On Nov. 15 OBI's Global Justice team hosted this hour-long livestream to mark the launch of the Climate Displacement and Resilience Database. The team provided background on the database, demonstrated how other researchers and organizations can use the virtual tools, and fielded questions from an engaged audience. The event was moderated by Bruce Riordan, Director of the Climate Change Network at UC Berkeley.
Transcript
Bruce Riordan:
Good morning everyone, or good afternoon for those of you in other time zones. Welcome to the release event for the Othering & Belonging Institute's brand new climate displacement database and website. I'm Bruce Riordan. I'm the director of the Berkeley Climate Change Network. We are a network of more than 300 faculty and staff at Berkeley and up the hill at Lawrence Berkeley Lab who are working these 300 folks on all facets of the climate crisis. So welcome. The purpose of this event is simple, to explore with a panel discussion and your questions, this newly released climate displacement and resilience database and to explain and discuss this concept that you'll hear about of the right to stay. So let's meet the panel members. First, Elsadig Elsheikh is the director of OBI's Global Justice Program. Elsadig's research focuses on global north, global south inequity as it relates to sociopolitical dynamics, nations state and citizenship and structural mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, we have Basima Sisemore. Basima is a senior researcher at OBI. Her research is global in scope. She contributes to solutions-based research to address structural marginality with a focus on Islamophobia, civil liberties and human rights enforced migration. And finally we have Hossein Ayazi. Hossein is a senior policy analyst with a global justice program at OBI. Across his research, teaching and policy work, Hossein focuses on U.S. and global political economy, race food systems and the climate crisis and also social movements across the global south and the global north.
Hossein asked me to moderate because while we at our network are very broad in terms of covering a wide range of climate topics, we are very interested in this one. Climate forced displacement, as you know, is a rapidly growing issue globally and one that's going to be center stage globally very soon. So here's our agenda. Pretty simple 20 minutes of panel discussion about the project, then 20 minutes for a walk through the actual database, the case studies, and all show you how it works. And we'll have time for about 10 minutes at the end if we do our job right here for Q&A. And you can put your questions in the chat box or the comments box and we'll get to a few at the end. Let's start with Elsadig. Please give us an intro to your global justice program and this project.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Thank you Bruce. Thank you core panelist. So the global justice program, one of the several program at the Othering & Belonging Institute that focus on cross sectoral things and bodies of work that actually try to really connect what we call the local phenomena to global phenomena. So the program examine and expose the structures that contribute to marginalization of communities here at home and worldwide. While at the same time envisioning a ways of dismantling such a structures. Of course, the goal is to advance the vision of an inclusive shared destiny and a sustainable world. Our research intentionally promote structural analysis, policy interventions and tools that can assist in building marginalized group's power to influence action at the local, national or international level. The global justice have several projects, but our work anchoring mainly in four key areas of work.
One of them we will discuss today, which is the climate displacement and the right state. The second one is the food systems, race and corporate power. Third, Islamophobia in national and global context. And lastly, the global marginality inclusivity and legal mechanism. And thus include the design of an inclusiveness index that look at U.S. states and look at nation state worldwide and try to rank them based on how close they are to create an inclusive society.
So also in general, we develop very significant engagement with the global sales network and partners in civil societies and social movement in global issues that align with our vision and mission in order to promote meaningful solidarity towards social change and belonging. And in order to build the infrastructure to popularize the concept of belonging worldwide as relation to this project climate displacement and the climate crisis and the right to stay. This work emerged in the last several years we've been contemplating with the idea why people forced to leave home. And from our research we know that nobody wants to leave home. There is voluntary migrations, that's a different thing. But what we talk about it here that when you feel when individuals, communities and people at large feel like forced to migrate. Since the World War II, the focus always was about conflict and political instability. But in the last decade and especially since probably 2015, we start to notice that there is something really other than just conflict and those things, we will call them different names.
But definitely today we all agree that is related to the climate emergency and the climate crisis. Of course there's still wars and political instability and economic instability contribute to that. But in our vision, in our understanding, we cannot separate those phenomenon from each other. So we started to think about forced migration phase and we noticed there's three specific mechanism of force be able to migrate. One of them is the climate change or climate crisis. As we adopt that term, we are favoring a term crisis rather than change for several reason. I can get into them later on. But so our idea that we wanted it not only just to talk about the crisis in itself, but to put it in a context of historical analysis, contemporary analysis, but also to provide tools, tactics for solutions. Because the world over talking about this offer multiple solutions and there is solution for those problems.
