Dr. Adil Najam is the inaugural Dean Emeritus at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Professor of International Relations and of Earth and Environment. He served as the founding Dean of the Pardee School (2014-2022) and was awarded Dean Emeritus status by Boston University in 2022, while continuing as Professor at the Pardee School.

Since July 2023 he also serves as the President of WWF International, one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most respected environment and conservation organizations.

Earlier, Prof. Adil Najam served as Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan and as the Director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. In addition to Boston University, Prof. Najam has taught at MIT and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College in 2022-23 and was named the first De Janosi Fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria for 2023-24. He is also the Mahathir Mohamad Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) where he leads research on Islam and Environment. His research and teaching focuses on issues of global public policy, especially those related to global climate change, South Asia, Muslim countries, environment and conservation, and human development.

Professor Najam was a co-author for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); work for which the scientific panel was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the public understanding of climate change science. In 2008 he was invited by the United Nations Secretary-General to serve on the UN Committee on Development (CDP). He was a member of the President of Pakistan’s Special Task Force on Human Development (2001) and served on Pakistan’s Presidential Commission on Higher Education (2002). During 2019-20 he was appointed to the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs. The government of Pakistan has conferred on him two of the highest civil awards for his global contributions to education and to climate change research: in 2010, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence); and in 2023, the Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Crescent of Excellence), both awarded by the then President(s) of Pakistan.

Dr. Najam has written over 100 scholarly papers and book chapters. His recent books include: South Asia 2060: Envisioning Regional Futures (2013); How Immigrants Impact their Homelands (2013); The Future of South-South Economic Relations (2012); Envisioning a Sustainable Development Agenda for Trade and Environment (2007); Trade and Environment: A Resource book (2007); Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community (2006); Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda (2006); Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia (2003); and Civic Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development (2002). He was also the lead author for the 2017 Pakistan National Human Development Report on Youth and for the Living Indus Initiative (2021).

Professor Najam’s areas of expertise include international negotiation, sustainable development, global environmental justice, human development and human security, international environmental politics, environmental conversation, politics of the Muslim world, and politics of South Asia.

BR Research sat down with Dr. Adil Najam along the sidelines of the 6th Karachi International Water Conference (KIWC), which was organized by Hisaar Foundation, a thought leader and innovator in the water sector. Edited excerpts and summary of his thoughts are published below:

BR Research: Many in the environmentalist community are now raising the alarm that the time for mitigation is over and that if we are to stay the course for the two-degree target, we must urgently shift policy focus to adaptation.

What are your thoughts on this position? Would you agree that shifting attention away from mitigation risks giving a carte blanche to the emitters to continue with their ways for as long as they can come up with ways and means (or technologies) to adapt?

Dr. Adil Najam: You cannot mitigate your way out of impacts after they have happened. You can mitigate your way so that impacts don’t happen. The time for mitigation is past, but it is not over. The urgency of mitigation is more today than ever before. It will be more tomorrow than it is today, and so on. And the less we mitigate, the more the urgency will grow.

It is also true that the age of adaptation has begun because we didn’t mitigate well in time. The less we mitigate, the more we will have to adapt. Adaptation is the failure of mitigation, but it is not the opposite of mitigation. Two are not the enemy of each other. Because we have failed to mitigate in time, now we are condemned to do both together.

However, when we say that the age of adaptation has begun, it does not mean giving a free pass to the emitters and polluters. If it is insisted that mitigation and adaptation are alternatives, then choosing adaptation would be wrong because that would condemn people to the growing impacts of climate change.

BRR: Does that mean that countries such as Pakistan must also adopt mitigation measures as the primary climate policy focus to avoid climate disasters such as 2022 floods in the future?

Dr. Adil Najam: Naturally, mitigation will yield the most benefit in the cities of Global North such as New York, London, and Dubai, which have a much larger carbon footprint; where the marginal returns from mitigation are much greater, compared to the near-zero emitters living in the Global South.

Similarly, it is easier for the affluent classes of Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad to drive a smaller car, than for a landless labor in Awaran, Balochistan to give up his motorbike to reduce his or her environmental footprint, which is already near net zero.

But there is also an opportunity in that. Both mitigation and adaptation, but especially adaptation, offer development opportunities. Adaptation is an opportunity to give people space and the ability to make more resilient decisions. Hence, in places such as Balochistan or rural Sindh, the marginal returns from undertaking adaptation activities are significantly higher than undertaking measures for mitigation.

