to do in my remarks is give you a little bit of background on the project, review the approach of the book, talk about the Myanmar and Bangladesh cases in the Book, and close with some implications for policy. As the generous introduction, as you heard, I've been publishing in this space for about 20 years in academic journals and for think tanks. I've also been part of several Department of Defense funded research initiatives on climate change and African political stability, and another on complex emergencies and political stability in Asia. That work culminated, as you heard in my service, in the Biden administration from 2021 to 2023 as a Senior Advisor for climate, where I worked on integrating climate and energy into the 2022 national defense strategy, among other areas. And happy to talk more about that in the Q and A. The motivations for this project go back to an earlier literature on environmental security in the 1990s and the debate that was had between Mark Levy and Thomas hillmer Dixon. There were a lot of single case studies tracing the effects of environmental degradation leading to armed conflict, and Mark Levy said the more logical research strategy under the circumstances would be to compare societies facing similar environmental problems but exhibiting different levels of violent conflict. And that would allow some precision and identifying the conditions under which environmental degradation contributes to violent conflict and when it does not. And it didn't seem like anybody had really taken mark up on that research challenge. And I thought, you know, as this new emergent literature in the 2000s on climate security took off, it would be welcome to have a case study based approach to try to shed some light on this new research agenda, but do so using a set of paired cases. And so the research question that animates the project is, under what conditions will climate hazard slash change? And we can talk about that formulation in the Q A, under what conditions will climate hazard slash change lead to negative security outcomes? And the approach of the book that I'll talk a bit more about is using paired cases that have broad geographic coveragethat enhances and has a broader understanding of security than the sort of conventional literature puts forward a general argument that seeks to unpack the causal mechanisms connecting climate hazards with security outcomes. So that's what I try to do in in the book. And as I mentioned, there are pair cases. So I explore in one chapter, why do you get famine in Somalia after severe drought, but not neighboring Ethiopia? Why do you get civil war in Syria after severe drought, but not in neighboring Lebanon? And then why do you get such extreme loss of life in Myanmar after exposure to a cyclone, but not in neighboring Bangladesh and India? And I also use within case variation to show how Ethiopia compares to itself over time. So Ethiopia in the 1980s had severe drought that led to famine, but by the 2000s it did not similarly, Bangladesh at its founding, and as recently as the 1990s had severe loss of life after exposure to cyclones. And now hardly anyone dies. So I use within case variation in the book as well as I said, I'm going to try and talk about the Myanmar Bangladesh chapter today, but in the Q and A, I can open up and talk about some of the others. So the point of departure for thinking about security threats is our conventional understanding of security threats as armed external attacks by states against other states. And what I seek to do is broaden our understanding of security to think about other threats that rise to the level of security concerns that aren't, aren't carried out by states that may be what colleagues have described as actorless threat. And so I include security threats such as conflict. But it's not limited to that. I think of security threats, they include risk of large scale loss of life that they rise to the level given their severity. So what distinguishes a security threat from other kinds of problems in society is not human agency of some male factor trying to do us harm. It is the severity of the threat, and that's why problems like climate change and pandemics can rise to the level of security problems because they can lead to severe loss of life and societal dislocation. So the argument, in brief, has three pieces. One focuses on state capacity, the other focuses on political inclusion, and the last, on foreign assistance. And and I make the argument that states with low capacity will have more trouble responding to climate hazards, and that states with politically exclusive regimes are less likely to respond to climate hazards with support for all at risk groups. And then finally, that states that block foreign aid or allocated in biased manners are likely to have worse outcomes. So let me walk through each of those pieces and then pull it all back together in terms of state capacity. I'm drawing on a literature from Francis Bucha, Michael Mann, Andrew price Smith, and some work in the climate security space from Catherine mock and colleagues. And the basic premise is that states need to be able to mobilize resources and carry out service delivery to prepare for and respond to climate hazards, and states that lack that capability are more likely to fail to respond to those hazards, but also have a host of other problems that can escalate and rise to the level of both large scale loss of Life, but also conflict. This, the second dimension draws on literature, also from political economy and political science, from recent Nobel laureates, Darren Austin Mogul and James Robinson. Douglas North scholars like Colin Col, Colin Hendricks and Nino von excuele, who write about the how exclusive political regimes that leave key groups out of decision making are more likely to ignore or discriminate against certain groups, and that can feed grievances. It can certainly lead to biased outcomes in in the wake of exposure to climate harm, so that communities that are excluded have worse outcomes in terms of, say, disaster or humanitarian response, but also, again, can feed grievances from communities that are systematically excluded from services. The third piece is about assistance, and here I'm thinking about not just overseas development assistance, but wider humanitarian assistance, which isn't often tracked in the same budget streams, and those streams of resources can compensate for state weakness in times of need, so you can get a pulse of resources that prevent large numbers of people dying, suffering and feeding