But it seems there's something lacking either that deep understanding of the relationship the climate has to other actions of human activities or political will. So we saw that this became so gigantic, the number of people displaced by natural disaster and climate induced dynamics. So we thought we need to figure this out because wherever you look you'll find the information, but it's extremely desperate. It's very hard actually to relate them to each other. So we thought if we create a space that consists of putting the number in front of people, but also create another association with that numbers, what does numbers mean anyway in terms of what lacking in those places in those regions and what the commitment we have as a global community and why we don't act in this commitment, especially the financial part of it?
But the big question for us was do we know how much it costs? Because this is the elephant in the room. We need to know so we can actually have a better debate, a better advocacy. And as researchers, that's our role to try to sit back, reflect and provide without prejudice the actual facts to people in the frontline communities, countries, and even in a negotiation within the international climate talk. So they can use that for their advance. I'll stop here because I can go on and on.
Bruce Riordan:
Well thank you Elsadig. Great intro and overview of the program. Certainly some hot issues around the climate crisis there. So let's go second question Hossein, let's jump right into it. Tell us why you're focusing now on climate displacement. Tell us more about that and what do you mean by the right to stay?
Hossein Ayazi:
Certainly. Thanks so much Bruce. So despite the growing intensity and scale of the crisis at hand, protections for climate induced displaced persons forced to cross international borders are limited piecemeal and not legally binding. So our project aims to connect demands for recognizing the rights of peoples displaced by the climate crisis and across international borders to the transformational changes needed to materialize what Elsadig was speaking to materialize people's right to stay at home and thrive within inclusive just and climate resilient communities. So in this light, what we conceptualize as the right to stay is not only the right for climate displaced people to safely resettle when their lives are uprooted.
It's also the right to stay in place amidst the climate crisis and against the extractive and exploitative structures and subsequent outcomes that are forcing them to move altogether. And so to aid the transition to climate resilient societies and regenerative economies globally, while protecting the world's most marginalized and exploited peoples and communities, we define the right to stay as comprised of a few things, specifically the demand for legal rights for all peoples displaced by the climate crisis within and across national borders. Second, that's the demand for climate reparations to countries of the global south whose vulnerability to the climate crisis follows centuries of global north extractive and exploitative political economic and military activity. And third, the right to stay is the demand for just transitions toward a post fossil fuel world that democratize, decentralize and diversify economic activity and redistribute resources and power accordingly.
So a little bit of context in this regard. These demands and goals are especially important in the context of the establishments of a loss and damage funds at the 27th United Nations Climate Conference in 2022. So this is known as COP 27. We have COP 28 coming up very soon. And so the culmination of decades of pressure from climate vulnerable countries, this achievement of a loss and damage fund was a kind of collective acknowledgement of the uneven impacts of the climate crisis and the uneven financial responsibility for it. And that's a real promising pathway toward climate reparations in the years ahead, right? Emphasis -+on climate reparations, this kind of framing and what it affords. But it's also important to note that the UN's transition committee on loss and damage this kind of decision-making body that represents a geographically diverse group of countries actually resolve to recommends the World Bank serve as the interim trustee and host of the fund for a four-year period.
And this is a kind of necessary condition taken in order to get all countries on board, right? And we've heard this before, what concessions need to be made in order to get all people to agree to whatever it may be? And this is really important to note because housing a fund at the World Bank whose presidents are appointed by the United States would give countries from which reparations are demanded a real outsized influence over the fund itself and would result in strings attached and high fees for recipient countries. And so this is all to say that despite the power of calls for climate justice and despite the power afforded by our focus on climate displacement and the right to stay, climate justice wins are quite hard fought and face the continued risk of being eroded by dominant powers and interests, which we understand, which we anticipate and we should try to holds together here.
Bruce Riordan:
Thanks Hossein, very helpful. Let's go a little farther and ask you and Basima to elaborate about what you're talking about when you're talking about climate vulnerability and then how is your database that we're going to look at in a few minutes, the climate displacement and resilience database, how is that going to address climate vulnerability? So question for both of you.
Hossein Ayazi:
Certainly. Thanks so much for this. I'll take the first part of it and speak to this matter of climate vulnerability and then we'll hand it off to Basima. So by vulnerability we mean countries and communities that experience relatively large climate loss and damage, not just because the natural disasters themselves are intense, but also because of inadequate disaster response capabilities and because of economies and infrastructure that are unable to withstand and bounce back from such impacts. So critically this follows from the ways that centuries of racial capitalism and colonialism have shaped the global landscape of extraction, of industry, of labor, of infrastructure such that peoples that make up the global south and marginalized communities within the global north really face the brunt of climate impacts. And so I'll elaborate a bit here.