Take the example of building climate-resilient schools and community centers in a flood-prone area of rural Sindh. Undertaking this adaptation will lead to three benefits. First, you are undertaking development activity by delivering services to those who would not have access to them otherwise. Two, the construction and completion of the project will generate economic activity. But most importantly, these are no-regret actions and would lead to a net benefit for the community.

BRR: What does “no regret” mean in the context of adaptation?

Dr. Adil Najam: Mitigation in the face of climate change often faces opposition from the status quo interests because the cost – such as giving up fossil fuel - is to be borne by the individual (whether a firm, industry, or economy), while the benefit will be enjoyed by the collective. Think of giving up cars for public transport. The benefit will almost always be enjoyed by someone other than the one who bears the cost of that action.

What “no regret” basically means is that in the future, if the region where climate-resilient schools were built faces no impact from climate change, there will still be no financial or economic loss from undertaking those actions. In fact, we would have managed to build schools and raise literacy in a region where there were no schools before or were destroyed in a past weather event.

That’s why adaptation has become particularly important for those in the Global South – especially in the poorest regions of countries such as Pakistan which are at extreme risk from climate change but at the same time rank very low both at the development ladder as well as in carbon emissions and environmental impact.

Countries such as Pakistan should prefer and start with those climate measures that have developmental benefits, and that have a no-regret feature. This is why it is extremely important that local minds are brought center stage and involved in designing adaptation strategies for Pakistanis, rather than following the received wisdom of developed countries, which will naturally push the agenda that suits their socioeconomic needs and goals.

BRR: The term “unprecedented” is thrown around in Pakistan’s policy circles almost to the point of becoming clichéd. Does evidence from climate research show that the 2022 monsoon floods were truly unprecedented? Or, in your view, the impact of the 2022 monsoon floods was greatly exacerbated due to Pakistan’s failure to learn and adapt following the 2011 floods?

Dr. Adil Najam: Pakistan exists in a region which was historically arid and, near-desert in its geography. In fact, we live in a region where communities used to pray for flood as it brought not just water for irrigation, but also silt. The soil in this region was historically not nutrient-rich enough to support large-scale agricultural activity, were it not for the regular supply of minerals from the rivers. That’s why the water from the Indus has never been clear; instead, it has always been muddy. That’s also why the Indus River dolphin is blind because it has no use for sight.

Thus, to insist that flooding in the Indus Basin is unprecedented or something we could not have prepared for is not accurate. However, we must appreciate that the 2022 disaster was a culmination of a multitude of climate events. It started with a heat wave in April/May 2022 and extreme heat for extended periods, which hardens the earth’s surface and ability to absorb moisture. This was followed by cloud bursts. Finally, when the river flooding occurred, the earlier two events had already consumed much of the capacity of the soil to absorb the excess water, resulting in the disaster that was witnessed. The confluence of those three extreme weather events is what could not have been forecasted using traditional climate models alone.

What worries climate scientists is that whatever we know about the patterns of climate is changing and it is changing randomly. This means that the past models have lost the ability to forecast accurately. Climate change has broken the global thermostat. Scientists can no longer forecast what will happen with a high degree of confidence, but they can only tell you with a high degree of probability that the amplitude and frequency of climate events will no longer follow past patterns.

BRR: Do you believe that the muted response of the global community to the 2022 floods was a result of donor fatigue (following the pandemic and Ukrainian invasion), or a failure on the part of Pakistan to make a case for climate justice?

Dr. Adil Najam: If history is to be honest, it will judge Pakistan’s elite very harshly for the way it responded to the 2022 floods. The impact of floods is still not over for those who lost their homes and livelihoods, but it is lost from our collective memories. But even if you review the media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the floods in September/October 2022, you will find that political dramas dominated not only the airwaves but also the social media timelines of Pakistan’s affluent, especially urban classes. Ask yourself if the response and media coverage would have been similar following the collapse of a tower in Islamabad in an earthquake, or flooding of an underpass on Canal Road Lahore, or of homes in DHA Karachi.

Only once the local environmental activists and international development community linked the floods to climate change, did Islamabad wake up to the opportunity. Pakistan’s policymakers eagerly rallied behind the cry for environmental justice and climate reparations only when visited by foreign dignitaries. That may have been the only time both Pakistan’s policymakers, as well as the media, spoke emphatically about floods because they were addressing international audiences and figured that the aid and assistance might help relieve the balance of payment crisis. The global community saw through the lack of seriousness not just among the policy- and decision-makers in Islamabad, but also among the Pakistan society at large. Unfortunately, the world is not going to step up when our own interest in addressing these existential challenges is limited to lip service.