grievances in the wake of exposure to climate hazards. And that then that same sorts of assistance over time can build state capacity. So the next time that there's an event, a government's better prepared, even relatively poor ones. So I put those pieces together in terms of my expectations, and it's a continuum from low capacity states with high political exclusion that block foreign aid or distribute in a one sided manner. Those are the worst case scenarios, and those range to best case scenarios, where they're high capacity states with high political inclusion, who receive aid and distribute broadly to all social groups. They they're expected to fare much better. And in between, there are a variety of mixed, mixed cases. So as I said, I aspire to have a general argument. There are a number of different diagram causal diagrams in in the book. Here's one that ends in civil conflict, and it starts with the climate hazard. It leads to some societal impact, in terms of impacts on lives and livelihoods that can feed into demands for redress from communities, and that can be telescoped in a rather short period of time, depending on the hazard. If it's a swift onset hazard like a cyclone, or a slow onset hazard, like a drought, it might unfold over a period of months, but where communities say, Please, help us. We are in need, and at that point, the government has an opportunity to try to provide services, and the kind of nature of its ability to do so and its willingness to do so feeds on its capacity and its political inclusion. And the international community has an opportunity to respond, and he may be head off worst outcomes by providing a pulse of resources. And that can happen in some instances and doesn't always happen in others. And in the worst case scenario, that can lead to either humanitarian outcomes or here, in this particular causal pathway, it leads to civil conflict, and there are more steps along the way in other diagrams, like it can lead to migration, and that, in turn, may feed into other outcomes. They're more variegated outcomes in the wider book, but this gives you a sort of flavor for what it looks like. So what I try to do in the book with the comparative method is compare two cases to each other, like two countries that are similarly situated but have different outcomes in terms of the security outcomes. I also exploit within case variation to compare countries to themselves over time, I need to show that both face some exposure to severe climate hazards. And then I need to code those key variables of capacity, inclusion and assistance. And then, for good measure, in the book, I try to address alternative explanations to be a halfway decent social scientist. As I said, I start off with hazard exposure. I try to show what the hazard exposure was in the different country context, and then connect it to potential security outcomes through impacts on lives and livelihoods. So, you know, a cyclone that affects two countries, but one hits an unpopulated area and the other hits a densely populated area, we might have different assumptions about about their impact. I try to show that it could have been bad in both places, but maybe it, or I argue that it wasn't in in one of the cases, because of the particular conjunction of factors that I talk about in the book. I talk about climate hazards throughout the book, rather than climate change, because many of the hazards are the kinds of things we expect to see in a world of of more climate change. But it's hard to attribute in a single event to climate change, anthropogenic climate change per se, and so they're a proxy for what we expect to see in a world of climate change. And even even as the science of sort of attribution studies is it has improved that that was at least the the best way to approach it in the context of historic events that I'm evaluating. So this, this particular graphics a little hard for you to see on the screen, but it basically is a list of all the cyclones that were severe that affected Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. And I'm going to talk about a couple of those today. And what I do in the book is I have maps overlaid on population that show the movement of Cyclone tracks. This is for Cyclone Nargis that affected Myanmar in 2008. I also have cyclone sitter that affected Bangladesh in 2007 just to demonstrate that both had a pathway that was going to potentially put large numbers of people in harm's way, and yet, in in Myanmar, they had differential impacts. Myanmar sort of pictured with the top and Bangladesh in the bottom photo, and I'll try and unpack what those differential impacts were. So in both cases, a large number of people were at risk and their livelihood. So in the case of Myanmar, 700,000 people were homeless. Three quarters of the livestock was killed, half the fishing tank in 2007 in in Bangladesh, you had a densely populated city of Dakar that was affected. You had $240 million in damages, including extensive damage to the rice fields and fishing fleets. Yet, terms of deaths, 140,000 people died in Myanmar, and depending on the estimate, perhaps as few as 4,200 died in in Bangladesh, which is still a fairly large number, but there's a orders magnitude lower than Myanmar, which had a comparable storm and also different when you think about Bangladesh's own past. So you had in 1991 a cyclone that killed more than 100,000 and if you go back to the foundation of the country, you had cyclone Bola as Bangladesh. It was coming into being as an independent country. From Pakistan, you had 300,000 people die from that cyclone. And so you see a progression in Bangladesh over time, as the country death toll from severe cyclones declines remarkably. And so by the current era, hardly anyone dies. So I attribute that to the factors in my book, differences in state capacity. So there was limited state capacity to protect our aid. Citizens in Myanmar and Bangladesh, over the past 30 years, have built state capacity to respond to severe cyclones with early warning systems and other measures. And so in the book, I tried to do a variety of things to get at differences in state capacity. There's some some measures from like the global governance measures from the the World Bank. Here's a measure of investor confidence in bureaucratic quality from the PRS group. And so Myanmar is essentially the lowest rank, rank of the three comparing India and Bangladesh. And though there have been some, some modest improvements over time, but I try to give that in more specific ways and granular ways to look at differences