So first, in terms of industry, this kind of uneven landscape of industry. So centuries of extractive colonialism and post-colonial dependency have left countries of what is now known as the global south with a relatively large percentage of their GDP derived from agriculture, forestry, and fishing. And these are industries that are by nature more vulnerable to a changing climate. So I'll just give one example to give folks a sense of this is that Ethiopia's economy is largely based on agriculture comprising 40 to 50% of GDP and employing 80 to 85% of the population. And although such countries have been made into dependent pastoral states, the pronounced impacts they experience have global repercussions. So it's not just within those countries that these impacts are felt. For example, the May 2022 heat wave in India helps send the price of wheat soaring to a record high globally after India banned exports of the crop, which is devastated by dry hot conditions. I'm sure we all remember rising food prices so memorable in 2022 and so acutely felt in that way.
We can also understand climate vulnerability in terms of infrastructural limitations and challenges. So global south countries are plagued with weak infrastructures that dams, roads, water supplies, waste management for the constructed housing and so on. All of these render climate impacts more acutely felt. And we could also understand infrastructure in terms of limited financial institutions and again, few opportunities for workers and communities to diversify income streams should disaster strike. Again, global south countries have it hard in ways that our project really tries to account for holistically. And finally, I'll just give one last example here of what we mean by climate vulnerability in that there are really key barriers to building resilience, thus compounding vulnerability. So specifically we highlight how predatory financial practices on behalf of the global north that really prevent global south countries from developing climate resilience infrastructure and economies. So these include for example, a high debt burden, a high external debt burden, right? Meaning countries of the global south are constantly paying back colonial and post-colonial debt and doing so with high surcharges and with lots of other conditions. And it's important to note that these debts aren't ultimately paid off.
In fact, this issue is getting worse and worse as time goes on. So in 2023, just this year, global south debt payments reached their highest level in 25 years. And so the issue has a kind of recursive element to it too. High debt burden means poor sovereign credit rating and a lack of access to international capital markets and lack of fiscal space for climate finance and development investments, which means greater impacts and subsequently poor credit ratings and so on. A sort of quick note here is that hurricane Maria, which hit the Caribbean Island of Dominican in 2017 caused damage equivalent to 226% of its gross domestic products. And so how much can countries build resilience amidst such circumstances? And so this is what we mean by climate vulnerability, climate resilience and barriers to building climate resilience and the need to hold these things together, which is exactly what our database and broader scope of our work games to do.
Bruce Riordan:
Great, thanks. Basima, you're going to add here?
Basima Sisemore:
Yes, thank you Bruce. And thanks Hossein for opening up there with the question, your response. I'll also add that over 70% of people displaced worldwide are from the most climate vulnerable countries, largely from within and across countries and the global south as Hossein was just outlining for us. And so our interactive climate displacement and resilience database illustrates how and why climate induced displacement is concentrated in the global south while also providing the information needed to develop recommendations and strategies in service of the right to stay. The database seeks to address this by joining global data on climate displacement with global data on climate event exposure and vulnerability emissions goals and compliance, governance and capacity building for climate resilience and mitigation and climate finance needs and challenges. And also that in addition, and to put a finer point on how we're measuring vulnerability in our database, we also specifically measure a country's risk and vulnerability to climate change by way of a climate change risk score.
And we also measure vulnerability by way of a country's socioeconomic vulnerability that accounts for factors such as inequality, aid dependency, development factors that predispose a country to be affected by and vulnerable to hazards and disasters. And with that, we also are able to assess the country's disaster response and capacity for resilience. And to wrap up the question, I will add that part of the database. In order to identify and support ongoing and future efforts to build climate resilience, we have developed dozens of case studies on the experience and activities of the climate vulnerable countries. And collectively we aim for this database to serve as a compelling research tool that will aid and inform the work of impacted communities, civil society policy and lawmakers who are committed to providing protections for peoples displaced by the climate crisis and the changes needed for an inclusive just and sustainable world.
Bruce Riordan:
Okay, well thank you panel and we did a good job there on time too. So now we're going to turn to the database itself. Again, put your questions for the panelists in the comments section or chat box, and we will get to some of them when we get to the end here. But for now we're going to look at the database and Basima is going to be our guide and going to walk us through the database and the other material here. So the floor is yours.
Basima Sisemore:
Wonderful, thank you. All right. So I see that we have that up. Wonderful. So this here is the microsite and our database entitled Climate Displacement: The Climate Crisis, and the Right to Stay. And here this is the landing page for our microsite. And this is kind of just the hub of, oh, sorry, this is actually not the landing page. This is the landing page. And so this is a hub for our microsite and it kind of provides information on the project as well as the other materials, resources, and items that we have that are part of the database in this microsite. So this is just an overview of the project itself. Here we have a link and short explainer of the database, which I'll get into more in just a second. We also have a featured case study, which is Peru. And as I just mentioned, we have developed dozens of case studies on the experience and activities of climate vulnerable countries and what the case studies touch on.
