In March 2023, Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the United Nations resident coordinator for Malawi, experienced firsthand the kind of destruction that may become more common as a result of climate change when Cyclone Freddy ravaged the southeastern African country. The powerful cyclone, the longest lasting on record, killed more than 1,400 people in Malawi and displaced 659,000 others.
“Malawi is very vulnerable to climate change,” Adda-Dontoh said. “Freddy was one of several climate-related disasters we’ve had over the past three years.”
Adda-Dontoh was one 16 U.N. resident coordinators — the highest-ranking representatives of the U.N. Development System at the country level — who recently attended a four-day seminar hosted by the International Leadership Center (ILC) at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs to learn skills and insights that will help them address the triple planetary threat of climate change, air pollution, and the loss of Earth’s biodiversity.
Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the United Nations resident coordinator for Malawi, works in a country that is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. (Photo by Tony Fiorini)
The seasoned diplomats, who are stationed in countries throughout the Global South, engaged with Yale faculty as well as the Jackson School’s senior fellows and World Fellows on a range of topics, including strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions, communicating effectively about environmental issues, and building effective partnerships to combat climate change.
They need to supervise responses from one problem to another and seldom have a lot of time to think, learn, and reflect because they’re always in response mode.
The U.N.’s resident coordinators play a key role in driving the kinds of systemic change that will be needed to address climate change and other environmental threats, said Jessica Faieta, a senior fellow and lecturer at the Jackson School, one of the event’s organizers. They do this, she said, by fostering collaboration among U.N. agencies, government officials, civil society, and the private sector in the countries where they work.
The Yale seminar, held in late October, provided the resident coordinators (who often contend with multiple crises at once) time to enrich their understanding of the triple planetary crisis, said Faieta, who served in the U.N. system for 30 years, including as the U.N.’s assistant secretary-general from 2013 to 2018.
“I’ve been in their shoes,” she said. “Many of them work in very demanding countries facing crisis situations. They need to supervise responses from one problem to another and seldom have a lot of time to think, learn, and reflect because they’re always in response mode.
“We aimed to provide them time to step away and get up to speed on some important concepts and ideas that will be very valuable to them in their work.”
During the seminar, participants learned about strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions, communicating effectively about environmental issues, and building effective partnerships to combat climate change. (Photo by Tony Fiorini)
In a keynote address, writer and trail finder Leon McCarron, a member of the 2024 cohort of the Jackson School’s Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, set the stage for the week by describing his journey tracing the Tigris River from its headwaters in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey, through Iraq, and into the Persian Gulf. He laid out the environmental threats facing the great river — including reduced water flow caused by heavy damming in Turkey and pollution from mining operations and power plants — chronicled how its degradation has affected the people who depend on its waters.
If it seems hopeless at times, all you have to remember is that there are 16 million people living in the watershed of these rivers waiting for some absolution and that is perhaps the greatest motivation of all.
McCarron noted that Iraq is losing 150 square miles of arable land each year as a result of climate change. While he and his team were traveling the river in southern Iraq, the wheat crop there failed. Speaking at Yale, he displayed a photo of a farmer standing on a wide expanse of cracked mud once covered by the Tigris. He described how wastewater from power plants heats the river, killing fish and other wildlife, and how the river’s reduced flow allows salt water from the Person Gulf to move upstream, increasing saline levels to 50 times higher than they were 10 years ago.
“By the time we reached the end of this river we found very little hope to cling onto,” said McCarron, whose book, “Wounded Tigris,” documents his journey.
Young Iraqis McCarron spoke with during this journey were hopeful that organizations like the United Nations would step in and help bring people together to produce change, he said.
“If it seems hopeless at times, all you have to remember is that there are 16 million people living in the watershed of these rivers waiting for some absolution and that is perhaps the greatest motivation of all,” he said.
Later that day, Daniel Esty, the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale, led a discussion on the need to remake global trade agreements to compel action on climate change.
The countries of the world are “far off track” in their efforts to reach the goal of net-zero global emissions by 2050 as set forth in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, Esty noted. He suggested that a successful global approach to addressing climate change and achieving sustainable economic growth requires engaging with the private sector.
“How do we ensure that private actors are engaged but in terms that meet society’s needs and not their own?” Esty asked.
He proposed remaking the international trade system as a vehicle for sustainable development. Citing his 1994 book, “Greening the GATT: Trade, Environment, and the Future,” he suggested that while international trade is an important engine of economic opportunity critical to the developing world, it must have rules that consider sustainability and other values as well as economic outcomes.
While acknowledging that enacting these ideas requires overcoming difficult governing structures in international institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization, Esty suggested that the world’s “middle powers” — countries like Switzerland, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Japan that are situated below superpowers yet exert important global influence — can provide leadership on remaking the global trade system to support sustainable development.
The opportunity to come to Yale and learn from others and gain conceptual insights on some of the climate-related phenomena we’re experiencing was so valuable.
Other sessions during the week included a discussion on climate change and the global public mind led by Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale Program on Climate Change Communication; a talk on building partnerships on climate change to advance development priorities by Yale World Fellow Leticia Jauregui Casanueva, the former head of global education partnerships at Meta; and clinics with entrepreneurs and World Fellows Charlotte Wang and Soraya Hosni on piloting and incubating innovative projects.
Bakhodir Burkhanov, U.N. resident coordinator for Laos, appreciated the amount of knowledge conveyed over four days.
“I enjoyed listening to the thought leaders,” he said. “There were a lot of applied elements. I expected something very conceptual with a lot of theory, but we covered a lot of practical applications, which are always welcome.”
For her part, Adda-Dontoh said she found the seminar “extremely insightful.”
“The opportunity to come to Yale and learn from others and gain conceptual insights on some of the climate-related phenomena we’re experiencing was so valuable,” she said.