in forecasting capability in early warning systems and emergency response, because that's what it means in this issue set and so terms of forecasting capability, Myanmar had none at the time, whereas India and Bangladesh have invested in forecasting capability so that by 2018 Bangladesh could anticipate a severe cyclone with as much as three days of lead time, but what you do with that forecasting capability is also important. This is a photo of one of the many 1000s of volunteer first responders and early warning system folks who are able to get the word out when there is warning of a severe cyclone and and in the case of Myanmar, I talk about not only did the country lack forecasting capability, but early warning systems were virtually absent as well. In 2008 whereas Bangladesh had spent a lot of time and resources and cultivating huge numbers of volunteers who are able to get the word out, as depicted in that photo. The third piece is about emergency response, and this is a depiction of Cyclone shelters. And so when you warn people about what to do in the midst of a cyclone, you gotta tell them, You know what, how to protect themselves and get them somewhere where they're safe. And so these cyclone shelters are one way. And with regard to Myanmar, a USAID official who worked closely on the response that the country had no shelters in place in 2008 whereas prior to 2007 Bangladesh had 13, 1500 purpose built shelters, each able to accommodate 5000 people. And they also had other attributes, like gender appropriate places for for people to congregate. Given the cultural context, there's also space for people's animals, and so why differences between the two countries that's on state capacity. I want to spend a few minutes talking about exclusion and assistance. And so because I know mindful the time, so the response to the cyclone favored some ethnic groups over others in Myanmar, and whereas in the Bangladesh context, shelters and aid were available to most of the population. And again, I try to get at that with some statistics on political exclusion, I showed that a large proportion of the population Myanmar lacked representation, whereas in Bangladesh, it was relatively most ethnic groups in society were represented in government. I look at some other measures of political exclusion, which shows a bit higher levels of political exclusion in Bangladesh based on this metric, although certainly higher, certainly lower still than Myanmar. I also look at other dynamics, as I said, in terms in terms of of assistance. So the third dynamic is that authorities in Myanmar refused international assistance, whereas Bangladesh, for decades, has been seen aswelcoming international assistance, both in emergency settings, but also in terms of development assistance to build state capacity. And so I try to track that in a variety of ways, through some statistics, and most of these, in the interest of time, I'll just gloss over them, but most of the aid that came into Myanmar happened after this cycle, and when they had a sort of temporary movement towards democratization, which is subsequently backslid considerably. So putting these pieces together, in Myanmar, there was no capacity or willingness to provide early warning or response, and the government impeded an international response, whereas in Bangladesh, they've had improved capacity over time, they have a social contract of crisis response, which basically the confidence of the people in the government is conditional upon their ability to heat off, head off, the worst outcomes associated with severe cyclones and and the Bangladeshi Government over time is welcome international assistance, both in emergency settings and in development to try to make that happen. I should note that there are some alternative explanations that you know. You might say, well, Myanmar was just unprepared because they hadn't had a history of cyclones, and I think that is true on some level, but they had early warning, they didn't act. They had an opportunity to respond, and they didn't, and they had offers of international help, what they refused. And so I think some lack of experience explains some of the outcome, but the severity 140,000 deaths can't be explained on the basis purely of this being a novel storm for them, although we can talk about that more in the Q and A, I should note that you know, there's some policy implications that flow from this analysis, and you probably are aware of huge societal change that's happened in Bangladesh with the ouster of their Prime Minister earlier this summer. And so the implications of my work are that, on the one hand, we shouldn't accept that climate change will necessarily yield catastrophic outcomes, and in countries around the world that focused investments in state capacity, even in relatively poor countries, can reduce vulnerability to climate hazards, and international assistance can help finance that. But there's some other lessons from this work, including this chapter, but also others in the book, is that it's more difficult for outside actors to build political inclusion if there isn't a will to have all groups in society represented in government, that's more challenging, and that progress can be upended. We see that in Ethiopia's case, if you're familiar with their descent into civil war over the last few years, or even in Bangladesh case, which I think has become more politically exclusive over the last few years, and one of the reasons for the recent protests is associated with sort of quota rules for government employees that kept many young people from having access to careers. And so I think that was that could be explained in part because of deterioration and political inclusion that created an upswell of demands from from young people. But this ultimately means that the the effort to address the security implications of of countries that are exposed to climate change is a political project that's associated with state building. And so if you're a well meaning outsider that wants to help other countries avoid the worst outcomes associated with climate change, you have to have a theory of state building. And in many instances, we know that say efforts to do force regime change by foreigners can end up quite badly. And so if, if you are supportive of international efforts to address climate change and to head off security consequences, you have to have a sort of pretty sophisticated understanding of what, what you can and can't do with external help. And so I'm going to stop there, and I look forward to your questions.