They provide an overview of the country including climate events and climate induced displacement, the cost of the climate crisis and resilience and mitigation strategies. So that'll be really great and interesting to explore and we'll dive into those in a little bit. And then here we have some additional information on items that are on the microsite. So country profiles which are profiles for countries. They include all the information in the interactive database and map, but it's laid out in a different format for people to dive more deeply into a specific country rather than navigating on a map and comparing countries that way. But all the information is the same. We have have a landing page for case studies and then we also have a resources tab, which is a repository of the global justice program's research on climate displacement as well as our research on related and interconnected thematic areas of work that are related to the overarching theme of climate displacement.
And I'll just briefly scroll back up to the top here. I apologize, I'm going to have to move through things pretty quickly, but we certainly encourage you to explore this and take your time navigating it. We have About the Project, which is a deeper dive into some more specifics related to this project and what we're aiming to do here. Please feel free to contact us. This is my email address. We'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, questions and opportunities for deeper engagement with you all. We also include some language here on the right to stay in our framework and why it's important and why we're utilizing it. And again, some more information on the climate displacement and resilience database as well as our lead researchers for this project. All of us are here speaking today, student research assistants that have been involved in the project over the years as well as website developers and the image artwork that was created by the artist Leia Haidar.
She created the original artwork that we're seeing on the banner here for this site. If you were to click on this, you would see the country profiles. I'll just click on that to give you an example, to show you the landing page for the country profiles. And here you can select your country, they're all listed alphabetically. You can also come here and select the country that you'd like to look at if you know exactly what country you'd like to explore. And I will come back to this in just a second. And then we also have case studies, we'll explore that a little bit later. Data sources, which are all the data sources used for the database and that are included in the map, we cite them here. Also, our data disclaimer on the data sources and how the data is being used, our methodology for how we built out this project, as well as the criteria for how we selected the data sets that inform our database, as well as the citation for the microsite and for the database. And then our resources tab.
From here I'm going to go to our database and here you'll see this is the landing page for the database, Climate Displacement and Resilience database. And the database is designed to be an interactive tool to support the work of scholars, journalists, researchers, artists, policymakers, and anyone else involved in centering the work on climate displacement and creating strategies that support and uplift climate resilience and the right to stay. And one thing that I'll note, which was mentioned earlier, we pushed to release this project ahead of COP 28, which will be held in the United Arab Emirates starting at the end of this month. And it was really important that we strive to get this project out before that, hopefully to be used in terms of conversations leading up to COP 28. And it can provide a resource and tools for that.
So the database, as I will show you all visually maps the scope of climate displacement, climactic events and risk of impact and vulnerability, countries, emissions goals and compliance country's governance and capacity building for climate resilience and mitigation and climate finance needs and barriers. And again, I apologize, I'm going to have to move pretty quickly and I'm not going to be able to go into much depth with the information that's here, but there's a lot of information and data here that you can play around with and explore. And so first off, I want to show just kind of what shows up as default on the database in terms of information. And so here you can see we have a map also if you hover over country's names, will populate and appear. And we also have different colored bubbles that range in scale and those here we have a scale that is defined, represents climate induced displaced persons per country.
So the smallest gray bubble ranges from one to a thousand people who have been displaced. And then the largest darker bubble is a million plus people who have been displaced. And here we have a little information icon that if you click on it'll expand and provide an explainer for the language and the term that we're using. So climate induced displaced persons are people internally displaced due to natural disasters. And this data is coming from the Internal Displacement and Monitoring Center, IDMC. And all of the information and data that is provided on the database will have a little information bubble that you can click on that you can get information in terms of how we're defining this as well as the data source for it. And you can scroll or zoom in and out on the map using these icons.
So if I was to click on Brazil, this is the information that pops up here. We have climate induced displaced persons. It's showing 3.5 million. Again, click on this icon here we get the data source and an explainer. Climactic events, these are the climactic events that are specific to Brazil, and these are the drivers of the 3.5 million climate induced displaced person. So these are what have been identified as drivers for forced displacement in terms of climactic events. And if we click here, we'll get a breakdown of how these terms are being defined. And these also come from IDMC and we have the source linked here as well. So if I'm to click on the profile, this takes me to specifically Brazil's profile. And again, all this information is listed on the map and is also listed here, but it's just a little bit easier to view as an overview and to holistically see all the information here. So if you want to just specifically look at one country, you can come here directly and see all of this information here.
