EVENT REPORT

The Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement (NIICE) hosted a lecture series featuring imminent lecturers, Prof. Daniel O Suman from the University of Miami, who spoke on “Climate Change and the Vulnerabilities in South Asia,” and Prof. Ariel C. Harmony, the Vice Chancellor of Global Affairs University of Pittsburg, USA, who delivered a talk on “Emerging Global Cities: Origin, Structure and Significance.”

Prof. Daniel O Suman began his talk with a quick reference to drivers of climate change, such as increasing temperatures and rising sea levels and their effects on the various settlements, agriculture and ecosystems and the socioeconomic development of a nation, and how different countries respond and adapt to these changes. He talked about greenhouse gas emissions, which are disproportionately emitted by more affluent countries and, thus, disproportionately affect countries in the Global South. Suman’s statistical graphs highlighted the tremendous increase in temperatures across the world. He offered a visual representation of the prediction of increased average daily temperatures and heat waves over the next few decades and centuries. Dangers include melting glaciers, causing glacier outburst floods, which pose a grave threat to low-lying areas like Miami and Dhaka, as well as salination of groundwater. Alternatively, some areas around the Caribbean and South America will experience lower precipitation, while countries like Bangladesh and India will be more prone to extreme climatic conditions like cyclones.

Suman asserted that climate change is a direct result of mindless human exploitation of the environment and quoted conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stating that “extreme climatic events are surpassing the resiliency and adaptive capacity of many natural systems” leading to extinctions and shifting ecosystems. Forests in Nepal are particularly vulnerable to these man-made disasters, especially the Himalayas, which are significant to both Nepal and India and will escalate to food insecurity in the future. This includes damaging effects on agricultural productivity and making both the old and young vulnerable to vector-borne diseases. Tiny particulate matter from the burning of biomass gas and fossil fuels poses another significant risk to human health. He asserted the need for Nepal to recognise the fragile mountain topography, floods and landslides and non-climatic events like earthquakes that pose a special risk for the landlocked state, and the need to regulate un-planned settlements and high independence on agriculture to cope with the climatic changes in the region.

According to Germanwatch, an NGO focusing on the environment, Nepal is ranked 10th on a list that calculates the number of deaths during disasters and the economic losses per unit in the GDP. In contrast, Bangladesh ranks 2nd amongst other South Asian countries. With this background, Suman delved into questions of how women are more vulnerable to climate change due to their relegation of the private and domestic, as well as the technicalities of how the government can help the poor, indigenous population reliant on fast depleting groundwater for sustenance. One of the participants brought up the Bangladeshi migrant crisis and how it can worsen due to the climate change crisis in Bangladesh. At the same time, another reflected on the yin and yang of carbon markets and the session ended on a unanimous agreement on the need for community-based projects for better adaptive techniques against climate change.

Next, in the lecture series, Prof. Ariel C. Harmony began by discussing the similarities of various highly developed metropolitan cities across the globe, including Miami, Singapore and Dubai, and their influence on the global economy. It involves the transformation of the cities into brands to attract investment and global attention while concealing the less charming parts of themselves, such as high rates of socioeconomic inequality. The goal is to project themselves as a permanent location for the investment of wealthy and multinational corporations.

Harmony discussed the emerging global cities next, also known as ‘Global Hopefuls,’ such as Sao Paulo, Lagos and New Orleans. He quoted another urban scholar, Saskia Sassen, who said that Global cities are not based on size or national significance but on their function in the global economy. On the other hand, these global cities were also a result of a bifurcation of the minority population profiting from international trade and finance and the majority population that worked locally and received poor remuneration. Coming back to Dubai, Miami, and Singapore, he explained that the financial and cultural significance of these cities is a result of decisive and sustained efforts to bank on their geopolitical positions, most notably, its ports, airports, major financial and banking centres, and its transformation as a tourist hotspot. But their most significant features are a reliable legal system, a robust bureaucracy, and highly motivated political leaders who wanted to succeed against global competition,

However, cities peripheral to these global cities, as well as the global economy, have the flexibility to ascend positions of strategic importance, mainly because industrialization does not always equal development, as seen in the case of Miami and Dubai. Cities are no longer passive marketplaces but active agents capable of building a brand of their own, and finally, all global cities are welcoming of migrant workers from across the world who have transformed their economy, from banking to construction, due to lower labour wages. The narrative of a bifurcated population comes up again, and Harmony explains the poor living conditions and gross human rights violations of the majority population who live paycheck and paycheck.

“Everybody wants to be a globalising city,” Harmony explained, before delving into how climate change and social inequality threaten the brand of these cities, such as Miami which risks getting flooded entirely due to being a low-lying area. In contrast, Hong Kong, another globalising city, has experienced the loss of trained experts to Singapore due to civil and political repression by China.

During the discussion round, the two guest scholars conversed about climate change in the context of Miami and the institutional policies to combat the threat of rising sea levels. Later, Harmony deliberated on the similarities between the global cities and Kathmandu such as their migrant population, even if the migrant framework is different in Nepal, and its potential to become a global centre for tourism and build a brand based on that. He elaborated on the Nepal government’s mismanagement of mountaineers attempting to scale Mount Everest, which has a detrimental effect on its branding. As the session drew to a close, Harmony shared his insights on safety levels maintained in global cities, the implications of China’s globalising tactics and India’s flow of capital for Nepal, and the geopolitical histories of cities and how they shape brand development of cities and finally, whether or not, Nepal could replicate the Miami, Dubai or Singapore model despite its socioeconomic shortcomings.

The series concluded on an amiable note, with Dr Jaiswal expressing a note of gratitude to the guest scholars and the audience for their insightful and invigorating discussions.

Prepared by Shreya Das, NIICE Intern