Margaret Peters 23:47

Thank you so much for that great presentation. All right, I'm gonna start off with a couple questions, and then we'll open it up to audience questions. As a reminder for audience members, please put your questions in the Q and A. My first question, actually, I was listening to remind me this morning, I was listening to a story in NPR about public safety power shut offs, and it was mostly about so these are shut offs. We know these well in California, when our power gets shut off because we're worried that it's so windy we're going to have lines knocked down and start wildfires. So this was one about, like, these first shut offs in Colorado, and it was basically like a bunch of people complaining that, you know, their power got shut off, and they, you know, were really unhappy about it. So this then made me think, you know, question had for you is, how much are there political benefits for building resiliency versus providing aid or help after a crisis? So you know, of course, if you are very good and can do a great job in building resiliency, then the crisis never comes and people start to wonder. So the first question I had was just, you think that there's, what is the political benefits? You know? What do you think the political benefits were in this case, in Bangladesh, in the Bangladesh case, that in the book, you talk about how they've built a lot of shelters, and you talk about how India has also built a lot of shelters. Do you think they've gotten political benefits that? Or do you think, you know, it's really just only when the crisis comes that people care about these things?

Joshua Busby 25:40

I think those are great questions. It's, it's almost as if the failure to respond is observable, but the but the resilient response is not. And so the dogs that don't bark are this storms that you, you don't have a catastrophic outcome because you've invested in other measures to so on some level, people may not give enough credit to governments for doing preparations, but they'll give them more credit for the visible response afterwards, but it's obviously much more expensive to do the heroic humanitarian rescue or mobilizing, whether it be in the US context, FEMA or other actors and so from, you know, from a political perspective, you might imagine that actors get more credit from from effective response after emergencies. But from a cost effectiveness standpoint, you, you would like to invest in early warning and preparation because you, you're you can't afford to just just do the response. But I think there may be some variation in different country context, but my sense is that the literature suggests that they're more political rewards associated with effective response than than resilient advanced investment preparation.

Margaret Peters 27:12

Great. On that same note, about effective response, I guess my question is in part, like, especially given your so there's these couple great chapters for those of you who've not yet read the book, which we put in the chat where you can buy the book. It's a great book, and if you are a member of the UCLA community, it is available online from the library. I know Joshua has already gotten the three cents he will receive for that purchase. Let me remind folks academic books we don't really make anybody off of he's more concerned about having people read his work than making money. Nonetheless, so I was thinking about like droughts and famines, and how so often, famines have led to really catastrophic outcomes for leaders. So if you think about the French Revolution, or later, the Russian Revolution, like lot of times, revolutions come on the heels of women. So that's the question. You know, in this cases where you have not so much the Somalia case that you go through, because Somalia doesn't have a functioning government so much, right? But in other cases, you know, when you have a functioning government, do you think it's just that, like they think that they can just survive no matter what or do they just so don't care. So, like in the Ethiopia case in the 1980s that you talk about, do you still not care about other people, or is it they think they can survive? What are your thoughts on that?

Joshua Busby 28:53

Well, there's a rich literature on, you know, there's like selectorate theory and political science, and suggest non democratic regimes have a smaller basis of public support to stay in power. And so there, there are folks that have written about this with respect to disasters, that suggest that, you know, non democratic regimes, that leaders, unless the unless the disaster has affected, sort of the communities that are, you know, main supporters of the regime, they don't really feel like they need to respond to them, to the wider pop populace, because they don't depend upon them for political support. Now, democratic regimes, where your your basis of support hinges on voting. In elections, you can be thrown out of power if you fail to respond to these extreme weather events. In the context of authoritarian regimes, there's more risk of of coup or violent overthrow and so. They may be less responsive, but, you know, when they fail to respond, we might see more of a regular turnover along the lines, you know, I think that there are cases like Nicaragua after earthquakes and and other countries that have faced, you know, regime change as a consequence of failure to respond to extreme weather events. So I think it's that that, you know, it's goes back to Amartya Sen's sort of classic formulation with respect to famine, that you never see famine in a functioning democracy. And I, I go a slightly different direction in the book, to talk about political inclusiveness rather than regime type, because we've had relatively inclusive authoritarian regimes like Ethiopia and to a certain extent, Bangladesh, that were, you know, far from sort of paragons of virtue with respect to democracy, but nonetheless had sort of a revolutionary ethos of inclusiveness. That meant that part of their legitimation was bound up with effective response to emergencies. And that happened, you know, the regime change happened in Ethiopia after the 1980's drought and and similarly, you know, Bangladesh, since, you know, its founding and reinforced after the 1991 cyclone, has had this sort of ethos of response to the community, even if they weren't fully democratic.