I'm going to scroll back up to the top and there's two ways you can get back to the database. You have this button, which is always available here in the banner. And then we also have a button here that can easily and quickly take us back. So I'm going to explore and explain our three indicators here. The first one, governance and capacity building for climate resilience. This indicator addresses the ability of state institutions to build climate resilience and to assess a country's risk and exposure to disasters. It's particularly crucial for understanding a country's vulnerability to destabilization resulting from climactic events and also a country's capacity to cope on both the institutional and infrastructure level in terms of being able to reduce disaster risk and impact. So if we click on this, these are the different data sets or data and metrics that you can choose from to click on.
We have climate change, risk score, hazard and exposure, which has some sub items here, vulnerability, sub items here, and lack of coping capacity and all of these hazard and exposure of vulnerability, lack of coping capacity, climate change, risk score, these measure the ability of state institutions to build climate resilience and to assess a country's risk and exposure to disasters. So I'm just going to click on this one here, climate change risk score. And you'll see that the color changes across the map from light to dark. I'll zoom in so you can get a little better look. And here we have a key which shows low risk is one and it's the lighter color. High risk is at two, and it's the darker color. And we have an explainer for what we're talking about when we say climate change risk score. And so the score ranks a country's risk and vulnerability to climate change.
And it's on a scale of 1 to 10, not 0 to 10. So we'll be correcting that. But so this shows the country's risk and vulnerability to climate change. So if I click on Sudan, this is the information that pops up and we can see that Sudan has a climate change risk score of 7.3 out of 10. We can click here again, see that same explainer as well as the data source. And this is coming from Inform Climate Change. The next indicator I'll go to is the price tag of financing climate resilience projects. And this indicator shows financial resources needed for a country to achieve their national undetermined NDC commitments in regards to the areas of mitigation, which is mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation, which is adapting to climate change impacts. So if I click on here, we see the total financial needs for both mitigation and adaption, financial needs for mitigation, financial needs for adaptation.
I'm going to click on the one for mitigation. And this is what shows up on the map. Again, seeing the color gradation from light to dark, which indicates that a country, if the color is lighter and indicates that it has less financial needs for mitigation or it's identified less in terms of its nationally determined climate action plan. And if it's darker, then it means that it requires more funding. And so here for the Central African Republic, we see that their identified financial needs for mitigation are 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars. We can click here, see the explainer for what that is, as well as the data source.
I'm also noticing that this needs to be changed to 2.5 trillion. We'll be correcting that as well for the next and final indicator that we have. It's country's NDCs goals or compliance. And this indicator addresses the status of country's nationally determined contributions as well as historic emissions levels per state and their greenhouse gas target. And this illustrates a country's contribution to the climate crisis and the measures being taken to mitigate their impacts. And for those who aren't familiar with what nationally determined contribution means, it is a climate action plan that countries established to create emissions and adapt to climate impacts. And each country or party that has signed onto the Paris Agreement is required to establish an NDC and update it every five years. So the information that is displayed under this indicator here will relate to that.
So if we go to total share of global greenhouse gas emissions, this is what pops up. Again, we have the color gradation. The lighter shade indicates those who have contributed less to the total share of global greenhouse gas emissions. And on the darker side, it's those those countries that have contributed more. If we click on China, this is the information that pops up and we see that China's total share of global greenhouse gas emissions is at 24.23%. We also have some information on China's NDC status as well as their greenhouse gas target, which indicates country's goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And here we have also a number of data sources that are behind the data here. So that wraps it up for the database overview, and I'm going to pass it to Hossein to talk through the case studies.
Hossein Ayazi:
Thanks so much Basima for that walkthrough. So I'll quickly walk us through the case studies themselves, how to access them as well as the purpose and structure of the case studies. So to access these case studies, you can either click the country on the map itself and if it's available click case study. So here we might click Peru and see case study there. And so that's a way to access them. Or from the top, you can click the Climate Displacement and Resilience Database dropdown menu and click case studies from there. So we'll be accessing them from here. Here you can see the list and there are dozens of case studies currently, and this is a growing and regularly updated collection of materials. So in terms of process, we've tried to prioritize, especially climate vulnerable countries and also countries that provide key lessons for building climate resilience within nations, regionally and globally.
And our goal for this list is that it's comprehensive and concise and also deeply informative. So in terms of purpose, then these case studies really aim to offer a finer sense of climate vulnerability, which is what I was speaking to earlier. So specifically, specific countries and communities experience of climate disasters and colonial and post-colonial relations of exploitation, dependency and disinvestment that have really exacerbated the impacts of such disasters and hindered resilience, right? This is part of the key context that we want to offer insight into through these case studies. At the same time, these case studies really aim to offer a sense of a country's specific goals, strategies, successes and pitfalls in their efforts to build climate resilience. So critically, this means highlighting on the one hand national plans and efforts to, for example, develop renewable energy infrastructure, promote reforestation, reduce emissions, diversify economies, and so on.
And on the other hand, the ways that the international community and global north countries in particular must support such efforts. This includes things from withdrawing extractive industries and canceling debt to no strings attached grants and so on. This is very much how the case studies themselves are organized. I'll briefly show us this by walking us through one in particular. So Peru is currently the highlighted case study. And so I'll walk us through again each section and just offer a couple touchstones in each section to give us a sense of really how these case studies accomplish what we set out to do. So this first section here offers a brief introduction to the country. It covers the country's climate, its geographic and social disparities within the country. It offers keynotes regarding industry and it contextualizes it with regard to the country's colonial and post-colonial histories and ongoing dynamics.
So for example, in the chat earlier I saw the mention of conflict within Ethiopia through which the pronounced climate impacts must also be seen and understood, right? And so in that case study that's named as well, right? And so in this context here, we might hold onto what's specific to Peru in the region. And there's one note that I want to make again, really highlighting countries that offer lessons for this global push toward climate justice and toward just transitions. So here I'll highlight a keynote here that with regard to Peru's natural resources with vast mineral and fossil fuel reserves concentrated in the mountains and mineral exports making up 60% of the country's total export revenues, Peru is ranked second in the world for copper, silver, and zinc production and top in Latin America for gold's production right here. And so this is especially important to note not only in terms of how Peru might diversify its economy and build climate resilience, but also do so in the context of global decarbonization efforts that again might really demand and intensify extractive mining and extraction from countries like Peru that are resource rich in these ways.
So the next section then covers major climate events and climate induced displacement. So here we'd identify climate impacts first in terms of the disasters that happen and in terms of the actual human impacts that take shape, specifically displacement. Throughout these case studies, we really try to identify again, climate induced displacement and necessary activities toward building climate resilience. So this information is quite recent too, and regularly updated. So in March of 2023, Cyclone Yaku made landfall in Peru's northern coastal region causing widespread damage and leading to a state of emergency and 400 districts causing over $300 million in damage to infrastructure soon after heavy rains and flooding displaced over 136,000 people in the same region. So there's kind of a pulling in of the data that really constitutes the database itself as well as a deep contextualization of it and a kind of argument that flows through each of these case studies.
Similarly, in section three, we map the cost of the climate crisis much more focusing on economic terms. You get a sense of it in the previous section here, we're really diving deep into it and we've included projected impacts as well. So a part that I'd like you to pay attention to here is that every year natural disasters on average already results in 2% GDP loss and welfare loss equivalence, it's to 5.2% of the GDP in Peru. Further, it is estimated that the climate crisis could increase the loss in GDP to 6% by 2030 and 20% by 2050. So this is key information that might not be gathered immediately from the map and database in that way, but really the case studies of forward and invite us to reflect on these dynamics within and across countries. Fourth section mapping resilience and mitigation pathways. What's key here is what the country itself is doing in order to build climate resilience.
So I'll just give one example here, and again, this is specific to proof, but also you sort of see trends across countries, and that's here in 2018, the country developed a national law on climate change regulations establishing a framework for incorporating mitigation and adaptation measures into the planning and budgeting process at the national, regional, and local levels, citations for all of these. So really this is an opportunity and means of actually doing further research and forms of advocacy. And so finally, we close these case studies with necessary changes. So given everything we know, given everything that the country's doing, given all the limitations we've identified what sorts of arguments can be made not only toward climate justice for the country, but also just transitions for the country and globally.
And so I won't go into too much detail here, only that in this section we really mention that countries like Peru are targets of intensified extractive mining amidst global decarbonization efforts and that it's necessary to address such dynamics as the country and world as a whole builds climate resilience. So again, key context about okay, what sorts of solutions are actually false solutions? What sorts of solutions should be upheld and what sorts of strategies are necessary in order to get us to that sort of place. So I'll stop there as far as what the case studies do, how to access them, what they afford us. And now I will hand it back to Bruce.
Bruce Riordan:
Sure. Well thank you for walking us through the database and the case studies. Wow, there's a lot there. Elsadig, you were going to add a few comments here on data sources.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Yeah, I guess when I mentioned one in particular, when you go to about the project and you look at the methodology, you can find all our data sources and there is also that disclaimer, but one in particular I would like to uplift here is because most of our displacement, climate induced displacement data come from particular resource that IDMC that Basima mentioned earlier. IDMC does not regard displacement resulting from whether related events are necessarily linked to climate change. And that's where we at OBI and the global justice, our disagreement here, and we believe that and that's how we frame this. But we want to be in total honesty here to say why they do not think IDMC.
That's whether related necessarily linked to climate, we say the opposite and we use that data. So we want to make sure that to attribute that clarification because we appreciate the work of IDMC for very long time, very robust data collection in the world maybe is one of the leading in the world without dispute. But hear that in the beginning when I open my remark, I said, why we favor climate crisis instead of climate change. That's exactly what the problem is here. When you hear change in any sort of context, change seems like passive, natural, evolving, but crisis require doing something wrong in order to get there. And today without any dispute scientifically that we know that the climate is in really our climatic systems are really in a crisis mode. That doesn't mean tomorrow we're going to have apocalypse, but but we going to be gradually and my colleagues talk about climate vulnerable region, nations, et cetera.
So the one who bears the prompt will be always the people who have been sacrificed, sacrifice zones, sacrifice people because of colonial relation, because of new liberal economic policy and impositions. So this is necessity for me to make this disclaimer that we at OBI framing an analysis of the climate crisis, contextualize weather related events and disasters and climate induced displacement as a result of different social, political, economic and environmental forces that simultaneously give rise to influence and compound the fourth migration of people globally. Even we go further. We say that we address how this, if you pay attention to the case study or the three indicators that we gather together because all this information exists, but how when you contextualize put them together, you will have a better sense of how these forces not only exacerbated by the climate crisis, but also largely born out of extractive and exploitative structure that have give a rise to the climate crisis itself.
So it's kind of whole loop. So that's the reason why we say you can't just isolate whether related natural disaster and say, oh, people displaced by that, but why and how. And so in our context, that's all related to the board of crisis that we are talking about it that largely driven by burning fossil fuels and thus give us the context when we try to do resilience because resilience also very cooperative, turns out there. But in our research we think this is very genuine solutions. Community need to be made resilience regions and countries and the globe. But how you make blast resilience in terms of a crisis, that's what necessitate climate financing, which is reparation, loss and damage, which every country in the world agreed on, every country. There is no a single country oppose to it, but it takes 31 years for global south to much harder for the people of governments of the world to accept that as a reality.
And last year they accept it, but now the financial is a problem. So we hope to see that next week the discussion will be around that issue. So that's coupled with financing. That's what will lead us to have a genuine resiliency strategies and resilience strategies. Sometimes you have to adapt to a very hostile climatic system. So if you have all what you need, you most likely you will be able to weather communities and vulnerable regions, to weather the emergency of the climate crisis. So if they have better preparedness system in terms of technology, for example, they could anticipate to move people at the time of hurricane or cyclone from the blast, still it passes. And we see some very poor country now doing that miraculously and some very advanced economy doing that very poorly. So at the end of the day is the question of resilience is in the heart of the climate justice and just transition in itself vis-a-vis the climate crisis.
Bruce Riordan:
Great, thank you. Thank all three of you. That took us through a lot of information and a lot to show us in a brief amount of time. Let's get to some questions now and kind of relates to what Elsadig was just saying about crisis, not climate change. Who do you want to use this database the most? You've done some great work here and you mentioned COP 28 and getting this done in time for COP 28. Talk a little bit about who you want to get out there and get using this.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
I'll start kicking us off and I'll let the others contribute to the answer. Basically most of our work as institutions that within higher learning, but also in the other part of a large civil society, we often see the debate and the discourse lack fundamental understanding. So I always say that we are privileged, we get paid to do the clarifications. So we would like our tools to translate the hard arguments, hard science, unnecessarily unseen relationships into an easy adjustable tools for people in four sectors to do their job better. One, our follow researchers. Second, our policy advocates and policy makers because if they understand the context of something clearly, they might actually propose a good solution. Third and larger, the context of community organization and frontline that actually fighting the fight against climate crisis. And lastly, but very importantly, the impacted communities themselves. So to be very well-equipped and to engage in self-advocacy.
They know their issues better than us. When they know all this context, their demand will be specific, precise. And if that's happening in multiple communities, we will have what the global justice aspire a concerted effort of challenging the status quo in a local, national and global level simultaneously. And that's how we see the local concept come together here. Because without clear understanding among all this in different parts, if Indonesian doesn't understand the same way as the Mexicans or the Ghanaians, if all of them are vulnerable to climate crisis, therefore their ask, their advocacy will be in different bowling directions. But it seems putting them against each other, which shouldn't be the case.
Bruce Riordan:
Yeah, good. Thank you. Hossein, Basima, you want to add to that a little bit about how you'd like to see this used or are people planning to take this to COP 28?
Hossein Ayazi:
I'll add one quick note as to how it's being used. And then also this database emerges as part of a constellation of projects works, analysis and recommendations that our program has put forth. So this specific database was anticipated a few months ago by a research and policy brief that really targeted the decision-making process around loss and damage and how to connect climate displacement to those in order to really address the questions of how might civil society policymakers and other stakeholders around the globe advocate for guaranteed protections for climate induced displaced persons within international refugee law in ways that are supported by and support the fights for climate reparations in this specific vehicle for that. So really what this analysis database comes alongside is us actually kind of diving really deep into common doctrinal objections to calls for reparations in general, the difficulty of identifying perpetrator and victim groups and so on. So there's a whole set of works through which this tool comes to be of great utility for movements, for organizers, for policymakers, for governments, and so on.
Bruce Riordan:
Great. Tied to that, this is obviously a lot of work that you all have done. What's the plan here to keep this updated? I mean as the information changes, as you have new ideas and all, what's the plan going forward?
Basima Sisemore:
I can jump in and invite Elsadig and Hossein to also add. It's a great question and the resource, the database that we created is very much a living, breathing resource and tool. So the goal is to have it updated as often as possible, hopefully on an annual basis. We know some of the data sources that we pulled from the institutions or organizations, they do provide annual updates. Others it's every couple of years, like some, it's dependent on countries NDC goals. So there's a lot of factors that kind of will determine how the database is updated and how that's reflected on our end. But the goal is that it's going to be updated as often as possible as the data is being updated.
And one of the goals in terms of criteria for the data sets that we had when we set out to do this project. This is a multi-year project. And what you're seeing now is version two of a project that we had a lot of learnings from in the first iteration of this. But for this project we saw data sets that were API, so application programming interface. They had that available in terms of us being able to pull from their data sources and have that populate within our own database. And that is going to help greatly in terms of maintenance and regular updates. So most of the data sets, with the exception of one, which documents the financial needs for adaptation and mitigation, aside from that data source, all of them have API built into them.
And one other thing I'll add is that we're going to continue to add and make tweaks and improve the database as we continue over years. And also right after this we're going to be jumping in to make some additional changes to it. But with that being said, the idea is that we will hopefully expand in terms of indicators, in terms of metrics. There's a lot of room for development and growth within the project. And so we're hoping to make this as robust as possible to serve sort of the larger strategy to advocate for climate refugees, climate displacement. So those are some of the immediate things in mind in terms of maintenance and moving forward.
Bruce Riordan:
Great, thank you. We have time for one more question. I noticed from your data for movement is displacement, internal displacement. Do you anticipate adding data that reflects cross border movement? Who wants to tackle that one?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
I could start on that record. I mean, our database is not about internal external displacement. It's fundamentally about displacement. And this is very tricky part. Remember that we started our take on this climate displacement about climate refugees, which nobody recognized by the way, we call them the climate refugees, anything but refugees because if they're refugees, our case is rested. So we want to get that finish line. So the international law, refugee laws and humanitarian laws only they have two kind of set of groups that they understand or they provide protection. The one who cross borders, international borders, and the one who are internally displaced, both of them have protections. The only one does not have protection is the one who been displaced due to climate crisis, how we explained it earlier. So we are concerned about the displacement period, whether that internally or externally, but later we make the case that when people move cross international border became extremely, extremely vulnerable because there is zero protection for them.
So to answer the question, it is very hard to separate this two because our goal at the end of the day is to look at the vulnerability of those populations that have been forced and thus give really good context for why we say the right to stay. We don't say just the displacement, but we say the right to stay. People want to stay in their home life, so how can they stay? We don't want them to be displaced. Nobody does, right? So that's the reason why we measure the whole entire displacement process, whether internal, external, or in a move because sometimes even the internal displaced person moves to become international displaced person.
Bruce Riordan:
Excellent. And that's a good note to end on here. We thank the panel for explaining all of this in just an hour and for the great work that you've done here that we're all going to use in various ways. Thank all of you out in the audience for giving us your time and attention today. We encourage you, this is the whole point to use the database and the analysis and all the case studies, the great stuff that's all there. Whether you're a researcher, an organizer, an advocate, a funder, whatever you are. And please also send your comments when you've had a chance to use the database and all the material there. A lot of material, send your comments to OBI. We'd like to see how you're using it and what your ideas are for going further. Again, it's belongingberkeley.edu/climatedisplacement. Probably we can throw it up on the screen here somewhere. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day. And thank you again to the institute for doing this great work.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Thank you, Bruce.