Margaret Peters 31:24

Yeah, great, yeah. It made me think, you know this, this comment about democracy, you know, we could think about, like, was India, you know, in the early 1940s when we had a great famine in Bengal, was that really, I guess, you know, they were colonized. They were a democracy. But it was really about the inclusiveness. You know, the British government didn't send famine relief to India at that point because they were worried about the war and didn't really care. Churchill famously didn't really care about him, so, like, they didn't do that. Great. Yeah, I do think this is an interesting question, though, about, you know, if disaster preparedness, if like suffering from a disaster, can be really perilous to regimes, you know, it's sort of surprising that even the worst authoritarian regimes don't do more to try to off, offset it, or prepare for it, or deal with it at the end. Because, you know, as you point out on these various examples, the consequences can be really bad for the regime. So in the case of Bangladesh, as you point out in the book, or Ethiopia, where you have these like cases...

Joshua Busby 32:35

It may also have to do with, you know, I distinguish between swift onset and slow onset hazards. So slow onset hazards, like droughts, you it may be more difficult for the regime to anticipate where it goes like you know, would the Syrian regime have had a good sense that the the drought that affected the country in 2008 would lead to such a large scale dislocation of people that would move to Perry urban areas, that that would, in turn, sort of create a cohort of people that were recruitable for the, you know, the the Civil War. They, they, they may be banked on their ability to repress, you know, any, any protest given their, you know, authoritarian past and success and repressing prior rebellions and and yet they weren't able to in this instance. And so, you know it, whereas swift onset hazards like cyclones, it may be more obvious that, you know, failure respond effectively could lead to, you know, really catastrophic outcomes that then lead to, you know, regime change.

Margaret Peters 33:44

All right, I want to bring in that. There's two audience questions that I'm going to bring in at this point, because I think they really tie to this conversation. And I'm going to try and summarize them together, thinking about, you know, one ofour great interns asking how to participate in our exclusion marginalized groups influence the country's ability to confront the impacts of climate change. And I also want to tie this to another question we have, which is looking at do some authoritarian states or or as you call them less inclusive states build better capacity where their supporters are? So here, in the case of like Burma, we might see that there'll be much more, you know, flood capacity or dealing with drought in areas where the political supporters are, and not so much in like ra state, where the Rohingya are, or other marginalized groups. So do you see any of this in your research? That you see sort of, sometimes you're building resiliency in the areas of your supporters and not in the areas of like more marginalized groups?

Joshua Busby 34:56

I think, I think that's consistent with the expectations. I think in the case of Myanmar, it's not clear that they had done much of preparations for anyone in that instance, but they have done some subsequent to that. And it's not a story that I've tracked carefully, but I would anticipate that we saw the regime, after the democratic backsliding, went after the Rohingya, and, you know, they're now displaced across the border to Bangladesh. And so I would expect that whatever preparations that they've made since the 2008 storm to build cyclones would go to, you know, areas of more political support, and that the Rohingya would be systematically excluded from, you know, being the beneficiaries of such policy. That would be, that would be my guess, but I haven't really tracked that in detail, and I think that certainly does happen. And you know, there the Ethiopia case may be some, you know, somewhat suggestive of that in terms of, you know, the famine that's emerged in the context of civil war over the last year or so, that parts of the of the of the sort of Northwest that were, you know, hostile the regime, and they were aid trucks were excluded from being able to get access to that part of the country, and that was by design as a sort of punishment strategy of the regime to Try to get the political opponents to back down.

Margaret Peters 36:42

Yeah, yeah, no, I remember hearing about that that was pretty awful them doing that. So then this sort of this conversation, sort of ties into another question that we have, that I'm going to sort of summarize as saying, you know, sort of end with talking about the need for development and inclusion. So if you look at the case of Bangladesh, I'm not sure Bangladesh is super well developed at this point, but they have done a lot more work on, you know, inclusive resiliency, even during, even if, during a time period where they were moving into being less democratic, although we'll see, given the current protest and the new government, what did they move back to being more democratic. So do you think you know, when we think about the worst hazards of climate change in terms of floods, famines, droughts, that sort of thing. Do you Well, if you, if you had a little bit of magic pixie ducks to sprinkle, would you make countries wealthier or make them more inclusive?

Joshua Busby 37:56

I think making them more inclusive, I mean, if, I mean, if you can couple it with targeted assistance to from from abroad, to support the the areas of where they're vulnerable or exposed to hazards, you know, if it's if it's cyclones, you put money in, you know, the kinds of things that Bangladesh has done, if it's droughts, you do the kinds of things that Ethiopia did very successfully with social safety nets. And, you know, early warning systems are going to be important wherever you go. But you know, having targeted, you know, hazard specific kinds of responses, those aren't that expensive. But you know, the hard thing is, is that you you want to support political inclusion, but that's a that's a difficult thing for outsiders to have much control over, and so it's almost as if you need like, kind of revolutionary ruptures in societies where they've gone down a really dangerous path and they realize that never again, and then they have a, you know, sort of high minded, inclusive leadership that comes to the fore that decides, Okay, maybe we need to do things differently, and that doesn't have like, not every like that hasn't coalesced in Somalia to you know, I mean, maybe in recent years there's some signs of it, but you often have bad leaders replaced by other bad leaders, and it's hard for outsiders to basically, sort of, you know, find your favorite diaspora, expatriate you know. Think about the Iraq examples of the of your where the Americans you know tried to find a Chalabi, or some you know figure that could, you know, come and restore, you know, a broadly inclusive governance. Often that person is weakly rooted in society and is as bad or worse than the existing leadership. And so I would say you want to build political inclusion first, and then, you know, wealth can come but it's hard for outsiders to alter that inclusive dynamic, and there may be more sophisticated ways of thinking about it, but if it's by force that our recent track record suggests that doesn't turn out too well.

Margaret Peters 40:16

Yeah, it does not. So we have another question from the audience, so how do you assess the impact of the recent electricity outages and earthquake on Cuba's security landscape? What are your insights on the regional response and preparedness for climate related security challenges? And you know, I would also add thinking about these sorts of issues. You know, within our hemisphere, we think about countries like Haiti, where I'm starting a new project. And so I've been thinking a lot about Haiti these days. Of you know, what do you what do you do, in particular, as the regional government, when you have a regional, you know, body,when you have these big out, like, disasters happen in in sort of pariah states, or in states you know, like, I mean, I guess Haiti is a little easier, but You know, right now, Haiti doesn't have a government again. Like, they're, they overthrew the government again. So, like, yeah, you know, what do you think? Like, what do you think that international community can do, and how does that affect? You know, in a case of, like, more of a prior state their security landscape.

Joshua Busby 41:38

Those are great questions. So, you know, if you think about failures respond to the Somalia drought of 2010 part, partly, partially. It. It was about the government unwillingness to accept aid, but it was more al Shabaab, the militia group that controlled part of Somalia's territory, its unwillingness to allow aid in, but it was also a function of us rules and war on terror that dissuaded aid groups from going into the country, and so it was a pariah state at the time, in part because of statelessness, but also because of local resistance and fears that any aid that came into the country would be co opted by Islamist groups. And this by the same token, Syria was already a pariah state after even in advance of the Civil War. So, you know, the Assad regime, there were international appeals after the 2008 2009 drought in Syria, and from the UN and nobody us didn't chip in. Other countries didn't chip in either, because already the Assad regime was something of a pariah state. And so on some level, there's maybe a trade off between some of your security concerns and human suffering concerns. But then over the long run, that can lead to catastrophic outcomes. In the Somalia case, there were an estimated excess deaths of 260,000 people who died, you know, beyond normal levels of mortality. And in Syria's case, you know, it escalated to a civil war. And so you end up with, not only, you know, drought related impacts on lives and livelihoods, but you end up with a catastrophic civil war that's claimed the lives of 500,000 or however many it is now. And so, you know, in the context of, you know, there were other cases in the Somalia period between, you know, 2000 when they had a severe famine, when the US sent peacekeepers for Famine Relief, and and then, and then the subsequent famine in 2010 there were other severe droughts during that period that didn't end up resulting in famine. And partially that was a result of there being a more permissive environment for local groups to provide assistance, so even in the absence of a functioning state. So I could imagine that if there were efforts to work with, say, Haitian gangs to have sort of like, you know, humanitarian pause in the event of an emergency that could, you know, you know, if there's a way to treat them as semi legitimate political actors that you basically, and This could be for routine, you know services of delivering, you know, aid, or, you know, health services or what have you. And if you can get them to back off of punishing, you know, actors that are just trying to deliver water or food or other kinds of health services, then maybe that gives you something to build on. And you just might have to treat them as actors that are going to be around, even if they're unsavory and and those are the kinds of choices that I think donors would probably likely have to make if they're going to try to rebuild state capacity in some places. And you got to start somewhere, and you can't build like, you know, state capacity writ large, but maybe you start in the things that are important to people's lives, like, you know, water sanitation. I know that's always been the theory of, like, counterinsurgency campaigns, but you know, we invariably, you know, kind of that's coupled with, you know, violent external actors. But maybe if it's seen as something that's needed and acceptable, it's more like conventional peacekeeping,

Margaret Peters 45:23

Yeah, there's a question from the audience that is kind of a bit of, like, maybe a clarify question type thing. But the question is, why do so many rebel groups, and we could also include governments, because in your Myanmar Burma chapter, you talk about governments, why do they prevent aid from entering the state or entering their area, like, what are, what do they benefit from that?

Joshua Busby 45:46

I mean, so some of this could be be seized upon by rebel groups to enhance their or degrade their capacity to fight a civil war. And so, you know, there are ways, and there's a Tobias E Day has a really good book that's in this vein about, you know, whether or not disasters in the midst of armed conflicts enhance the power of the state versus rebel groups. And so, you know, rebel groups will be worried that a successful government response that's supported by international assistance might help them legitimate themselves and extend their ability to exercise a monopoly of force over full territory. And so they may want to prevent that, or at least credit claim that any assistance that comes in is that they're doing. And so that's why these are politically contested moments. And you know, who controls territory and who controls food growing areas can be especially important for, you know, sustaining a war fighting capability of rebel groups, because they've got to have some food growing areas to sustain their armies. And so there are ways in which this becomes a more contentious enterprise than simply, you know, the kind of high minded humanitarian support for people coming in to support civilians?

Margaret Peters 47:13

Yeah, great. To turn to a slightly different topic we are in the midst of, or we just finished cop 29 can't remember because, because the news is in the US has only been on one thing. When I was away last week in Europe, I heard a lot more about cop 29 than, yeah, back here. Um, so you know cop 29's big goal is thinking a lot about financing and getting more money to pay for countries to become more resilient and build these systems. And have had a lot of trouble making these commitments. You know, governments, as somebody who studies refugees, I know every time UNHCR calls for money, they only get, you know, 40% of what they want. So this is typical, but I think this is even smaller. So my question is, like, in the case of, you know, states building resiliency, is it just easier for these for aid groups, or, like, the UN or people like that, to get donations when they can, like, have a sad face and have Live Aid, and you know, things like that, is it just harder to get aid to prevent crises than to get aid to deal with the problems after a crisis.

Joshua Busby 48:37

I think that's part of it. So the cop, for folks who may not be familiar with the climate ongoing climate negotiations that are in their 29th year, and the problem for climate change is that the mobilization of funding is is for both climate mitigation, which is reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and also for adaptation, to help countries respond to the consequences, but also for loss and damage. For you know, funds to compensate countries for damages that they've already experienced. And historically, you know, there hasn't been nearly enough assistance offered to developing countries, even though they're the least responsible for this problem, either mitigation, adaptation or loss and damage. So that's one and that most of the money that has been mobilized has been for mitigation. So and that's in part through the more we legitimated that we needed money for adaptation. There was the sense that maybe we're giving up on mitigation, and now we're in a world in which we need to do both. But the turn away from foreign assistance from rich countries, is is occurring. We're becoming more miserly. And so the commitments that were made in Copenhagen and 2015 and in Paris were to mobilize up to $100 billion a year by 2020, and, um, but that mobilize isn't just purely foreign aid. It's not just donor grant money, but it's private sector money as well. And so the international community kind of got close to, or, you know, got to do 100 billion, but the external estimates suggest trillions annually are needed. And so, I mean, I have a piece that's about to appear in an edited volume called Great Decisions that's basically or what are the prospects for US climate leadership, and it's updated to reflect the outcome of the US election. And even if Harris had won, the ability for her administration to mobilize climate finance would have been limited based on Congress, and that's something that the Biden administration had suffered with and now we're in Trump world. It's even worse. And so, you know, I'm not especially optimistic about the ability this cop, or cops in general, to mobilize finance for poor countries and in the really the because the things that make money might be mitigation related, but adaptation isn't necessarily something where you can give a loan to a country and necessarily expect to get repayment. It's just it's not necessarily going to be all that profitable. And trying to do sort of adaptation projects. And the Somalias of this world, or even the, you know, the Kenyans of this world is, you know, can be frought and so, you know, it's going to have to be more grant based aid, and we're just not getting in enough of that. And that's probably where the World Bank and other international financial institutions could probably be helpful. And if we were in a different world, there would be pressure on new donors or lenders like the Chinese or also the, you know, the fossil fuel, you know, rich countries, to provide more of that kind of adaptation assistance, but in the absence of the US, I'm not sure if anybody's going to step up. I think some efforts to make the extraordinarily wealthy individuals either guilty or taxable could be a rich source of resources.Otherwise, some of the dystopian future that's depicted in sort of Scifi novels may come to come to fore.

Margaret Peters 52:11

So before I ask the last question, I would ask one more that's maybe more hopeful. So if you are, let's imagine the new government in Bangladesh called you up and was like, Josh, where should we spend our money? Right? So before you know, should we spend it? Should we save money to deal with disaster after they come? Should we spend money we have a limited budget? Should we spend money now, should we go beg the World Bank? Like, what would you how would you advise one of these developing nations to think about, how do they both think about growth, but also think about climate resiliency, adaptation and mitigation?

Joshua Busby 52:55

I mean, Bangladesh is an interesting case, because they already have a lot of the elements in place. So it's, you know, keep doing what you're doing, and maybe figure out a way to get back to creating opportunities for young people, because you have a youth bulge, and you need to ensure that they have a sufficient opportunity, and that the country was doing reasonably well with their, you know, garment sector, that you could imagine that, you know, a more inclusive, I don't know, meritocratic basis for government appointment would, you know, provide, you know, college educated youth with sufficient opportunity, along with, you know, low skill labor and garment sector that they could, they, they, they could Become a middle income country in a couple of decades, I think they can get back to that other countries that haven't yet done what Bangladesh has done should do what Bangladesh did, and international donors should help finance that with early warning systems and targeted efforts to build capacity And the hazards that they're most susceptible to, and unfortunately, you know, we're in a world of climate change in which it's not going to be just simply, you know, one off storms, but it could be perennial damage that degrades the earning capacity of the country, or, you know, sea level rise That will make whole countries, you know, unlivable by middle of this century, at least. You know for sufficiently large numbers of people that they need to look elsewhere. And it's not quite clear to me that that there it's going to be managed retreat and trying to figure out other things other than adaptation. But that's what I would recommend, is for Bangladesh to get back to what it did well, and for other countries to do what Bangladesh did well, right.

Margaret Peters 52:55

All right. Last Well, someone answered the last question about providing disaster, humanitarian or developing aid to other countries. But let me ask you. So with the election of Donald Trump, do you worry about the US and our ability to deal with disasters here at home? We've just seen two major hurricanes blow through, one that did a lot of damage in North Carolina because of these floods, and one that blew through Florida and did damage, but seems to have not been as bad. But do you worry about when we think about inclusive governments, and you know, those sorts of issues about our own future? And what would you suggest, you know, local communities or states should be thinking about?

Joshua Busby 54:50

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the US is certainly not immune to these kinds of problems. And if you think about absence of inclusiveness after Hurricane Maria buffeted Puerto Rico, even though it is technically part of the states, it is remote enough as a Commonwealth where people don't have voting rights that you know, part of the problem of the effective response as a function of its distance. But I but it's not simply physical distance. It's sort of political distance from levers of power. And you had parts of the island without electricity for more than almost a year, and you it's almost unimaginable to you know, to imagine that, you know, large parts of Florida would be without, you know, electricity, you know, for extensive periods of time we saw, you know how the clamor and call in North Carolina, after he lane that to get things right as soon as possible, And and, and, and, and that can be politicized and weaponized by, you know, agents that are not necessarily interested in effective response, but seizing upon any, you know, perceptions of of failure for political and so I think no country, the US, or any other The US, has, you know, fractured history of race and inequality that make, you know, parts of the country underrepresented in in political life. And that's not solely related to Puerto Rico. So I worry about that. I also worry that the lesson is, is that we're going to get surprises. Like, you know, In what world did anyone expect that Asheville, North Carolina, would be like the epicenter of a catastrophic climate impact, and none of our models would necessarily have privileged that place, as by contrast, a lot of our climate resilience models of exposure would suggest that Asheville should have been okay, and no place is safe, and so, you know, we're going to have to do a lot more in this country to try to help people prepare, because it's just catastrophically expensive to do otherwise. I don't have any confidence that the incoming administration will prioritize this set of issues, but there may be state based efforts to keep it on the horizon, and I suspect that in the next four years there will be Helene Marias or something along those lines, that will test this administration in ways that we'll see if they're up to it or if state actors are up to it. But this problem is with us forever.

Margaret Peters 58:21

Well, on that happy note, I want to thank Josh Busby for being here today as a little advertisement next week, same bat time, same bat channel, Aaron Lynn will be here with a book that is different, but also in some ways, very similar when the bomb stops the legacy of war in rural Cambodia. And the reason I say it's somewhat similar is it really talks about the environmental degradation of uncleared munitions, unexploded ordinances, and how it affects people's lives. So again, we're thinking about environmental damages and security processes. So thank you again. Josh, so much for be for being here. I really enjoyed your book. I learned a lot about it. I've already recommended it to some of my grad students, and good luck with everything.

Joshua Busby 59:13

Thanks for having me, and thanks everyone for attending.

Unknown Speaker 59:17

You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai